Summerfest Presentation: What IS Social Media? What ARE Social Media?

What IS Social Media?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).
Information outputs and human interaction

Primarily, social media depend on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words to build shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit.

Social media utilities create opportunities for the use of both inductive and deductive logic by their users. Claims or warrants are quickly transitioned into generalizations due to the manner in which shared statements are posted and viewed by all. The speed of communication, breadth, and depth, and ability to see how the words build a case solicits the use of rhetoric. Induction is frequently used as a means to validate or authenticate different users' statements and words. Rhetoric is an important part of today’s language in social media.

Social media are not finite: there is not a set number of pages or hours. The audience can participate in social media by adding comments, instant messaging or even editing the stories themselves.

Examples

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), MouthShut.com yelp.com (product reviews), Youmeo (social network aggregation), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Avatars United (social networking), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging), Open Diary (blogging), and other microblogs such as Jaiku. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.

Social media: a categorization

Examples of social media software applications include:

Communication

• Blogs: Blogger, LiveJournal, Open Diary, TypePad, WordPress, Vox, ExpressionEngine
• Micro-blogging / Presence applications: Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku
• Social networking: Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Skyrock, Hi5, Ning, Elgg
• Social network aggregation: NutshellMail, FriendFeed
• Events: Upcoming, Eventful, Meetup.com

Collaboration

• Wikis: Wikipedia, PBwiki, wetpaint
• Social bookmarking (or Social tagging) (Golder & Huberman 2006) : Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google Reader, CiteULike
• Social news: Digg, Mixx, Reddit
• Opinion sites: epinions, Yelp, City-data.com

Multimedia

• Photo sharing: Flickr, Zooomr, Photobucket, SmugMug
• Video sharing: YouTube, Vimeo, sevenload
• Livecasting: Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Stickam, bizbuzztour.com
• Audio and Music Sharing: imeem, The Hype Machine, Last.fm, ccMixter

Reviews and Opinions

• Product Reviews: epinions.com, MouthShut.com
• Q&A: Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers
• Employer Reviews, Jobeehive.com

Entertainment

• Media & Entertainment Platforms: Cisco Eos
• Virtual worlds: Second Life, The Sims Online,Forterra
• Game sharing: Miniclip, Kongregate

Social Media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).