Social Media

According to Wikipedia, “Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies , that is intended to facilitate communications, influence and interaction with peers and with public audiences, typically via the Internet and mobile communications networks. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM)."

Currently, there are numerous social media platforms and more popping up all the time, so much so that last year, BusinessWeek updated an article from 2005 on “Social Media Will Change Your Business, Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”

In reading through these two write-ups, there are key points that colleges, universities, and non-profits should be taking into consideration as educators plan next year’s syllabi, administrator’s develop their new budget, and non-profits raise awareness and education:

1. Social media tools are easy to use and inexpensive. They can be created/published easily, and offer simple ways to access information.
2. Social media allows for very fast delivery of information and products.
3. Social media is not finite, there is no set number of pages or hours.
4. Social media is interactive – people can participate in it easily and add comments, photos, video, or create their own.

Social media takes on many forms: blogs, wikis, podcasts, email, instant messaging, social networking…. Wikipedia breaks them down into four categories:
1. Communication: Blogs, Internet forums, Micro-blogging, Social networking, Events
2. Collaboration: Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Social News, Opinion Sites
3. Multimedia: Photo/video/art/music sharing, Livecasting
4. Entertainment: Virtual Worlds, Online Gaming, Game Sharing
Some well-known names in social media include: Yahoo! Groups, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, Flickr, Twitter, and Blogger – just to name a few in the vast social media ocean.

BusinessWeek’s article was written in a “blog voice”, and in my opinion, was very well done and makes it’s point.
While the exact numbers are not known, there are 2-13 million blogs in the universe, with 40,000-120,000 new ones coming every day. (Seems crazy to me that we can’t actually count the number of blogs – shouldn’t some computer somewhere be able to do that?) While all this sounds like a large amount of cyberspace and hard drive space, apparently only 11% of the blogs are active.

Obviously, all this blogging is affecting mass media, “Set up a free account at Blogger or other blog services, and you see right away that the cost of publishing has fallen practically to zero. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.” BusinessWeek further comments: “This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.” And that, it does!

So, why should colleges, and non-profits pay more attention to social media?
1. Income. Federated Media Publishing, and advertising network for social media, turned revenue of $22 million in 2007. Of that, $14 million went to bloggers and publishers. Of the 150 sites that FM represents, about 15 of them are receiving $50,000 per month.
2. Exposure. There are approximately
· 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) unique URLs in Google’s index
· 2,000,000,000 (two billion) Google searches every day
· 684,000,000 visitors to Wikipedia last year
· 100,000,000 YouTube videos viewed per day
· 26.57 average age of YouTube uploader
· 346,000 people globally who read blogs
· 150,000,000 active Facebook users
3. Simplicity. Gone are the days when you had to purchase air-time during the Super Bowl in order to have millions of viewers see your message. Now, a few clicks and taps and ZAP! your “ad” or information is on the web for everyone to Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Yelp, or chat about in Second Life.

Whew! I had better go update my MySpace page now, and maybe sign up to sell ads on my website, then blog about it, create some podcasts, and quit my job to become a tech junkie!

Descriptions of some of the terms used above will be in an upcoming blog…

Stay Tuned,
Teri

Resources:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2008/db20080219_908252.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
http://thefuturebuzz.com/2009/01/12/social-media-web-20-internet-numbers-stats