Social Media, the latest buzz phrase in marketing. It’s really about old fashioned word of mouth networking. Produce a good product, sell it for a fair price, get the word out and people will come.
Wikipedia defines social media as the following:
Social media are participatory online media where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are made public via social media websites through submission. Normally accompanied with a voting process to make media items become “popular”.
Social media expanded definition: Social media democratize information, transforming people from content readers into content publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many- to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people, and peers.
Social media use the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards,weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies such as blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs , wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, group creation and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google (reference, social networking),Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), and Flickr (photo sharing).
Here’s a good blog on the subject:
http://social-media-optimization.com/
Another good blog related to technology and social marketing
http://www.techipedia.com/2007/internet-marketing-best-blog-posts/
