Social media: this buzzword is all over the news nowadays. Business and marketing periodicals fill their pages with articles about it, and a veritable industry of self-titled "social media consultants" has sprung up, trumpeting social media as the golden key to vast financial rewards for your business. But what exactly is this all about? With all the ink (or pixels) being used to write about this subject, how can you separate "the wheat from the chaff," the facts from hyperbole?
First off, a bit of history: for most of its existence, Langlands program the global internet has been an "online library" of sorts: website owners produced content - usually text and pictures - and posted it on websites for other people to come see. Then regular folks like you and me would browse the internet and read the content on these pages. It was always a one-way street: the website owner would produce the content, and other people would read it. They couldn't contribute to the website in any way - they were merely passive spectators.
Then around the turn of the century (the 21st century, not the 20th century!), a new technology called blogs - short for "web-logs" - started to appear. Suddenly, people without computer coding skills were able to easily create and update their own websites. They could post new content as often as they wanted. Furthermore, their site visitors could post comments on the web page in response to the page content, and the blog page was now a central hub for a community-wide conversation.
A few years later, YouTube was invented.Now people could not only post text and pictures online, but could post whole videos online. Other people could then rate and comment on the video, embed that video into their own websites, and make their own videos in response to the original videos. Additionally, people could "subscribe" to a person's YouTube profile, so they would always be notified when that person had posted new video content. Other websites such as rel=nofollow Flickr and rel=nofollow Last.fm took the social media innovations of YouTube and applied them to other types of media such as photography and music.
Around the same time that sites such as YouTube and Flickr were becoming a household name, the third pillar of social media was taking shape: social networking - websites with the ability for people to create their own private networks of friends to communicate with each other. MySpace was the first social networking website to gain a large mainstream following, but it was not long before it was eclipsed by the current 800-pound gorilla of social networking: Facebook. Two other major social networking players also emerged about this same time: Twitter, with its ability to post short messages that could be publicly sorted according to commonly used keyword tags, and LinkedIn, the social network designed primarily for business networking.
And that brings us to the world of today. Whereas previously most communication media (newspapers, television, the first generation of websites, etc.) were one-way streets from the media producers to the passive consumers, nowadays any person can produce articles, videos or other media, and broadcast them to their networks of friends and acquaintances, or make it publicly accessible to the whole world. This new shift in communications media is affecting business, politics and society as a whole. Stay tuned to the following articles in this series to see how your business can effectively harness these new communication tools, starting next month with the biggest social media tool of them all: Facebook.
Chris Strom runs a company that specializes in Denver website design. Contact them today to see how they can help with your website development needs.
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