Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?

Lately, when people hear the term social media, they tend to think of the fairly new developments of sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but in reality, social media has been around as long as we have been social and have used media. Letters to the editor in traditional print newspapers are an example of social media.

Online social media, in turn, has been around as long as we’ve been online. Before what we now know as the World Wide Web, people were connecting all over the world via bulletin board systems (BBS) and later in chat rooms on platforms such as Prodigy and CompuServe. Today, even multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft are social media—they are yet another way that people connect online. Online social media, as defined for the purposes of this book, includes:

• Discussion sites: These sites include general and topic-specific message boards.
• Content-sharing sites: These include any sites that enable users to share what they’ve created with one another, such as photo-sharing sites (such as Flickr), blogging platforms (such as Blogger and WordPress), and microblogging platforms (such as Twitter). For the purpose of this book, social bookmarking sites, such as Delicious and Digg fit into this category as well.
• Social networking sites: These include places that exist specifically to facilitate connections between people. For instance, Facebook began as a way for college students to stay in touch and now enables friends, families, and colleagues ...