Please Note: Understanding social media is akin to understanding a biro, fascinating in any language but, non the less not what it’s ALL about. Social media is to the web as a biro is to writing – part of the deal but not the one that will do it all.

However;

It’s definitely true to say that "social media" is the buzzword of the moment, but few people actually understand what it is, and how important it is to the future of business and communication in general.

Wikipedia offers up this description:

"Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, 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 monologue (one to many) into dialog (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 and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM)".

Through social media (a blog), I discovered this explanation by Joseph Thornley which I also like:

"Social media are online communications in which individuals shift fluidly and flexibly between the role of audience and author. To do this, they use social software that enables anyone without knowledge of coding, to post, comment on, share or mash up content and to form communities around shared interests".

As I like to keep things simple, this is how I describe social media:

Social media is the collecting and sharing of information via web tools and social/business networking platforms. Simple!

However, saying it is simple is one thing acting upon it is another.

More importantly why are you doing it and what do you what to get out of it? This has to be understood first NOT the various applications that are touted.

If you want to create "find-ability" on the web then social media will be part of the aggregate that allows that.

To do this you must first "map the web" and your part in it, (all aspects of the web from social media – social networking – social bookmarking – blogs – websites, how each site interacts with each other how to minimise effort maximise exposure best practices  and where you get your input from (which is the real secret)) and see where you fit into it now and where you want to be in the future. This, in turn, will tell us what you need to do.

In other words just "try it on" and see if it fits. If it does not then that’s OK at least you tried and at least you can have an understanding of the web via your map. It might not fit now, but who knows that might change in the future.

Social media is part of the web and has it’s place, BUT you have to embrace all of it not just one bit of it.
 

Click here.
 

 Learn about the NT show here …

Regards N

 

 All year round …