People have been using the Internet from the very beginning to connect with other people. In recent years new technology developments have allowed individuals, and soon after businesses, to begin participating in “social media”.
The marketing community has put a huge focus in this area over the past five years, and more recently social media has gone mainstream prompting a series of questions: what is it, why should I care, and how can I leverage it to drive business for my company?
Wikipedia, which as a completely user generated encyclopedia is itself a form of social media, offers this explanation of social media:
“Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves.
Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. The social media sites typically use tools like message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, communities, wikis, weblogs etc.”
Social media is essentially about sharing and reacting within an online of community of people with various thoughts, experiences, and opinions. It allows access to potential purchasers like never before, but the key is to tread lightly and truly integrate into the community. These interactive communities don’t like pure sales pitches, and negative word of mouth spreads even faster than positive word of mouth.
Over the next two weeks I’ll dive into some of the various types of social media with a discussion on how best to leverage each for your own business. I intend to explore:
- Blogs and Podcasting
- Social Networking
- Video Sharing
- Photo Sharing
- Virtual Reality Worlds
Keep an eye out for posts discussing each of these areas. For more thoughts on social media check out the fantastic post by Dion Hinchcliffe, Social Media Goes Mainstream, where I pulled the above graphic, and What is Social Media? by Robert Scoble.
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