Basics of Social Media – Lesson One: What is Social Media?

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, 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.

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Friendster (social networking), Bebo (social networking), LinkedIn (professional networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging), and Plurk (social networking and microblogging). Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.

How does it differ from traditional media?
Social media has a number of characteristics that make it fundamentally different from traditional media such as newspapers, television, books, and radio. Primarily, social media depends on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words builds shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit. Let me rephrase that: traditional media is one-way conduit for information, while social media is an interactive two-way conversation. This is a key difference. The blogosphere will eat you alive if you don’t understand or ignore this fact.

Why is it important to us as wine marketers?
It’s simple: the global reach of social media websites is immense, reaching millions of users every day. According to Technorati, a blog tracking website, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second. More than 100 million videos are watched on YouTube every day. MySpace has 110,000,000 active users and Facebook has 80,000,000 active users. Traffic to Wikipedia is on the magnitude of 7,000,000,000 page views per month. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia are among the top ten most popular sites on the internet. Simply put: social media has the potential to influence millions of people. That is a lot of potential for wine sales.

UPDATE (8/16/08): According to Business Week Magazine, Facebook is now the most visited site on the web with 132,000,000 users.

How do we approach social media?
The most successful companies will follow a philosophy of honesty, integrity, and full disclosure. Don’t think of this as getting up on a soap box and spewing the company line. It is a two-way dialogue. It is about having conversations and telling stories. This provides many opportunities to us as PR and Marketing professionals. Not only is it another avenue for us to promote our brands, but also a way of getting direct feedback from consumers and trade. In the following lessons, I will address the several sub-categories of social media and how it can benefit us and our clients.

Tags: Blogs, Microblogging, Music Sharing, Photo Sharing, Social Media, Social Networking, Video Sharing, Wikis