Social media -- a powerful business tool

A company or a product's success will be largely driven by how effectively it leverages on the social media technology, said co-founder of SKALI Group.

This is because more and more consumers tend not to believe what appears in advertisements, instead, they have the tendency in believing recommendations given by friends, relatives via social media.

"Social media is a platform where the client and the public can interact and engage with the business or service that the person sells or operates.

"When Ford Motor Co launched the Explorer last year in America, they had a higher audience in Facebook compared on the advertisement that they put on Super Bowl advertisement.

“Bear in mind that, Super Bowl advertisement is the highest paid advertisement in any network in USA," said Tengku Farith Rithauddeen told Astro AWANI after delivering his thoughts on "Digital Business: Game Changers of the Technology Realm" during the CEO Forum 2013.

Tengku Farith added that the process of a consumer's buying decision has evolved over the years. Today, consumers prefers to have more interaction from various parties prior to a purchase.

"If I wanted to buy a car, I will just get onto Facebook or Twitter and get the opinion from the netizens. Of course, people will give their opinion and I will have to juggle the opinion based on the interaction that we had," said Tengku Farith.

Despite the growing trend of the social media, there are some people who still do not understand the concept of social media.

"For them, it was just another platform for interaction but it was more than that. It is like a human body, the portal maybe just the body but the hand, leg and fingers will be the social media which they interact each other work in tandem with the portal," he said.

According to him, a lot of people have investment portal but it is still not enough. "Yes, it is good but it is not down-listed. They have to invest in social media and propagate it," he said.

With this development, the conventional way of business making has started declining.

"80 per cent of newspaper agency in USA have ceased their operation within this 10 years and this kind of wave is going to happen in Malaysia too, which we have the online newspaper and certain focus group that talk about certain subject and this is the new way to go," he said.

"Media company, organisation and people who sells their product needs to evolve and Malaysia need to adapt this because they might be left behind and creating a huge gap on that changing where the hole will be fill up later by other foreign company," he said.