"Social Media" is a buzzword that has been thrown around a lot lately. But what exactly does it really mean? Wikipedia describes social media as...
“the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.”
Also, social media can be considered anything that can help build a community to rally around. Companies/websites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, and Revver all fit the bill. These are all websites that can now be used as places to put out your marketing message. Spreading messages through blog posts and blog search engines also fits the bill. It is all about making something easy to spread, which, by the way, used to be called word-of-mouth. Buyer beware though, you can't force SMO. This is pull marketing; it is not "push your message onto someone marketing".
The top 25 social media networks delivered over 155 million unique visitors in Feb. 2008 with 70 percent coming from MySpace, Facebook and Classmates.com. Add in YouTube and Flickr and you get another 60 million totaling an estimated 215 million humans viewing social media monthly.
Compare that to television where an average 24-hour period delivers around 50 million unique viewers. The highest viewership day of the year, Super Bowl Sunday, has an estimated 110 million unique
The Internet has become a powerful platform for advertisers to reach mass audiences via user generated video too. According to comScore Video Metrix, U.S. Internet users viewed over 10 billion videos online in the month of December alone. Imagine a 15 to 30 second commercial with each video view and the Internet seems ready today to compete with broadcast TV in delivering commercial views.
Advertising on social media is not about clicks or click rate any more than TV commercials are; it's about quickly reaching reaching a huge U.S audience. Sooner rather than later, advertisers will see social media as a great way to reach mass audiences. After all, in terms of audience size there are several Super Bowls every day on Facebook, MySpace and YouTube!
Click rates are a reflection of pageviews and social media sites similar to TV have a large overlapping audience that hang around them all day, every day. Television would have a low click rate too if an ad campaign were measured over the course of a months worth of programs on the same network, assuming you could click the screen.
People also tune in and out of TV just like they do with social media. According to Compete's figures for every unique visitor to YouTube there are 54 pageviews. With Facebook, a unique visitor creates an amazing 564 pageviews in a month and on MySpace each person generates a staggering 1,110 pageviews.
The social media audience is loyal, large and habit-oriented just like broadcast TV. They also hit the prime youth-tilting demographic who are big spenders online and are considered a high value audience by ad agencies and advertisers. Ultimately, what advertiser’s value is the audience, not just the clicks.
Today it is the new reality of Social Media
• 45% of adult Internet Users have created content online
• 54% of adult Internet Users have watched video online
• 28% of adult Internet Users have tagged content online
• 77% think Blogs are a good way to get information about a company or product
• My Space gets more traffic than Google
• Triple digit percentage increases in number of visitors to SN’s in recent years
So What is Social Media.....?
A social media is a tool which helps people to connect to each other, share there thoughts and opinion etc. The main characteristics of the social media could me summarized as:
User Controlled Content
- Users create content: videos, photos, comments, links
- Users decide what is popular
- No line between media & audience
> The audience is not a passive recipient of information
- The media is created by the interaction
- Content feeds conversation and vice versa
- Linking,commenting, etc.
Open
- No password protected content
- What is popular (and often what isn’t popular) is evident
- Who is posting content is evident
- Reusing, repeating, remixing content is encouraged
Mixed Media
- Text, video, audio, photos, etc. are frequently combined
- Key difference between online and conventional media sources
Communities
- Niches, channels, groups that reflect personal interest are ALWAYS a feature
- Allows people to define themselves and CONNECT, which is one of the primary motivations of Social Media participation
The World of Social Media
- SM is not a site or a group of sites; SM activity is everywhere on sites belonging to marketers, search engines, etc.
- People do the same kinds of things (connecting and creating content) no matter what site they are on
The main different categorization of Social Media are as follows:
BLOGS
A blog is a “web log” or online diary or a website and is a publication of personal thoughts, experiences, news, reviews, products, web links and much more. It is updated frequently and offers readers the opportunity to reply to opinions and link to their own blogs.
- Technotati tracks over 112 million blogs
- Blogs 120,000 Blogs created per day
- 39% of Internet Users (57 million American Adults) report reading Blogs
BUT
Most Blogs are “personal” Blogs; content will range from a new restaurant in town to parenting to sports.
SOCIAL NETWORKS
Social Networks are the tools which help to build communities of people who share interests and activities or 
who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. These networks provide various ways for the users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.
Various social networking websites are being used by millions of people everyday on a regular basis and it now seems that social networking is a part of everyday life.
The various social network popular today are MySpace and Facebook being the most widely used in North America, Bebo, MySpace, Skyblog , Facebook and Hi5 in parts of Europe, Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America, Friendster, Orkut and CyWorld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and LiveJournal in Russia.
CONTENT COMMUNITIES
Bookmarking and Tagging
According to wikipedia
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains.
According to wikipedia
A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (like picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information it is applied to.
There are 2 types of Tags
1) Tags that you create on your own blogs. You will ping your blogs for these
tags to be picked up.
2) Tags that you create on Social Bookmarking sites. You will Tag your site on
these Social Bookmarking sites with a link back to your site.
Some important points of Bookmarking/Tagging
Users want to mark, store, organize and retrieve content
28% of Adult Internet Users have tagged content online
7% say they do it DAILY
Under 40, high income and education levels
38% have broadband
Tagging is getting easier: GMail users can tag email content; Amazon users can tag books, etc.
Flickr: Massive, self organizing community of photo lovers
Produce all content
Classify it
Build and share new applications for community members
- Digg is common example for Web content, skews heavily male (94%)
Community “decides” what is most important content on Web
VERY suspicious/unwelcoming to anything perceived as marketing
Video
- 54% of Adult users watch videos online
- You Tube gets more than 35 million visitors per month; average time on site is 28 min.
- Other examples:
· MetaCafe
· Google Video
· My Space
CONSUMER REVIEWS
- Consumers trust the opinions of others more than any other source of information
- Epinions heavily populated by 25 – 54 demo
- Other examples:
• TripAdvisor
• Yahoo Local
Wikis
A wiki is software that allows users to easily create, edit, and link pages together. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. These wiki websites are often also referred to as wikis.
Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. Thus, while wikis are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages.
- Community edited content
- Wikipedia most popular; branching into new areas:
WikiNews
WikiUniversity
- Other examples:
Democratic Underground
Wikihow
Discussion Forums
It is one of the “early” examples of using the internet as a way to share, they are used for the discussion and to get to know other people views
- Almost all SM destinations include a mechanism for discussion
- Examples:
Yahoo Groups
Google Groups
Eurekster
What can we do with social media
- One of the best use of social media is for marketing and it could also be used for a much wider scope such as advertising, doing online PR etc.
- It could also help in Product Creation and Innovation
- Social media is a powerful tool for Internal Communications, Employee Innovation and much more.
- Could be used for R & D purpose example Innovectra
- Social Media also helps in Research work for eg Opinion Mining
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Creating and distributing editable content/tools that will resonate with SM users, participating in online communities
- Currently a broad spectrum of activity, including tactics that are not much more than conventional advertising/marketing/PR
- Developing a high ROI social media strategy requires much more than what is currently understood as SMM
Social Media Strategy
In fast IT age the social media strategy does No more follow the conventional marketing and advertising concept nor the public relations procedure , however it include:
- Social Media Optimization
The process of refining a site so that its awareness, content are easily spread through social mediums and online communities
- Social Media Outreach
Actively engaging and contributing in communities
- Non marketing applications
So now some details about the SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION
“Social Media Optimization (SMO) tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren’t the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it’s not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.”
Social Media Optimization: A set of tactics to get more attention and exposure for your events’ web site in social media including web wide blogs, forums, and social bookmarking sites.
The more mentions of your event > the more attendance you can build > the greater the buzz for your show!
According to Hans Peter Brondmo of
Some Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)
For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings. While we all believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.
Mentioned below are some of the rules of Social Media Optimization which would be helpful in better understanding of this medium.
- Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are "static" - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
In summary, Think blogs, content, aggregation & linkbait.
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
In summary, Include calls to action for users to tag, bookmark and Digg your stuff. Sociable Plugin is also suggested if you have a Wordpress powered blog.
- Reward inbound links - Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.
In summary, List blogs which link back to you via permalinks, trackbacks or recently linking blogs (like the Yahoo & Google blogs do).
- Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
In summary, Content diversification can lead to mobility of your content beyond the browser.
- Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.
In summary, Let others use your content or tools to produce something a bit different or outside of the box with your stuff, even RSS.
- Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
Add value to users, including outbound links to areas that could help them with their goals and purposes. Deployed corrected, even if you link to competitiors you stand to gain as the communities first source of information finding. How will this help SMO? Folks will link to your social site and tag is as helpful or the ‘ultimate’ guide in that space. As this adds up, it will become more and more relevent in search engine results.
In summary, Add value and outbound links, even if it doesn’t help in the short term, it will in the long.
- Reward helpful and valuable users
Often helpful or popular users will be influencers and champions within your social site, devise ways to elevate them buy promoting their works on the homepage, or develope a rating system. Sometimes a quick email or note in private telling them you appreciate them can go a long way. Some folks have done that to me, and for communities I run, I do that as well. Only do if sincere. Perhaps this is not truly SMO, but it will help to keep the most valuable members of a community closer to your site.
In summary, Give your contributors and readers the recognition they deserve.
- Participate - Join the conversation. Social Media is a two way street, lets not forget that. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. You are keeping it going and this often results in a snowball effect. Participating helps your message spread further and faster.
In summary, Get in there and get involved in the discussions going on among the blogs and sites of others, and do it organically. Earn your rep on Digg.com, don’t try and force it.
- Know how to target your audience - If you don't even know your target audience you are in trouble. I would love to have everyone using my product too, but you need to be realistic. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can't. So know your appeal and who it is appealing to.
In summary, Understand your appeal and those people you wish to attract.
- Create content - There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will work. Whether it is creating widgets, making people laugh, or writing a whitepaper, it can be done. Know what type of content can work for you and create it.
In summary, A little bit of rules 1 & 4 here, but the underlying message is know the form of content working for you.
- Be real - The community does not reward fakers.
- Don’t forget your roots, be humble- Sometimes it can be easy to get carried away being a BlogStar or industry talking head. Remember those who helped you along the way, and that respect will help all involved.
- Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh: Social Media is changing and morphing by the minute, keep up on new tools, products and challenges in your social sphere.
- Develop a SMO strategy - define your objectives and set goals. Be fully aware of what your desired outcome is as a result of performing these tactics. Reputation, sales, influence, credibility, charity, traffic/page views, etc.
- Choose your SMO tactics wisely - Be cognizant of what actions will influence the desired outcome with the most impact.
- Make SMO part of your process and best practices - As with good SEO, SMO tactics should become part of your organization’s best practices. Find ways to incorporate SMO tactics at the “template” level of document creation and as part of information distribution. Minor things like encouraging social bookmarks and rewarding incoming links as a standard practice across the organization can go a long way.
These are some of the details of Social Media and its optimization i was able to read from various sources and hope that it would be of some help to the people looking for information about social media. Please fell free to post your comment and help me too to increase my knowledge.
