Social media has become a well-understood term for Internet entrepreneurs, digital marketers, and enterprises. Often one relates social media to the emergence of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter, SiliconIndia.com, and YouTube.

These networks of people provide a platform for users to express themselves and allow for user generated content. SiliconIndia.com itself has over 2.5 million Indian professionals networked to help each other with their career goals and entrepreneurial ambitions. These large networks offer a great platform for marketers and advertisers to reach out to users. That explains why Facebook is on its way to reach $1 billion in revenues, if it attempted to monetize its current ad inventory. But, one of the key questions on everyone’s mind is that where is the ‘social media’ headed and what does it mean for traditional businesses to take advantage of this phenomenon. Clearly, many businesses can use the power of viral marketing and communication in Facebook, linkedIn, and YouTube to get the word out about their products or services, but is that an appropriate social media strategy today? How can one tap the fullest potential of social media – that is a question for all executives and entrepreneurs.

Beyond Social Networks 1.0
Social media is on its way to becoming a mainstream media not just for the early adopters like Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTubes of the world, but the opportunity now extends to each and every business in the world. The notion is that every Web and Internet strategy must be relooked through a ‘social lens’ and one has to understand how it must embrace the social Web. Websites are no more a broadcast media, where the company offers up to communicate to the world about its product and services whether in the b2b or b2c environments. The company must now engage its entire community of users, customers, prospects, and employees in a level playing field, yet maintaining editorial and quality control, to drive their Web strategy.

Let me take an example from SiliconIndia.com itself. SiliconIndia has been traditionally a magazine, where the SiliconIndia employees were producing great content, and its website did a good job of sharing the content online. The challenge was that back in 2006 it was not leveraging its user base to create and grow the content needed to accomplish its vision. Over the last two years, SiliconIndia.com has done a wonderful job of transforming itself from a news website into a true social media where millions of professionals are expressing themselves through all the social tools, while stringent content and editorial qualities are maintained. This transformation to social media is a great example of how every business has to see itself in the future.

Another example I can share is that of MetricStream, which is a market leader in governance, risk management, and compliance enterprise software. Being an enterprise software company, one would think that it had little to do with social media. But quite on the contrary, MetricStream has now created one of the largest online communities for governance, risk management, and compliance professionals at ComplianceOnline.com where they are connected with each other and are sharing their professional knowledge. SiliconIndia.com and ComplianceOnline.com are two completely different yet successful examples of social media, from two completely different market segments. But they both illustrate how one can create effective social media strategies. For both MetricStream and SiliconIndia, the benefits of social media strategies have been significant. MetricStream offers webinars on ComplianceOnline through the experts in the ‘cloud’ and is able to create relationships with prospects as they enter the sales funnel. MetricStream is also able to monetize its funnel by turning prospects into paid customers for webinars, thereby generating significant revenues and profits for the company.