One of the things I love about working at Microsoft is the really interesting, super intelligent people that come to work here. A new addition to our New England Research team is Danah Boyd. She is also a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She recently delivered a talk on campus about he views on Social Media. Transcript of the talk is here.
She had an interesting perspective on 3 dynamics of the social web.
1. Invisible Audiences: Social media introduces all sorts of invisible audiences. There are lurkers who are present at the moment but whom we cannot see, but there are also visitors who access our content at a later date or in a different environment than where we first produced them. As a result, we are having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience.
2. Collapsed Contexts: Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it’s often difficult to figure out what’s appropriate, let alone what can be understood.
3. Blurring of Public and Private: These distinctions are normally structured around audience and context with certain places or conversations being "public" or "private."
For a marketer like me #1 has a major impact on the control or lack of I have on my brands message. What this has enabled our outreach team to do is offer one set of messaging whether a customer is a parent, teen or developer. Since I don’t know who or when the message will be consumed we make sure the message is appropriate for everyone. The other impact this has on marketers is if you plan to have a special ‘slant’ to a marketing message for a hip hop teen you better be prepared that a Grandma sees that same message. Social web means the messages move across the web and aren’t contained by a URL boundary. This is the power and the curse of an uncontrolled domain. 
Don’t underestimate that dynamic.
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