The Blog Improvement Project is a year-long series of events to help those of us who are intrepid enough to improve on what we have created.
Event #5 calls on us to enter the “social media” world. A long time ago I learned an important lesson: never assume your audience knows what you are talking about. In the case of social media I was very fuzzy. What I have learned is that it does not mean going up to the clubhouse for happy hour.
What it looks like to me is a whole new world that’s been created with technology that allows people to visit/socialize with each other in a new way. This new way of communicating is done via computers, laptops, a blackberry, cell phone and who knows what other devices still in the developmental stage.
It’s a way to “talk” to friends, make new friends with similar interests, learn something new, join a clubs, share photos or videos or music or art.
Various organizations have created software that make all of this social media happen. You have probably heard of some of them. Right now you are reading a blog. That’s one. There is also Twitter, a mini-blog. Perhaps you are reading lots of blogs and you want to keep track of the ones you like best. You could “bookmark” them with Delicious or StumbleUpon or GoogleReader.
Suppose you want to look at videos or share some of your own. You would go to YouTube. For photos, you would go to Flickr or SmugMug. Music sharing? Go to Last.fm. How about art? Go to deviantART.
Want to connect with specific friends or old classmates? Go to Facebook or MySpace. Want to create a group of collegues or associates – a social network? Try Ning.
Look back at all the words I underlined. Those are examples of social media. I’ve left out a few, not to mention the ones just created yesterday. This is a very simple explanation and I hope I didn’t insult your intelligence, but I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t understand all this. Now the next question is how do I make use of all this stuff? I don’t know. That’s assignment #6. But I am going to try out some of these “social media” and I’ll let you know how it goes. Stay tuned.
This is a good post, I didn’t even really think that people might not know what some different social media are or what they do. Thanks!
Wow. I didn’t realize that YouTube was considered “social media”. I’m a little more behind than I thought!
I like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and I absolutely love my blog. I’m just starting to learn about Stumble Upon.
There’s a lot more that I have to learn. Thanks for helping me with some of it!
Yeah I didn’t realize YouTube was social media till these past two weeks either. Thanks for writing a great post.