Last night ABC show “Q & A” was very intensive; I guess the panellists and audiences all got quite excited.

Apart from a lot of ‘politics’ topics, they did talk a bit around social media. I like the comments from Miriam Lyons, the Director of the Center for Policy Development. She mentioned that “I like the fact that we’ve basically seen something of a bit of an equalization of the power to communicate and that’s doing quite radically things in many cases. It’s making it much easier for groups and, you know, progressive groups which I obviously have some contact with, to challenge whatever the kind of mainstream accepted narrative is and I think that’s really important. You know, you see massive protest movements that aren’t necessarily - it’s not that they wouldn’t exist without Twitter or without Facebook but their lives are made easier by those tools being available and I think that’s something to celebrate.”

To borrow the concept here, every single individual actually has his/her own say about everything. They think about it, it crosses their minds, they even talk about it when with peers…however, without a platform, the opinion and comments won’t be known by a lot of others. Social media provides a shared platform on which people would be able to speak their minds and exchange ideas with other like-minded. In the same way, if we would want to know consumers’ opinion about our brand, our products, we would build this platform for them to share it. No matter positive or negative, it’s a way to engage with them, it’s a way to make them really care.

Although people also argue social media also created the battleground for the brand, they need to catch up and fight. No battle can be won easily I guess. Of course, in this new media arena, we have a lot of things to do. Mainstream wants to make it a fair and real platform for people, company, organizations, government to reflect their views, present their products, etc. However, we also got a lot of barrier to overcome, a lot of questions to be answered--- increased the danger posed by counterfeiting, intellectual property issue, privacy breaching problem, and so on.