What Is Social Media?
According to the The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success
While many think of social media as new fad technology, the social media movement of today has slowly evolved since the 80s, when a series of disconnected networks formed into the global network we know today as the internet.
In the early days of the “inter-tubes” users were able to instantly exchange ideas through message boards and emails. Over the years many new features have allowed greater levels of interaction. Weblogs or “Blogs” helped add a more personal presence on the internet, and blog commenting has greatly increased the conversational landscape of the internet.
These days users can have more control over the information they receive from the internet through aggregators and Really Simple Syndication (RSS). These tools are used to gather updates of content from favorite sites in one place. One example of this is Google Reader.
Socializing this process are tools like Digg where you can share your favorite stuff on the internet with others, and become part of a community that decides what information on the internet is popular, important and accurate.
Of course, there are the sites created for social networking. The first major social networking site, Six Degrees was launced in 1997, and is now only open to existing members. Since then many others have started, such as Friendster, MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.
Other categories of social media include microblogging, a category which includes Twitter, although Twitter can also be considered a social networking tool as well. There are also the kind of sites that are set up exclusively for sharing photos, video and audio such as Flickr, You Tube and Podcast.com.
But what does all this mean for business? Stay tuned for the next blog entry…!
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