SOHO Solo West Cork

Dave November 11th, 2008

An overview of on line Social Media

Our first social network is the people we grow up with, if we are lucky, our family. As we move through our life we meet develop new relationships. They may include people we are in education with and people we work with. We may meet people who have shared interests. These are all social networks.

Most people realise that the Internet has given us a whole new set of tools for getting in touch with people. They are sometimes a little daunting, but if you look at them as different tools for doing different jobs you can start to see them as just useful for you… or not. They all attempt to make the job of connecting to our new and existing social networks easier.

Traditional communication media like newspapers, television and radio are variously predicted to be dying and do appear to be struggling. Many people see the increase of people who write and express themselves without the encumbrances of traditional media infrastructures as a new way of disseminating information and news.

In Ireland a massive proportion of young people are on Bebo. Many parents have no idea what Bebo is. I think they should find out. I don’t mean to be alarmist, and I believe Bebo is not a bad thing at all. It’s just all of us need to be aware of what it is.

Social Media can be:

• just be about using emails to keep in touch with Aunty Fi in the Blue Mountains.
• Small businesses can use social media. (and of course large businesses can too but we won’t worry about them here!)
• People can use social media to campaign for something they believe in.
• A local community could use social media to promote their area.
• Performers can (and do) use social media to promote their work be it recordings of music or their live performances.
• Kids already use social media to make friends and keep up with what’s happening.

So what is on line Social media?

Blogs, Twitter, Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, email, Podcasts, Forums, mailing lists, Linkedin are all social media. If you can ‘take part in the discussion’ you can probably call it social media.

You may or may not have heard of any of these so I’ll try and give a quick run down and define what (and who) each is for:

Starting at the light weight end.

• Twitter:
  Twitter allows you to post 140 characters either publicly or privately. Variously described as texting on-line or microblogging. You can send links to web pages or to photos or your favorite music track. A myriad of services have sprung up in the short time twitter has been running. Ephemeral, disposable and can be useful. Follow me on Twitter! Very easy to sign up, you just need an email account. Free.
• Emails:
  You probably know about these! Rather formal and somehow seem to encourage people to send you large attachments you can’t or don’t want to open. Weapon of choice for splatter gun advertising.
• Texting:
  Have you missed this? 140 Character long unintelligible messages your teenage children send millions of every week (probably at your expense!)
• Tagging:
  A group of services that let you share web site addresses that you think notable. You can add your own comments. Delicious, StumbleUpon etc
• 
• Blogging:
  You get to publish your own newspaper. organise your thoughts and ideas chronologically or by subject matter. You can set up your own for free on Blogger or Wordpress.com (and others) or get your own unbranded blog set up for a more professional look.
• Podcasts
  You get to run your own radio station (or even TV station).
• Networking Sites
  There’s Facebook, Bebo, hi5, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon and YouTube, just to name a few.These are commercial sites that allow you to post your ‘profile’ on-line and allow access to varying degrees to other people. They tend to not connect with other services.Each target particular sectors: LinkedIn for professionals, Bebo for young teens, MySpace for late teens/young adult etc.Some are targeted around particular interests like Flickr for photo sharing and Friendsreunited a mostly UK based site for linking up with old school friends and of course a myriad of dating sites.

  (The ‘catch’ is that all the information and time you invest to the site is stuck there. All the connections you build up over time cannot be extracted and bar closing your account it is hard to move on to another service.

• Independent News media:
  For the inner journalist in you. Post articles on-line for anyone to read, copy and republish. usually with the proviso that they link back and credit your authorship.
• Forums:
  Often attached to websites that offer some kind of goods of service but occasionally just organised around a cause of common interest.
• Wikki’s
  The most famous has to be Wikipedia. These are web pages that have an edit tab at the top and usually allow anyone to freely change the content of the pages or add new pages.The ultimate ‘read/write’ web and most people are amazed they work at all but you only have to look at Wikipedia to see they do.Thousands of volenteers write, edit and monitor millions of pages.
• Newsfeeds:
  I have included newsfeeds for completeness because they are part of my daily reading and they fit with many of the other services.

• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the language that web sites, blog, twitter and many publishing ‘platforms’ can publish a stream of their latest articles or ‘postings’. You can gather these ’streams’ together in one place in your ‘Feed Reader’ (or agregator if you want to get technical) like Google Reader or Bloglines  and then scan through hundreds of headlines at your leisure. Think of it like making your own newspaper to read on-line out of what ever you choose to include. Fresh news every minute of every day.

I’ve grouped all these networks in my own particular way and there are many services I’ve missed out.

Like the internet itself people have lots of ideas about what Social Media are and are not and how they can make use of them for their own use:

• Businesses see a marketing opportunity to target users as they tend to segment themselves into special interest groups.
• Educationalist see a way to teach in an interactive way using feedback and and student interaction as a distributed education tool.
• People in their personal life see a chance to catch up on old friends and keep in touch with faimily.

However you look at social media it is a useful set of tools if you learn how to use them.

The downside of all this avalanche of on-line information is you may well feel overwhelmed. Take it slow and sign up for a few of the services I have mentioned above and test the water. You can spend some time just listening in (Lurking) until you get the idea of how each service works. Usually you then introduce yourself to the community and join in.

The dangers of being online tend to be sensationalised but you should take care as you would with any contact with people you don’t know. Don’t give out too much detail on-line. See stay safe online and others if you are nervous about this.

Take heart! Armed with this mini guide to what they’re all about you will be able to tame your own torrent of information and even take the plunge to make yourself heard with a louder shout.

• For my reference; I often consult Wikipedia. On-line I read many blogs via my feed reader. You can see my feeds here and I participate in the twitter stream.  Thanks to Cork company Louder Voice for inspiring the title.
• Dave Spathaky is a social media recluse living in rural isolation near the sea in West West Cork.

A big thanks to Dave for contributing this post – what do you think about social media, how it applies to your business and to life in general? Let us know in the comments – and don’t forget, if you’re a SOHO Solo member you can contribute your own posts right here on the SOHO Solo West Cork blog…. CJ

Tags: bebo, introduction, linkedin, overview, social networks, Twitter

• Blogging , Networking , Social Media , Twitter , Web , internet
• Comments(1)