Social Media Series – Part 1 – Introduction

Ok, so last week I was tasked with running some classes on digital media with some of the other departments in work.  Nothing too exciting, just run them through the basics and let them know how to sell our services…. This particular one was on social media.  Now I’ve head alot of speakers talk about writing articles / books before they start writing a talk to help organise their ideas, hence why I’m doing it on this occasion, as not only is social media a rather “new” but its relatively unstructured (some will argue).
Now the more switched-on of you out there will be thinking .. by the time I write this, not only will it probably be out of date, but also, however long I write this (or teach this tomorrow) it still wont be long or detailed enough to cover everything in socia media!  Well here goes;

Wikipedia defines social media as “information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies”.  Now what does this really mean?  It doesnt really matter what I write here… but in a nutshell its the shift from 1-to-many to a many-to-many shift in content publication.  Some definitions on the internet will refer to this as a shift to “peer reviewed content” or “conversational”.  Instead of simply publishing content for people to read, you’ll allowing users to have conversations, with you, and with each other.

Recently I’ve started seeing this in quite a few places on the internet (I believe it was first seen in the Chairman of eCademys email signature);

• Web 1.0 – Find Me – Search orientation – marked by Google / Yahoo
• Web 2.0 – Join Me – Facebook (well facebook 1.0), Linked In, Flickr, Blogs
• Web 3.0 - Share This / Follow Me - Twitter, new Facebook etc

Well why is this important?

Well web 1.0 is easy – the invention of modern search engines really allowed us to find what we are looking for on the internet.  Before we had Google, we were relying on directory editors and other people to link to our site.  Not just that – but the highest in the search results were never necessarily the most relevant.
Then along came web 2.0, with its blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and so on, made it easy for anyone to publish, and more importantly aggregate content, but it didnt make it easy to share that content with other people.  We’ve always been able to email links and send them to friends, but it hasnt been until recently, with the function go post links to your profiles, and the huge array of short URL services and twitter, that its been really easy to get them out there.  Add to this the fact that you can now comment on _everything_ and we’ve got the evolution of social meda.
Tomorrow I’ll be looking at the different types of social media, and how they relate to each other, and in the final part we’ll look at the aspects you’ll need to look at when designing a good social media campaign, and why social media is becoming more important than ever in the context of SEO and site promotion.

Tags: introduction, social-medial
Posted in Work Stuff