Social Media: Welcome to the New Social Internet

Social Media, Web 2.0 and All That Jazz
©2007 Patsi Krakoff, Psy.D. and Denise Wakeman, The Blog Squad(TM)

If you’ve been around the Internet for more than a couple of years, you’ve learned that blogging isn’t just some geeky fad that’s going away soon. Just when you start to “get it” as far as the importance of blogs for marketing your business, along comes more new stuff, namely Web 2.0 and “social media.”

Here’s what we’re learning about social media and how it will impact your business and personal life. First, the Wikipedia definition:

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Miniclip (game sharing).

These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media)

Robert Scoble of Scobelizer.com had some fun writing about how this “new media” impacts our lives.

Here is a summary of what new media can do that old media can’t, from Scoble.

1. Old media, once published, can’t be changed. Retractions can be run the next day. New media can be updated instantly as soon as new information is available.
2. You can interact instantly with new media: Leave a comment and press save. Some comments are moderated, but most aren’t.
3. You can find out how popular a new media piece is by looking at the number of comments, the links, and the number of other posts about it.
4. You can look and find archives of other posts immediately.
5. You can mix media by providing written words, photos, audio files and video.
6. Each blog author usually publishes independently; old media is run by editors and committees and lawyer filters.
7. New media is infinite. There are untold hours of video available on sites like YouTube. But a TV channel only makes programs available during 24 hours of viewing, if that.
8. News on new media is syndicatable and linkable; information gets passed around quickly and is instantly findable thanks to RSS feeds and search engines.
9. New media can be mashed up; ads can come from third party servers; widgets can display things from somewhere else onto a blog.

These are only some of the changes that are already with us. What’s next? The imagination is fertile ground for creating the next tool that exponentially increases our inter-connectivity.

How will you use these possibilities for marketing your business?

A Few Examples

From www.socialmedia.biz/ here is a small sampling of the new tools:
• Flickr
• Linked In
• Ourmedia
• MySpace
• YouTube
• SpinXpress
• Blip.tv
• Digg
• Upcoming
• Delicious
• NowPublic
• Wikipedia
• Facebook
• Second Life
• Twitter
• Vox
• Dabble
• StumbleUpon

Technologies Don’t Drive Anything

To conclude, I rephrase this concept found on several wise sites: technologies don’t drive anything. Rather, they enable people to do things they have always done, only better, faster, or cheaper. The most effective and successful social networks are addressing universal human needs using an improved technology component.

It’s not important that you familiarize yourself with all the latest social media tools, neither should you be on the leading edge of all the cool trends.

However, it is important that you and your business connect with people, both your internal and external customers. It is still and always will be about relationships, credibility and trust.

Now there are new ways to create those relationships.

Comments

[Tetsou]

You have to be careful with sites like Digg as the amount of traffic they can generate can be very large - but not always appropriate for your site.

When one of my articles was placed on Digg it went viral overnight resulting in a huge headache for my hosting provider and myself. I wrote about what happened in another article: http://www.tetsou.co.uk/content/view/26/41/ The Digg Effect which folks might find instructive.

Tetsou
http://www.tetsou.co.uk