Social media will change your business. This is a long article (9 pages) in Business Week, but it’s worth the read.

In summary:

• (quoted from the article), “Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. ….While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.”
• very upbeat and positive article but still full of accurate facts
• news travels fast in the world of the blog (see quote in first item)
• RSS (real simple syndication) feeds of ads could knock traditional Internet advertising (relying on clicks, views etc) metrics for a loop
• (quoted from the article), “Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches…”, which indicates the beginning of the end for ‘mass marketing’
• the authors of the article,   Stephen Baker and Heather Green have started a blog: blogspotting.net

Interesting reading and they predict that we are only at the beginning of a long journey of change. 

Dean Owen