Social Media needs to break up!
What is Social Media? Well it consists of about a million sites, concepts, types of media and web 2.0 and 3.0 concepts.
Why do people keep lumping it together as one type of online marketing? Pay Per Click and SEO are separate and completely different from email marketing or media buying, so, why would we take everything else and call it one thing?
Well, I don’t honestly think that the title “Social Media” will disband anytime soon, but in the meantime I’ll break it down myself.
Blogs
I think everyone has heard of or understands what a blog is, this is one! A blog is an online journal, a web-log.
Examples:
In the past years blogging has evolved and taken on many new forms, but one of the newest forms is micro-blogging. Twitter.com is a clear example of this (yes, I think Twitter fits under blogs).
Social Networking
It may not have started with Myspace.com and Facebook.com, but these two companies have been instrumental in taking social network to new heights. Social networking is a place where you can make friends and stay connected to people you know. You can stay up to date with what your friends are doing, where they work, who they are dating, see photos of them and many other activities.
Examples:
Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is the idea of any idea becoming like a virus and spreading across several platforms to reach a number of different users. It can rarely be targeted and almost never guaranteed that a marketing campaign will go viral, but when they do it can be a huge success and be seen by millions of people in one day. The effectiveness of a viral campaign comes down to whether or not a user wants to forward it to friends and spread the word.
Examples:
Video
Video marketing is fairly self explanatory, it’s the making of a video for publication on the internet. Technology has made it possible for nearly anyone with a camera to make a movie and easily publish it online. Video can then be embedded within a site, used to create a Vlog (video blog) or used to help a viral campaign get launched.
Examples:
Photo
Again, pretty straight forward. Photo sites are any site where you can upload a number of pictures for display, storage or sharing. If you have a camera and can point and shoot you can publish your photos to the web and send them to millions of people to view. It’s even possible for you to sell your photos online through stock photo companies.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the collaboration of users to complete project, discuss a topic or work together in pieces to complete an end goal. The internet allows us to work collaboratively with a number of people spread throughout the world to deliver an end goal. Probably the best example of this is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by users who manually update the content. It’s easily the most up to date and comprehensive encyclopedia.
Examples:
Social News
Social news is when one user submits, to a social news site, a link to an article, image or video as something they like or find interesting and a number of other users also find it interesting as well. Users then vote to raise the popularity of the news piece and it is then voted up to the do of a social news site where more people will view it. Having an article, site, image or video can deliver a number of users to a given site in a matter of moments, but can also be crippling to servers if they aren’t properly equipped for the surge.
Examples:
Aggregators
Since Social Media is so fragmented and disjointed it makes sense that there are services that will aggregate information across a number of platforms and put it in one convenient place where you can make use of it.
Examples:
More?
Well yes, there are probably tons more sites and concepts that I haven’t mentioned here and a bunch more that are yet to come. But, as you can now see, there are tons of sub-topics within Social Media and although I feel that it needs to break up, it likely won’t because for now it’s easy enough to cover all of these topics under one umbrella.
Adding to the complexity and confusion of Social Media is that all or some of these Social Media sites and concepts work together. You can publish your Twitter feed to Facebook, post a Video on your Blog or link them all together using various software products. So, it’s important to know what type of Social Media is right for you and the most effective way to make use of it.
Stay social.
CC
One Comment
Yes, there are a ton of “social media” sites, applications and tools to keep track of out there. The average Canadian internet user is on around 7 of them. I’m certainly feeling the need to address video sharing separately from microblogging. But for now, at least people are starting to talk about it, and that means that organizations will start to make the shift from a one-way web interface to a multi-directional, multi-conversational web. And that’s a good thing for everyone. Thanks for giving it some thought and putting it out there, Mike!
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