Conrad Travis David, social media strategist at Hashtag spoke to HumanIPO about social media as a strategic network of globally beneficial connections to raise awareness and trade knowledge.
HumanIPO: How do you see the progress of social media?
David: I am seeing the progression from where we started and where we are going to. Social media is the jumping start to getting us all on that cloud-based system with platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Once we gather people on various social platforms and we build up skills and needs… there is a further mobile social app platform created so they can push content to people much faster.
So what we do now is building up audiences on social platforms.
Do you think there is a great need in South Africa for the government to have a greater presence on social media?
I built this company based on meaning to present to the government.
[I intend] to go to each department in the government industry and create transparency so that when policies and projects are executed, people that are on the ground who want these projects can actually voice out and say ‘hey, look we have completed phase one’ or there is no service delivery rather than just [relying] on television and newspaper.
On social media everyone becomes the politicians.
What is your take on the risks posed by social media?
From a social media point of view we plug into companies and sort of advise them on the type of message they should be pushing out not to over promise, but to rather under promise and over deliver.
What people tend to do is they tend to hold on to the words that their leaders say and some of them keep them to their words.
So what you say on social media is very important, even though it can just be casual conversation.
I’ve seen people being fired based on rash decisions taken without their approval so we write social media policies as well to make sure that companies understand.
What do you think is the realness level of social media?
Mankind is equipped in evolving the real potential and purpose and social media is showing them examples of people that have actually been doing things and making that difference.
People are actually questioning if others are doing such great things, why can’t I? Based on that, it expanded on people’s thought processes.
Social media is one of the first steps to uniting people together with the sharing of ideas. Many countries’ organisations restrict communications but at the end the people always rise.
