How to change the world with social media

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Social media is all the rage at the moment. Everyone is talking about Facebook, Twitter and Digg and businesses are trying their best to harness the Internet and use the social platforms to further their businesses. Social media is really just a category of websites that are driven by users rather than the website creators. That is to say that the content of the sites are user created and the sites are centered around user interaction be that voting on popular news stories (such as on Digg) or sharing and tagging photos (such as on Flickr) or simply having short conversations like on Twitter.

Should you care about social media?
Well this is a difficult question to answer. Certainly for the average person who just uses the internet and isn't trying to make money online, social media sites can be a lot of fun. They are a great way to communicate with friends and family. Normal people's use of social media sites will be governed by which sites their friends and family already use.

For businesses, however, having a social media presence is becoming more and more important. Apart from providing a public face and giving corporations that were previously faceless a more friendly persona, social media sites can be leveraged to find new clients as well as provide sophisticated and up to the minute customer care to existing client bases.

Mass collaboration and monitoring of trends on social media sites can also give companies some interesting input into how they are perceived on the internet. And at the same time, social media sites can act as a sort of regulatory community to keep businesses in check. Consider how quickly a story can spread over the internet. A casual comment on Twitter or a news story on Digg can fly around the internet in a matter of hours.

This sort of power means that consumers can keep companies in line. Make sure that you provide your clients with good customer service and a good product and you will get great publicity for free through people's use of social media. But if you mess up and don't deliver on a promise, you reputation will be mud before you can think twice.

In a way, social media sites provide the perfect opportunity for consumers to really get the service they want as well as a method for really keeping corporations and governments honest. We no longer live in a world where news can be censored and people's opinions can be silenced. Everyone has the perfect platform to campaign to make the world a better place using social media.