What is Social Media?

Trying my way to understand about Social Media in general, I came across with an e-book by Antony Mayfiel which fully analyzes the meaning of Social Media, the first part of the book.

What is social media?

Social media is best understood as a group of new kinds of online media, which share most or all of the following characteristics:

Participation - social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is
interested. It blurs the line between media and audience.

Openness - most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to
accessing and making use of content – password-protected content is frowned on.

Conversation - whereas traditional media is about “broadcast” (content transmitted or distributed to an audience) social media is better seen as a two-way conversation.

Community - social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively.
Communities share common interests, such as a love of photography, a political issue
or a favourite TV show.

Connectedness - Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and people.

Basic forms of social media

At this time, there are basically six kinds of social media. Note, though, that innovation and change are rife.

Social networks - these sites allow people to build personal web pages and then connect with friends to share content and communication. The biggest social networks are
MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

Blogs - perhaps the best known form of social media, blogs are online journals, with
entries appearing with the most recent first.

Wikis - these websites allow people to add content to or edit the information on them, acting as a communal document or database. The best-known wiki is Wikipedia4, the
online encyclopaedia which has over 2 million English language articles.

Podcasts - audio and video files that are available by subscription, through services like Apple iTunes.

Forums - areas for online discussion, often around specific topics and interests. Forums came about before the term “social media” and are a powerful and popular element of
online communities.

Content communities - communities which organise and share particular kinds of content. The most popular content communities tend to form around photos (Flickr), bookmarked links
(del.icio.us) and videos (YouTube).

Microblogging - social networking combined with bite-sized blogging, where small amounts of content (‘updates’) are distributed online and through the mobile phone network. Twitter is
the clear leader in this field.

If you think that there’s something oddly familiar about descriptions of social media, it may be that you recall some of the discussions in the 1990s about what the web
would become. And many of its emerging manifestations are close to the idealistic imaginings from that time.

A good way to think about social media is that all of this is actually just about being human beings. Sharing ideas, cooperating and collaborating to create art, thinking and commerce, vigorous debate and discourse, finding people who might be good friends, allies and lovers – it’s what our species has built several civilizations on. That’s why it is spreading so quickly, not because it’s great shiny, whizzy new technology, but because it lets us be ourselves – only more so.

And it is in the “more so” that the power of this revolution lies. People can find information, inspiration, like-minded people, communities and collaborators faster than ever before. New ideas, services, business models and technologies emerge and evolve at dizzying speed in social media.


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