Social media can be best understood as a group of new kind of online media with characterestics such as participation,openess,conversation and connectedness.It provides content for users and allows users to contribute in creation and development of content also.
What is Social Media
Social Media includes web-based and mobile technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue between organizations, communities, and individuals.
Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Social media is ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable communication techniques.
According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (e.g., Wikipedia), and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), content communities (e.g., YouTube), social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.
Honeycomb Framework The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks (identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups). These building blocks help understand the engagement needs of the social media audience. For instance, LinkedIn users care mostly about identity, reputation and relationships, whereas YouTube’s primary building blocks are sharing, conversations, groups and reputation.
Social Media Examples:
·Social Bookmarking(Del.icio.us,Blinklist,Simpy) Interact by tagging websites and searching
through websites bookmarked by other people.
·Social News(Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.
·Social Networking(Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM) Interact by adding friends, commenting on profiles, joining groups and having discussions.
·Social Photo and Video Sharing. (YouTube, Flickr) Interact by sharing photos or videos and commenting on user submissions.