Social-Media Optimization

From Jerri L. Ledford's Book

Ask any child over the age of 10 what MySpace is, and you’ll get a pretty good description. During the conversation, you’ll also probably hear about other places like Flickr, FaceBook, ShoutLife, YouTube, Twitter, and Jaiku. These are all examples of the different social networks that have become an Internet phenomenon over the past few years.

Social networks are groups of people who are linked by some type of connection. MySpace is a social network where friends people who know each otherconnect. New friends come into the mix. Friends’ friends come into the mix, and eventually you have a network of people who may not know each other in the real world but are connected on the Internet.

The phenomenon part of the social network is how quickly people have adopted it. And using the connections made available by social networking, the category of social media has grown nearly as quickly. Social media are contents generated by social networking. The publishing mode for social media is many-to-many publishing. What this means is that a group of people publish a work or works that are distributed to another group, or several groups, of people.

Literally defined, social media are the technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and multi- media. These technologies and practices can be translated into all different kinds of social networking. Table 18-1 is a short list of some of the types of social media and social networking available.

Types of Social Media and Networks

Wikis

These are collaborative web sites. The concept behind wikis is that anyone who has access to the site is able to add to or change any page on the site. Examples : Wikipedia

Social networks

A group of people tied together by some common interest. Interests can range from reading to education to food to news or any other subject imaginable. Examples :FaceBook,MySpace,Villij

Presence applications

Presence applications are like miniature blogs. These sites allow users to communicate back and forth using their services. Conversations run from important to completely mundane on these web sites. Examples : Twitter, Jaiku,Pownce

Video sharing

Have a great vacation video you want to share? YouTube takes “America’s Funniest Home Videos” to a whole new level. If you have a digital videocamera and some time, you can create and share any kind of video thatyou would like. examples : YouTube

Virtual reality

This interesting social networking category is like living in a fantasy world. You make up your looks, personality, your life, and all of your surroundings.But don’t think this is just a game. Living a virtual life can be more than just fun; it can also be a way to make a good income for some people. Examples : Second Life

Events

Events networks connect people according to the events that they are attending or want to attend. If you want to know who’s going to be at that TobyMac concert on Thursday night, check out on of the social-events networks. Examples : Upcoming

News aggregation

These social networks are connected by current and past news. If you find a news story that you think is good enough to be shared with people whose interests are the same as yours, you can add it to your network for them to view. Examples : Digg, Reddit

Photo sharing

Everyone wants to share pictures. Photo-sharing networks let you share your pictures with anyone that you want to. Most of these services also allow online photo storage. Examples : Flickr,Zooomr,PhotoBucket

Livecasting

Livecasting is literally live webcasting. A community is built around the webcasts, including everything from blogs to chatrooms. Examples : Justin.tv

Episodic online videos

These social networking sites are built around online videos, but the videos difference here is that each person tells a specific story in a series of episodes. The social network is built around your favorite episodes. Examples :YourTruman-Show

Media sharing

If you want to create a network of people with whom you can share all kinds of media files, these services are the ones to use. Connect to as many or as few friends as you like when sending e-mails, videos, audio files, and more.

Examples :Izimi, Twango

Music sharing

Not music file sharing, but creating community around music. Most of these sites allow for integration with iTunes or other media players to keep track of the music you listen to, and make recommendations based on your tastes and the tastes of your network. Examples :last.fm, pocketfuzz

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is one of the most widely used social-media techniques. These services allow you to tag news stories, blogs, videos, audio files,web sites, and other Internet-based services to share with friends. Tagged sites are then ranked (and searchable) according to the number of tags received.

Examples : del.icio.us, ma.gnolia.com,blinklist