Social Media: An Introduction

I do not intend to question the intelligence of my readers by defining Social Media. Since, the term social media is ubiquitous and generously been used in all avenues for quite some time now. So, everyone irrespective of age and location pretty much knows what the suddenly all popular Social Media is. But, as this blog is relatively new, it needs to build on these basics. And just for the sake of completion and laying a firm foundation, let me go through the rigours of defining all these ubiquitous terminologies. Though not an extensive explanation, I would link up to some other useful resources.

But before that some facts:

• 133 million blogs registered on Technorati[1]


• More than 100 million videos on Youtube[2]


• 132 million users in social network, Facebook[3]


• Twitter received 3.5 million unique visitors in the month of Nov' 08.


• LinkedIn, the professional social network, received 12 million unique visitors in Sept'08.

Source: http://socialmediastatistics.wikidot.com/start

Demystifying Social Media

If you are popular in Orkut(if you are an Indian), or Facebook(US/ Europe) then you are already a part of social media phenomenon. If you often take your angst out to the world through blogs, you have embraced social media already. If you like uploading small personal videos and share with your friends through Youtube, then you are ready to teach others a thing or two about Social Media. In short, almost any avid Internet surfer is already a participant of Social Media.

Let me formally try to define it, though it is too broad a concept to be explained in few words:

Social Media is a range of online applications and services which aim to facilitate interaction, collaboration and content sharing. These applications and services have some common characteristics (Refer Wikipedia):

• Participation

Its the age of user generated content. The control of media is gradually shifting from organized publishing centers to individuals. individuals are setting up and writing blogs and working together to create information through the use of wikis. What these tools have done is to lower the barrier to entry

• Sharing

The culture of communities and relationship has evolved on Internet. People of similar interests and needs are able to meet and network faster today through social media sites. As a result they share and discuss more and feel empowered than ever before.

• Collaboration

Social Media provides various collaboration tools. Though these collaboration tools existed even before, the social element acts as a major facilitator for collaboration. It provides the much needed immediacy to act quickly and efficiently. To reinforce this, let us review a case study. Conversation 2.0 (the next post)

• Connectedness

Social media content can be easily retrieved and is easy to stay in touch with. You can quickly link your content on other' site and vice-versa. There are numerous ways to let the members know of any new information that you want to disseminate. With the use of RSS (Really Simply Syndication) feeds, you can also syndicate your content or have others republish your content onto their site. Utilizing RSS feeds of your content gives other website publishers advance permission to view your content.

The following are the broad categories of Social Media applications and services:

• Blogs (short for web logs) are online journals posted by an individual or group, which readers can comment upon.


• Forums are discussion groups in which multiple users create topics and then comment on these topics. These are usually formed by people with common interests get together and share ideas. For example, book lovers within a company can discuss about best sellers in order to share knowledge.


• Content communities are sites that allow users to post and share content. Such communities exist around anything from videos and photos to stories and links. Some of these sites include voting functions that allow the community to determine the relevance of content.


• Virtual worlds are three dimensional virtual space where users interact and engage in immersive worlds. These spaces resemble real world scenarios.


• Wikis are community-generated documents and databases. Approved users can create content and augment that of others in the interests of creating better resources. Wikipedia is arguably the best known wiki, with over 2 million4 articles in the English edition alone.


• Social networks are communities through which users stay in touch with each other in a virtual network. Facebook is the most popular social network site and LinkedIn is a popular professional social network site.


• Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users share information through short messages not more than 200 characters. Twitter is the leader in microblogging service

Many of my friends wanted to know more about social media through me since I am a social media evangelist for IFF. I wouldn't want to state more than what the Internet already has a lot to say. I will provide a lot of relevant resources for your perusal.

Resources:
http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/
http://socialmediacore.com/top-25-free-ebooks-on-social-media/
BLOGS
http://www.conversationagent.com/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/

(Please come back. Because I will be appending more resources here)