New technology seems to arrive at the speed of thought, and it can be difficult for the casual web user to keep up with all of it. If you have ever shied away from a conversation that steered toward anything web-related or have ever shrugged your shoulders when you heard terms like social networking, tweeting, status updates, wikis, blogs, or social media, you are not alone, and this guide should help you get a basic overview of what social media is and how it is used.

A clear definition

The first problem with social media is that it means different things to different people, but it is important for someone trying to understand it to have a clear definition of what it means. Social media, in this context, refers to any site on the web that relies on participatory input and interaction among its visitors. Part or all of the content is created by the users.

Social media has taken over the web in a very short amount of time. Nearly all of the top sites on the web are participatory in essence, excluding the search engines, and nearly all sites have at least some participatory elements (such as comments).

Types of Social Media

While there are many forms social media can take, one can basically divide them into five categories, and each category has several sub-categories with accompanying examples:

1. Collaboration:

• Wikis — Easily editable encyclopedias. Often open to any users, although some are more restrictive.
  • Example: Wikipedia
• Open Content — Content licensed for reuse and sharing
  • Example: Creative Commons
• Social Bookmarking — Sites that allow users to bookmark, share, and discover websites.
  • Examples: Delicious, Google Bookmarks, Stumbleupon
• Social News — Share links to news and comment on stories
  • Examples: Digg, Slashdot, Reddit

2. Communication:

• Blogs — Services or software for easy user publishing, comments, and more
  • Example: WordPress, Blogger
• Micro-blogging — Very brief blog updates, often shorter than 140 characters
  • Examples: Twitter, Identi.ca
• Social networking — General social interaction, sharing, and friendship building.
  • Example: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn

3. Multimedia:

• Photo sharing — Publish photos for the world to see, comment, and share
  • Examples: Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa
• Video sharing — Publish your own videos online
  • Examples: YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion
• Live streaming — Stream live videos
  • Examples: Livevideo, Justin.tv, USTREAM
• Audio and Music sharing — Share favorite music streams
  • Examples: Last.fm, Like.fm

4. Reviews and Opinions:

• Product Reviews — Rate products for quality and price
  • Examples: Epinions
• Questions and Answers — Anyone can ask and answer questions
  • Examples: Yahoo Answers
• Employer/Educator reviews — Find out how good an employer, professor, or other authority figure is
  • Example: Rate My Professor
• Real Estate — Rate apartments, houses, neighborhoods, and commercial property
  • Examples: ApartmentRatings, Neighborhood Scout

5. Entertainment:

• Virtual Worlds — Create avatars and live out virtual lives
  • Example: Second Life
• Social Gaming– Play games online with other players
  • Examples: Browser-based games like Farmville and MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) games like World of Warcraft

Beyond websites and services specifically designed for social media, many personal, non-profit, and commercial websites incorporate social media elements. For example, many shopping sites like Amazon.com and eBay allow users to review products, rate them, and even resell items. Most news sites, even from corporate media, now give readers the ability to comment on articles, audio, and video. Furthermore, many sites incorporate elements from established social media sites. For example, a site may have a Facebook “Like” button or a Twitter sharing button. Some may even allow you to share their content on several different social media sites.

Although social media as a concept is relatively new, the actual implementation of online participatory elements predates the term. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), for example, date back to the 1970s, and chat rooms have been a part of the Internet from the beginning. With a steady evolution, most interactive features of the Internet (such as email) are now integrated into the web. Because of this, some people use computers and never close their web browsers.

According to web experts at UK dedicated hosting 34SP.com, when the web was created, it was intended to be a participatory tool that anyone could use to create and innovate. Social media is just a step in the direction of realizing that vision of a participatory culture, where a free exchange of ideas and knowledge flourishes.

About the Author

Tavis J. Hampton is a librarian and writer with a decade of experience in information technology, web hosting, and Linux system administration. His freelance services include writing, editing, tech training, and information architecture.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

As promised a while back, I’ve finished editing the Corporate Blogging Guide in PDF eBook format. So, today I give you the chapters you’ve had the chance to read online plus a whole new chapter (8. Technical aspects) and some bonus tips to guide you in your corporate blogging adventures!

How to download the eBook?

In order to download the ebook, all you have to do is to subscribe for free to Blogsessive’s RSS feed (if you haven’t done so until now) and you’ll find the download link at the end of each article in the feed.

eBook preview and contents

Here are two screenshots of the book’s cover and the contents page:

Don’t forget to subscribe…

… to Blogsessive’s RSS feed to download the eBook and to stay updated. There are plenty more freebies in the works, including a new WordPress theme and my second eBook: “From Zero to Blogging Hero: 100 Blogging Tips”

Enjoy the eBook friends!

PS: Please do not link to the download link in the feed. Instead, if you wish to promote this ebook, link to this post. Otherwise, I will consider it spam and wrongful usage!

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

Not all promoting and marketing techniques yield results in any given situation and likewise blogs aren’t always the best solution. In certain cases, a blog can become a useless investment, or worse, a way to boost the already negative view the audience has on a company.

Before launching a blog, each company needs to ask the following questions:

2.1. Is the blog a necessity or just a whim?

A company’s decision to launch a blog may be based on obvious advantages generated by the freedom of communication and by its being given a human touch. Considering these advantages or failing to do so, we still run into situations where a company chooses to launch a blog because of reasons such as:

• Our competitor X has launched a blog;
• It’s trendy, any teen has one. Why can’t we have one?
• We want to look high-tech / tech savvy.

In theory, none of the reasons above is a real obstacle, given it’s associated with and supported by other factors such as having the necessary resources to create and maintain a blog or a positive or neutral image in the market.

2.2 Do you have the needed resources to launch and maintain a blog?

Unlike classic company website, blogs keep consuming resources.

Blogs imply costs. Be it the technical side – design, development, hosting, be it hiring an experienced blogger to maintain it and publish fresh content, a blog needs financial resources.

Blogs take time. It takes time to create and publish content; it takes time to research, write posts, update them and maintain the blog. And for any company with a sense of business, time always means money.

Blogs need dedicated personnel. While there are quite a few tools to render content publishing automatic, the best results in corporate blogging are harvested by those publishing customized content, created by their own people. Are there people in your team who can maintain the blog? If not, do you have enough resources to bring in someone new?

Blog require information. And information is either created or needs to be searched for, analyzed and filtered. These steps also take time and need to be carried out by people who need to be effective and thorough in research, data filtering and content creation.

2.3 How does the online audience feel about your company?

We are talking about the online world, where the fastest and most relevant reactions are being published. How do we track them?

2.3.1 Reactions in the blogosphere: Technorati

Technorati.com is at the same time a blog search engine and a blog content aggregation service. According to the latest data, Technorati indexes and analyzes the activity of about 110 blogs from around the world.

Through a system reviewing both post tags and inter-blog links, Technorati returns relevant search result in a reverse-chronological order, the most recent ones being displayed first.

2.3.2 Reactions in the blogosphere: Google Blog Search

The world famous Google has a search engine entirely dedicated to blogs. Using the traditional search algorithms it’s already known for, Google Blog Search allows you to filter results based on multiple search parameters as well as on the date when the blog articles and reactions have been published.

Running a search for your company’s name will most likely return relevant results which are usually very personal, as they are reactions from within the blogosphere. If your brand mainly targets domestic customers, the wisest choice is to use the local version of the blog search engine.

And of course, running the search directly on the main Google search engine can return similarly relevant results.

2.3.3 Reactions in the online press from your field

Although it is not always the most relevant source, as it is often affiliated to certain trade groups or biased by advertising constraints, the online press covering your field can be an effective indicator for your company’s image by taking into account what their experts and analysts have to say about you.

2.3.4. Quantifying the risk factor

Based on the results obtained after analyzing all these online reactions, one can quite accurately quantify the risk factor their company is exposed to by publishing a blog, especially if it is a blog that allows comments to be posted.

A negative online image can lead to a virtually unlimited series of negative comments which rarely have to do with the actual content published on the blog. Visitors would have thus found a way to express all their frustration caused by real or imaginary flaws they see in the company’s products and services.

2.4 Interpreting the answers

It hardly takes a genius to determine if the blog is just a whim with a short life span and inexistent success in communicating with customers.

Also, it is obvious that without the necessary resources, a blog cannot be launched or it will be launched while lacking any real possibility of it being maintained in the future.

And who would ever want to help spread an already bad image through exposing themselves to ever present negative comments, especially in their own “online home”?

Other chapters of the Corporate Blogging Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction to Blogging
Chapter 2: Critical Questions Before Launching a Corporate Blog (current)
Chapter 3: Setting up Goals and Blog Positioning
Chapter 4: Types of Corporate Blogs
Chapter 5: Blog Editors & Editorial Policy
Chapter 6: Blogging Tips to Get You Started
Chapter 7: Blog Performance Tracking Tools

Photo credits to Johanna Ljungblom

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

A few months back I was invited to attend, as a speaker, an event on corporate blogging where the people in the audience were mostly PR Managers for different companies in my country. Along with the PowerPoint presentation, I have decided to also give those who attended the event more information on corporate blogging through an eBook I wrote at that time.

The following post is the first chapter of that eBook, translated into English. The rest of the chapters will be also published, over the next few days, except for the weekend. Now, let’s see what corporate blogging is about and if it is the right tool for you and your business.

1.1 Blog, Blogging, Blogosphere

The term blog, contracted form of weblog, defines a certain type of website where texts, photos, audio or video content are published in chronological order, much like an online diary.

The first blogs date back to 1993 when the term was first introduced, but they only started to be used more frequently in 1998 when the first blog community, Open Diary, appeared.

The true hit of the online mainstream happened around 2002-2003, when the first blog reactions regarding the Iraq war were published and when Google acquired the Blogger.com platform, which allows any person with Internet access to create and maintain their own blog.

The Blogosphere comprises all public blogs and is defined as a community based on the theory that all existing blogs are somehow interconnected, often through blogrolls or links inserted in their content.

A blogroll is a list of links, commonly displayed in a blog’s sidebar. The links usually point to blogs the author deems relevant to the content of their own blog or simply wants to recommend to their readers.

Therefore, through blogrolls, it is believed that any two blogs can be connected through one or more intermediary links.

Blogs allow publishing content in a wide range of types and formats, and these types of content lead to a first classification of blogs:

1. a. Classic blog – text content
2. b. Photoblog – publishes photo content
3. c. Videoblog – publishes video content
4. Audioblog (podcast) – publishes audio content

Microblogs and tumbleblogs, both defined as blogs with extremely short entries, are two other blog formats gaining more and more popularity in the past few years.

Regardless of information format, the online publishing of content through blog platforms is called blogging, and the author of a blog is called blogger.

1.2 Corporate blogging

Once they have hit the spotlights, the blogs’ potential to communicate effectively was immediately noticed by companies.

Initially seen as a mere tool to promote products and services, blogs gradually became part of a company’s brand. Aside from placing a name and a logo on them, blogs granted companies a persona they could be associated with. In short, they made them human. The corporate blog managed to break the barrier between the “inaccessible company” and its customers.

The true value of a company is undoubtedly fueled by its employees’ individual values. But how exactly can these values be expressed? How can they be best presented to the world?

Blogs allow companies to position their employees as industry leaders through the opinions they publish, through the breakthroughs shared on the blog, all in a human, personal form that eases communication with customers.

A few companies that have successfully adopted the concept of blogs are:

Adobe – http://blogs.adobe.com/
Microsoft – http://www.microsoft.com/communities/blogs/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/
Google – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

The benefits of a well crafted and maintained blog are plenty, but is it the right tool for companies? Find out in the next chapters.

Other chapters of the Corporate Blogging Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction to Blogging (current)
Chapter 2: Critical Questions Before Launching a Corporate Blog
Chapter 3: Setting up Goals and Blog Positioning
Chapter 4: Types of Corporate Blogs
Chapter 5: Blog Editors & Editorial Policy
Chapter 6: Blogging Tips to Get You Started
Chapter 7: Blog Performance Tracking Tools

Photo credits to Peter Nielsen

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive