Social Media Defined

My friends at People First of Nevada reminded me last week during our webinar, ?Social Media for Grassroots Advocacy?, that not everybody is familiar with all of the social media tools that are available today. I was describing the ?Social Media Landscape? illustrated in the great infographic from FredCavazza.net when the questions starting coming?Can you please define a blog/microblog? What?s a podcast? Livecasting?

So, for those of you who may also be wondering, I?ve compile the definitions of some of the main types of social media. Here you go:

Social Networking Site

According to pcmag.com, a social networking site is a website that provides a virtual community for people to share their daily activities with family and friends, or to share their interest in a particular topic, or to increase their circle of acquaintances. There are dating sites, friendship sites, sites with a business purpose and hybrids that offer a combination of these. Facebook is the leading personal site, and LinkedIn is the leading business site. Globally, hundreds of millions of people have joined one or more social sites.

Members create their own online ?profile? with biographical data, pictures and any other information they choose to post. They communicate with each other by making their latest thoughts public in a blog-like format or via e-mail, instant messaging, voice or videoconferencing to selected members. The service lets members find and invite other members into their personal network (to ?friend? them) as well as invite friends of friends. A photo sharing capability may also be provided.

Blog/Microblog

In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write about anything you want on an ongoing basis. (You are reading on right now!!) New posts show up at the top, so your visitors can read what?s new. Then they comment on it, link to it, email you, or not. ?A blog can be a personal diary or a daily pulpit. It can be a collaborative space, a political soapbox, or a breaking-news outlet with a collection of links. A blog contains your own private thoughts and memos to the world. Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.

A microblog on the other hand, according to pcmag.com, is a blog that contains brief entries about the daily activities of an individual or company. Created to keep friends, colleagues and customers up-to-date, small images may be included as well as brief audio and video clips. The most popular microblog is Twitter.

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Podcast

Chappy Sinclair from Demand Media defines a podcast as a series of audio or video files that are distributed over the Internet. Podcasts are usually episodic and specialize on a specific topic. Podcasts are intended to be entertaining or helpful and are usually no longer than one hour.

Streaming

Sam Costello with About.com Guide says on the Internet, there are two ways to listen to or watch audio and video files. The first way is to download the file to your computer and watch the file after it resides there. The other way to do it is to start a progressive download of the file, where the file isn?t downloaded to your computer in a lasting way. This is called streaming.

For instance, if you listen to a radio station online, you will stream the music, since you?re listening live and couldn?t download all the songs that they play. Instead, your computer connects to the radio station and receives an ongoing audio feed, or stream, with the radio station?s programming.

When you stream a file, you will get to listen to or watch it, but won?t have the file on your computer to do things with later. Some websites offer streaming as a way to make their content available, but not let people have it without buying it.

Livecasting

According to technicavita.org, by definition livecasting refers to any kind of audio or visual sharing that is done over the internet.?Skype?is probably the number one recognized platform for multimedia livecasting which enables users to have a life voice conversation utilizing voice over IP technology (VOIP) or projecting live video and audio streams in real time. Web cameras and teleconferencing by this method has become a preferred method of communication for businesses and has increasingly become daily use technology for the mainstream technology user.

What social media tools do you use? What do you want to use? What?s working and what?s not working? Let me know by leaving your comments below!

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