The entrepreneur and social media

One thing that I gathered while doing research for my presentation in Dr. Junker's class is that most people see MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter (what I like to call "The Big Three") as the only forms of social media that a company can use to generate discussion about the company. While this may not be the case several years from now, these three social media platforms dominate most of the discussion on this topic.

While reading through the most recent posts on Mashable, I came across an article detailing the ten best social media tools for entrepreneurs. Number 10, Monitter, was the most interesting to me. Monitter has three columns that search through recent Twitter updates on the three topics of your choice.

This ties in with one point that I stressed during our presentation: As a public relations professional, it is important to know what is being said about your company so that you can combat a crisis before it gets out of hand. It should also be noted that a company might receive positive feedback, which can be used in a strategic way to keep the company moving in a positive direction.

What was most exciting to me was when I entered my employer's name and the press release that I wrote and uploaded to PRWeb last week was included in several tweets from various blogs. If I can find information about a press release that I wrote on Twitter, I am pretty sure that a company that that works to improve their search engine optimization will find themselves on Monitter as well.

While this social media platform is not one of the "Big Three" that I mentioned earlier, its existence, for now, is dependent on Twitter, which only reinforces the point that businesses of any size need to pay attention to Twitter and the effect it will have on the company.