Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category:

Why Social Media is Hot

Social media, social networks and communities are nothing new.Bulletin board systems (BBSs), AOL and sites like Bolt.com (from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s) are good examples of online communities. Amazon and other sites have made use of community features such as user submitted product reviews for some time. Message boards, newsgroups, list servers, forums and dating sites have been around for a while too and allowed people to build relationships, share content, photos, videos, etc.

A few things have changed during the past few years though:

  • It’s now incredibly easy and inexpensive for regular people like you and me to generate and publish content. The tools are easy to use and in most cases free.
  • More of us are on the web now and we are more knowledgeable and capable.
  • The tools used to create social media platforms have become easier to use and less expensive.

The barriers that existed to user-created content have fallen and continue to fall. The same goes for barriers to developing new forms of social media and social networks.

The results of these developments:

  • More people creating content.
  • More social networks springing up.
  • New forms of social media being created.
  • Traditional sites increasingly making use of social media features.

As social media becomes widely present across the web, its ability to reach people increases. That is why it is becoming such a powerful promotional tool and social media marketing is getting so much attention.

Posted on Feb 12 2008 by Rob under Marketing, Promotion, Social Media. No Comments

What is Social Media?

Prospects and clients often ask me two related questions:

What is Social Media?

How can I use Social Media to promote my business?

In this article I’m going answer the first question: “What is Social Media?” This article will form a foundation of understanding to build on in future articles where I’ll discuss how you can use social media to promote your business.

The social aspect of social media encompasses concepts like:

  • User-generated content.
  • Sharing, contribution, participation, interaction and collaboration.
  • Authority-generated content and user-generated content existing together and interacting.
  • Relationships.

What I mean by authority-generated content is content generated by an official publisher. For example, the New York Times pays writers to publish information through the New York Times website. I’m calling that information authority-generated content.

User-generated content is content generated by regular, non-official publishers like you and me. We might comment on a New York Times article or write a book review for Amazon.com. In these examples, our user-generated content co-exists with authority-generated content.

Another big part of part of social media is discovering, connecting with and building relationships with other people. These relationships can be centered on things like locations, events, offline relationships, shared interests and shared content.

The media aspect of social media refers to the form through which we apply the concepts from above:

  • Online communities.
  • Video sharing.
  • Picture sharing.
  • Bookmark sharing.
  • Content sharing.
  • Blogging.
  • etc.

If our explicit goal is to create relationships, then the social media could be classified as an online community. An example of a social network that fits this description is Facebook.

If our goal is to share videos, then the social media could be classified as video sharing. An example of a social network that fits this description is YouTube.

I slipped in a new term: social network. You have likely gathered from context that this is used to refer to a particular instance or example of social media. Things are tricky here. Different people use terms like community, social media and social network in slightly different ways. These terms are somewhat flexible and overlap. In addition, the purposes and forms of the different social media themselves overlap and the features used to enable the different forms of media overlap. So don’t get too caught up in the names.

Now that we’ve gotten a feel for social media, let’s take a closer look and match up the concepts above with some concrete examples you are likely familiar with.

Below I have organized social media into 7 different categories. Earlier I said that things were hard to define, flexible, overlapped and were constantly changing. That’s true but we need to start somewhere and this is how I’ve decided to do it.

Communities/Social Networking

Photo Sharing

Video/Audio Sharing

Content Sharing

Social Bookmarking

Social News Aggregation

Blogging/Micro Blogging

(Sites like wikipedia.org and pseudodictionary.com are examples of social reference sites but they are of limited value for promoting your business so I’m not going to cover them here.)

Now we have a foundation for what social media is and some specific examples. I’ll continue to add to the lists above as things change.

Going forward, I’ll build off of this foundation by giving more detailed explanations of each of these types of social media, discussing major social networks in each area and then outlining strategies for using each type to build your audience and extend the reach of your message.

Posted on Feb 02 2008 by Rob under Social Media. 1 Comment

Warning: Social Media is Dangerous

Ok. The headline is a bit dramatic. But it is also true.

Using social media to build relationships can be a powerful way to extend the reach of your message. It allows you to identify people receptive to your message, provides a way to connect with them, provides a way to establish and maintain a relationship. It also allows others to quickly and publicly sing your praises when you have done good for them.

The same things that make it powerful in a positive way also make it powerful in a negative way.

Read more »

Posted on Jan 23 2008 by Rob under Social Media. No Comments
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