Right now many companies are busy throwing out a lot of money on expensive, fancy-looking campaigns on every digital platform they can think of - the phenomenon of ubiquity -, without even realizing, what the determining factors of success in the new business environment are.

Times have changed. In recent years, the usage of social media has grown tremendously. It has enabled consumers to contribute and share information on the extensive world wide web. Means of communication, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have also greatly impacted corporations.

The winter of 2010-2011 was tough for the travel industry in Sweden. Records were set both in terms of temperature and snow amount (Wikipedia, 2013). This meant trouble for the travel industry, since consumers wanted to get from point A to point B in reasonable amount of time.

About 34% of the world’s population (about 2.4 billion) uses the Internet daily (Internetworldstats.com). Of those, for example, 955 million are active users on Facebook that spend on average 6 hours and 35 minutes per month there and 58% return to the website every day. (Pring, 2012)

The emerge of online marketing has revolutionized the marketing arena, since its rise in the middle of the 1990s it has become one of the most common marketing channels in today’s society; which is due to the exponential development of the internet and social media (Seraj 2012; Meerman, 2011;Winer, 2009;Varadarajan 2009).

YouTube is the largest video hosting service featuring user generated content (Chenail, R.J., 2011). Created in 2005, today it is the third most visited web-site (Bullas, n.d.). It generates 800 million unique visitors every month. (YouTube, 2013).

Social Media has been popular for several years but we can see that this field is still evolving. These new channels are redefining ways companies are doing business and in order to be successful, we will see that it takes new ways of thinking.

In this paper, I will address the overall question “Who is a company’s new customer in the Internet era” provided by the course outline. To give an answer to this question I have chose to focus and narrow my research into a field that I find particularly interesting – consumer empowerment. Hence, I will provide a link and discussion between how to examine the relationship between the modern consumer and the corporation based on a Foucauldian perspective.

web 2.0.

Do we have to rethink identity in brand management when branding through social media? Internet usage has increased tremendously during the 21st century and according to Qualman (2012) social media has become the number one activity on the web. Traditionally people used internet primarily to expend content and to buy products and services. Today people tend to use internet in a more interactive way by create, share and discuss content, and this is also what represent the social media phenomenon. 

The new information technology has changed the environment in which companies and consumers co-exist, and the consumers are no longer passive recipients of information and brand value (Christodoulides, 2009; Rowley, 2004). Internet has made the one-to-many communication obsolete and it has been replaced by a many-to-many communication, where the consumers actively engage in conversation with each other and the company (Christodoulides, 2009).