Social Media
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Social media describes the online, tools, and platforms people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.
Chris Shipley (Co-founder and Global Research Director for Guidewire Group) is considered the first person to have coined the term "social media"
The BlogOn 2004 conference, July 22-23, 2004, focused on the "business of social media." Shipley and Guidewire Group used the term social media in the months leading up to that event to discuss the coming together of blogging, wikis, social networks, and related technologies into a new form of participatory media.
Social media share most or all of the following characteristics: 1
Participation: social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between the concept of media and audience.
Openness: most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, feedback, comments and sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content – password protected content is frowned on.
Conversation: whereas traditional media is about “broadcast”, content transmitted or distributed to an audience, social media is better seen as conversational and two-way.
Community: social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively around common interests – be that a love of photography, a political issue or a favorite TV show.
Connectedness: Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, via links and combining different kinds of media in one place. 1
Basic types of popular social media:
There are basically five kinds of social media. Note though that innovation and change are rife in social media. 1
Blogs: perhaps, the best known form of social media, blogs are online journals, with entries appearing with the most recent first.
Social networks: these websites allow people to build personal websites and then connect with friends to share content and communication. The best known example of a social network is MySpace, which has over 107 million members.
Content communities: communities which organize and share particular kinds of content. The most popular kinds of content communities tend to be around photos (Flickr), bookmarked links (del.icio.us) and videos (YouTube).
Wikis: these websites allow people to add content to or edit the information on them, acting as a communal document or database. The best-known wiki is the online encyclopedia which has over 1.3 million articles published in English alone.
Podcasts: audio and video files that are available by subscription through services like Apple iTunes and Microsoft Zune.
1 What is Social Media
