Social Media's Future

As the various predictions come out about people's projections for 2007, I am beginning to see more and more impressive predictions about what will happen in the social media space. People are projecting that the power of human input will do all manner of incredible things. But there is a basic problem with all this. Unregulated human input on a large scale has serious problems with accuracy. One of the most interesting experiments along these lines is Open Directory Project, aka DMOZ. The failures of ODP well known. Too much self interest, and too little policing have blown the validity of this site out of the water. Think of it this way - when was the last time you went to DMOZ looking for quality sites about some topic? I don't mean for your link building project - I mean for real information. But what we need to realize is that the social media phenomena is incredible anyway. We shouldn't try to take the concept of social media more than it is. Sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life (to name a few) are fascinating and thriving communities, where marketing opportunities abound for the savvy marketer. Social media smart companies realize that they have an opportunity that is unprecedented. You can now engage in real discussions with your customers, and at very low cost, making it scalable. For one thing, companies can use this dialogue to learn more about their customers than ever before. In addition, companies can engage in dialogues with their critics. Social media smart companies realize that they have critics, all businesses do. Ignoring critics comes with great risks - the crticisims can build momentum and start to affect the growth of the business. Engage those crticics in a conversation, and you have the opportunity to address their converns. It seems to me that this is pretty amazing as it is. Ramblings about SEO blog. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic, Inc., the publisher of Custom Search Guide.