What is Social Media?
Social media is a phrase
being tossed around a lot these days, but it can sometimes be difficult to
answer the question of what is social media.
Social Media is the future of
communication, a countless array of internet based tools and platforms that
increase and enhance the sharing of information. This new form of media makes
the transfer of text, photos, audio, video, and information in general
increasingly fluid among internet users. Social Media has relevance not only
for regular internet users, but business as well.
Social media includes web-based and mobile technologies used to turn
communication into interactive dialogue between organizations, communities, and
individuals. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a
group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web
2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Social media is
ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable communication techniques.
The best way to define social media is to
break it down. Media is an instrument on communication, like a newspaper or a
radio, so social media would be a social instrument of communication.
In Web 2.0 terms, this would be a website that
doesn't just give you information, but interacts with you while giving you that
information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for your comments or
letting you vote on an article, or it can be as complex as Flixster recommending movies to you based on
the ratings of other people with similar interests.
Social media technologies
take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or
pictures, video, rating and social
bookmarking.
Social Media Sites:
Here are some examples of social media websites:
Ø
Social
Bookmarking.
(Delicious, Blinklist, Simpy) Interact by
tagging websites and searching through websites bookmarked by other people.
Ø
Social
News. (Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Delicious, Mixx)
Interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.
Ø
Social
Networking.
(Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM, Twitter, Linkeden, Google +, Myspace) Interact by adding
friends, commenting on profiles, joining groups and having discussions.
Ø
Social
Photo and Video Sharing.
(YouTube, Flickr) Interact by sharing photos or videos and
commenting on user submissions.
Ø Wikis. (Wikipedia, Wikia)
Interact by adding articles and editing existing articles.
And these websites are not the only social
media websites. Any website that invites you to interact with the site and with
other visitors falls into the definition of social media.
0 comments:
Post a Comment