Social media chapter three from the Book Going Mobile: Going Social

Social Media: The Revolution Will Be Socialized by Andrew Pearson

Overview Although it is one of today’s buzzwords, “Social Media” is a generic term that refers to websites that allow one or more of the following services: social networking, content management, social bookmarking, blogging and micro-­‐blogging, live video-­‐casting and access into virtual worlds. Social Media—the technology as we know it today—has its roots in Usenet, a worldwide discussion system that allowed users to post public messages to it (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 60, 2010).

Usenet was created by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis at Duke University in 1979 (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 60, 2010) and it is still in use today. According to its website, Usenet is “a world-­‐wide distributed discussion system. It consists of a set of ‘newsgroups’ with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. ‘Articles’ or ‘messages’ are ‘posted’ to these newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software—these articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks.”[1] Obviously, 1979 was a long time ago, it was long before what most people would consider the true era of social media, which began with the creation of “Open Diary”, an early social networking site that brought online diary writers together into one community” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 60, 2010).

In their influential article Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media, Kaplan and Haenlein (pg. 60, 2010) explain that a formal definition of social media first requires an understanding of two related concepts that are often referred to when describing it: Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. As Kaplan and Haenlein (pg. 60, 2010) see it: Web 2.0 is a term that was first used in 2004 to describe a new way in which software developers and end-­‐users started to utilize the World Wide Web; that is, as a platform whereby content and applications are no longer created and published by individuals, but instead are continuously modified by all users in a participatory and collaborative fashion. While applications such as personal web pages, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, and the idea of content publishing belong to the era of Web 1.0, they are replaced by blogs, wikis, and collaborative projects in Web 2.0. Although Web 2.0 does not refer to any specific technical update of the World Wide Web, there is a set of basic functionalities that are necessary for its functioning.

The “basic functionalities” that Kaplan and Haenlein (pg. 61, 2010) refer to are; Adobe Flash, the popular animation tool, interactivity, and web streaming audio/video program, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries or news headlines, as well as audio and video—in a standardized format; and Asynchronous Java Scrip (AJAX), a group of web development methods that can retrieve data from web servers

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asynchronously, allowing the update of one source of web content without interfering with the display and behavior an entire page.

For Kaplan and Haenlein (pg. 61, 2010), Web 2.0 represents the ideological and technological foundation, while “User Generated Content (UGC) can be seen as the sum of all the ways in which people make use of social media. The term, which achieved broad popularity in 2005, is usually applied to describe the various forms of media content that are publicly available and created by end-­‐users.”

The Four Steps of Social Media When a company is first delving into social media, Eley & Tiley's (pg. 85, 2009) state that there are four steps of social media that should be followed—listen, join, participate and create—and these steps must be strictly followed in that order.

Listening is the most important step. People online are frequently mentioning and commenting on a company and its products, so all you have to do is listen. Even if you do not choose to participate in the discussion yourself, you will discover valuable information about your company or even about yourself if you are an artist (Eley & Tilley, pg. 86, 2009). Instead of doing expensive surveys, focus groups or other experiments, the best information is often found right there in front of you for free (Eley & Tilley, pg. 86, 2009). You will find out what your customers think of you and what they are looking for as well as the problems and frustrations they have about dealing with you and/or your business. Most importantly, you will get the inside scoop of what is actually important to your target audience (Eley & Tilley, pg. 86, 2009), whether that audience is a retailer’s customer base, a band’s rabid fans, an airline’s frequent flyer members or one of a million other business users.

Listening can be useful in the following ways: • • • • •

Monitor for buying indication terms and reply with helpful links (Nelson, 2013).

Listen for recommendation requests and share helpful links (Nelson, 2013).

Listen for discussions of your product or category and provide web links (Nelson, 2013).

Share relevant web content with prospects (Nelson, 2013).

Discover relevant blogs and ask for backlinks (Nelson, 2013).

Once you understand the community and what it is all about, it is time to join a social network.

Many networks require that you have an account on their site to participate in the discussions and you should sign up as it is always better to have an account even if you are not required to have one because you always want to claim your brand and/or company name to gain credibility.

You should always join communities where you are most likely to find your customers (Eley & Tilley, pg. 86, 2009). If you start out by listening, you will know where your customers tend to congregate online. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Digg and Twitter are big networks which should be on your radar (Eley & Tilley, pg. 87, 2009). I mention many, many other Social Media sites throughout this chapter and the companion website to this article–www.social-­‐media-­‐ encyclopedia.com—also includes a searchable database of over 600 social media websites that I constantly update. Many of these sites can be used to listen to your audience or to start a discussion.

Many are niche websites where business can discover very selective audiences.

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Businesses should set up accounts at all the major social networking sites and link back to their website(s) (Nelson, 2013) as well as link content and similar keywords throughout their social channels (Nelson, 2013).

Once the discussion has been initiated, then it is time to participate in the community.

Participating includes replying and posting to online forums and blogs, reviewing products and services and bookmarking sites that you like or find interesting (Eley & Tilley, pg. 88, 2009). By participating, you will build your online brand and people will start to respect you as a valuable contributor to the community (Eley & Tilley, pg. 88, 2009). When respected, others will help to promote you and, possibly, your company without even being asked to do so, which, as most marketers will tell you, is one of the best forms of marketing around. Not only is word-­‐of-­‐mouth marketing one of the most trusted forms of marketing around, but it can help spread the word about a brand virally. Two words of warning, however; your role models should always be very experienced and remain very active users in the community; and, most of all, remember that it is never okay to spam (Eley & Tilley, pg. 88, 2009).

Participation can be fostered in the following ways: • • • • • • • • •

Ask readers to sign up for an RSS feed (Nelson, 2013).

Answer all questions and share peer referrals (Nelson, 2013).

Feature community members on your site (Nelson, 2013).

Share customer stories (Nelson, 2013).

Ask influencers to share your web links (Nelson, 2013).

Interview an influencer for web content (Nelson, 2013).

Have an influencer guest blog (Nelson, 2013).

Help an influencer write content about your brand (Nelson, 2013).

Share products with influencers for feedback and web content (Nelson, 2013).

Finally, it is time to create. Once you have built yourself an online brand by listening, joining and participating, it is time to create your own content (Eley & Tilley, pg. 89, 2009). You will now have an audience to share your content with and this audience will help you spread your content far and wide. It should be noted that you have to create value; ads are not generally seen as valuable (Eley & Tilley, pg.

89, 2009). Posting “buy my stuff” on twitter will fail to achieve the results you want, and this practice may even get you banned (Eley & Tilley, pg. 89, 2009). By making beneficial contributions to the community, people will notice you and want to know more about your company (Eley & Tilley, pg. 89, 2009). If you have listened properly, you should have a solid idea of the type of content people would like to see (Eley & Tilley, pg. 89, 2009). Then, simply, give it to them. You can be creative in the following ways: • • • • •

Divide a piece of content into multiple Slideshare presentations that link to your site (Nelson, 2013).

Start a LinkedIn group (Nelson, 2013).

Tie content together so an ebook links to a relevant blog post, which, in turn, links to a topical webinar (Nelson, 2013).

Build a forum or community section on your website (Nelson, 2013).

Create referral programs (Nelson, 2013).

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Six Types of Social Media According to their influential article Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) break Social Media down into the following six different types: • • • • • •

Collaborative projects Blogs and micro-­‐blogs Content communities Social networking sites Virtual game worlds Virtual social worlds

Throughout the rest of this chapter, I will break down each of these types of social media individually as well as explain how a business and/or an individual can use them on their own or, preferably, combined together.

Collaborative Projects Probably the most democratic form of all UGC, collaborative projects enable the joint and simultaneous creation of content by many end-­‐users (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 62, 2010). Kaplan and Haenlein (pg. 62, 2010) believe collaborative projects can be split into two different categories: • •

Wikis–these are websites that allow users to add, remove, and change text-­‐based content; and Social bookmarking applications—these enable the group-­‐based collection and rating of Internet links or media content.

The main idea behind collaborative projects is that joint efforts can lead to a better outcome than individual action (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 62, 2010). Examples of collaborative projects include the web-­‐based encyclopedia Wikipedia and social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Stumbleupon.

Social bookmarking is both the method of storing and managing Web page bookmarks with individually chosen keywords as well as the sharing of this information with others. At social bookmarking sites, users can tag, save, manage and share Websites with their friends and their connections. Users can add descriptions in the form of metadata and these descriptions can be anything from free text comments, favorable or unfavorable votes, or tags that collectively form a social thread of information. This kind of thread is also known as a folksonomy—“the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content” (Golder and Huberman, 2006).

In his article How to Use Social Bookmarking for Business, Lou Dubois (2010) explains that “Social bookmarking, at its most basic form, is a simple way to organize all of the best content from around the web based off your interests, all in one place.” It is a handy way to “sort the relevant from the irrelevant, according to their interests and the value of the information provided. And perhaps most importantly, the bookmarks are transferable between computers and locations” (Dubois, 2010).

Founded in 2003, Delicious (then known as del.icio.us) coined the term social bookmarking and pioneered the concept of tagging (Mathes, 2004). The following year, similar sites such as Furl, Simpy,

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Citeulike and Connotea came online. Stumbleupon also appeared around the same time. There are now countless other sites and I have included a list of over 40 of the most popular ones later in this chapter.

Why are these sites so important and powerful? Well, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki argues that the collective opinion of a large, diverse and independent group of people produces more accurate information than the judgment of a single expert. According to Surowiecki (2004), groups can excel even when individuals fail. “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

Using the highly successful search engine Google as an example, Surowiecki (2004) shows that Google's underlying technology is based on the wisdom of the crowd and that the system works so well because it uses the collective voice—or votes—of millions of people to deliver its search results (Surowiecki, 2004). Few would argue that they are incredibly accurate and have made Google the go-­‐to search Internet destination.

To augment his somewhat counter-­‐intuitive argument, Surowiecki states that for a crowd opinion to be considered wiser than the judgment of an expert, three requirements must be in place; the crowd must be diverse; the crowd members must be independent; and the crowd must be decentralized (Surowiecki, 2004). Because of the vast, decentralized and independent nature of the Internet, Kaplan and Haenlein's (2010) “collaborative projects” easily fulfill all three of Surowiecki's requirements (Surowiecki, 2004).

Compared to search engines and traditional automated resource location and classification software, social bookmarking systems are advantageous because the tag-­‐based classification is done by a human being, who usually understands the content and context of a resource better than any algorithm-­‐based computer program. Human beings are also adept at finding and bookmarking Web pages that often go unnoticed by web spiders (Heymann, Koutrika, Garcia-­‐Molina, 2008). In addition, a user will probably find a system that ranks a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by other users more valuable than a system that simply ranks resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

For the promotion of a business, social bookmarking is important because it helps a compnay Website get quality backlinks. When a Website is submitted for ranking by a search engine, the search engine considers the quality of the backlinks, i.e., the quality of the sites linking back to it. This means that if you bookmark popular sites, the search engine spiders will automatically follow the links back to your site.

Kaplan and Haenlein (pg. 62, 2010) argue that, “From a corporate perspective, firms must be aware that collaborative projects are trending toward becoming the main source of information for many consumers. As such, although not everything written on Wikipedia may actually be true, it is believed to be true by more and more Internet users.” This can have particularly damaging repercussions during a corporate crisis (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 62, 2010).

Collaborative projects can also be used to increase productivity, for example, the Finnish mobile manufacturer Nokia “uses internal wikis to update employees on project status and to trade ideas, which are used by about 20% of its 68,000 staff members” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010). Also, the

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U.S. application software company Adobe Systems “maintains a list of bookmarks to company-­‐related websites and conversations on Delicious” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010).

Dubois (2010) explains that “From an individual consumption perspective for Internet readers, social bookmarking can make great sense to filter your news and information all into one place.” But it also makes great sense for businesses to utilize these tools as they can increase Website traffic and grow brand recognition by curating information and disseminating client testimonials (Dubois, 2010).

Throughout the business world, content curators are “considered the gatekeepers to information for businesses and individuals. As a company, curating, or aggregating the best content from around the web, can make you an industry leader” (Dubois, 2010). For companies you already work with, showing that you are on top of industry news gives you a vaunted level of credibility (Dubois, 2010). “Similarly, if you think of it from the perspective of businesses who you don't already do business with, you're going to be seen as a resource for information” (Dubois, 2010), which should give you an immediate leg up on your competition.

Another way to utilize these tools is by pulling together all of your company’s best customer testimonials in a social bookmark. Just about every business gets questions about its client list and testimonials from its potential business partners. When asked the question: "What have others said about your work?", wouldn’t it be better to direct potential clients to a site that has all of the company’s testimonials in one place, in a simple format rather than sending them to a Yelp page, argues Dubois (2010).

Dubois (2010) explains that, "For individual projects and campaigns, the creation of folders and tags within social bookmarking sites can make it very easy to track success. If you've recently launched a campaign and want to see what stories, blog posts, Twitter notes and more have been written about it, you can very easily refer to your social bookmarks, where again all of the information is gathered in one place". Dubois (2010) recommends the following steps: • • • • •

Create accounts on the sites you want to be on. Fill out a complete profile about you and your company and add a link back to your webpage.

Add the social bookmarking tools and buttons to your website and/or blog so users can utilize them within your community.

Create lists and categories to arrange specific information in neat, searchable silos.

Submit URL links to the bookmarking site and write reviews, rate other stories, etc., etc.

Network with other community members who share similar interests.

Social bookmarking isn’t as intuitive a process as blogging or social networking on sites like Facebook or Twitter, but it is a very valuable tool in its own right and it should be one part of a social media marketing plan.

List of Collaborative Projects Websites As the Collaborative Projects landscape changes on a daily basis, it is impossible to list all of the available Websites, but these are some of the most common and popular platforms I have found: NAME A1 Webmarks

ABOUT A1-­‐Webmarks is a free service that combines the convenience of a personal webmark server with the power of social

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WEBSITE a1-­‐webmarks.com

Blinklist

Blurpalicious Bookmarky Delicious Digg

Diigo

Folkd

Google Bookmarks

Gravee

ikeepbookmarks Jeteye

Jumptags

webmarking.

BlinkList is a powerful productivity tool that makes is much blinklist.com easier for anyone to share and save their links for later. With BlinkList you can save a local copy of any web page on your computer. We give you a website so that you can easily access all of the links that you saved from any computer.

Social bookmarking made simple. blurpalicious.com The hottest tags and bookmarks in one easy serving. bookmarky.com Keep, share, and discover the best of the Web using Delicious, delicious.com the world's leading social bookmarking service.

Digg delivers the most interesting and talked about stories on digg.com the Internet right now. The Internet is full of great stories, and Digg helps you find, read, and share the very best ones. It’s simple and it’s everywhere: visit Digg on the web, find it on your iPhone, or get the best of Digg delivered to your inbox with The Daily Digg.

If you browse or read a lot on the web, we believe you will find diigo.com Diigo indispensable. Diigo is two services in one -­‐-­‐ it is a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-­‐sharing community and social content site on the other.

Using social bookmarks with folkd.com will enrich your web-­‐ folkd.com surfing experience. We provide a simple website and easy to use browser buttons which allow you to: Save your favourite links and bookmarks online and access them from anywhere at any time.

Save time with quick links to your favorite websites. Use google.com/bookmarks Google’s Web History to find the sites you visit frequently and bookmark your favorites. Use the Google Toolbar for quick access to your bookmarks and to easily create more. Get your bookmarks on any computer. No matter where you may be surfing the web, your bookmarks can stay with you just by signing in. Keep your bookmarks organized. Add searchable labels and notes to your bookmarks to find them easily and keep them organized.

Gravee takes three of the most useful applications on the Web gravee.com and combines them together in one experience – search, recommendations, and social networking & sharing. This creates a rich social search and recommendation engine that personalizes results based on your interests, as well as those of your friends (and other people like you whom you don't even know). iKeepBookmarks.com allows you to upload, and keep, your ikeepbookmarks.com bookmarks on the web for free. You can access them at any time, from any computer... anywhere!

Jeteye was created to address the difficulty of keeping track of jeteye.com good information and resources that you find online. The Jeteye community is a public library where people can freely use Jeteye tools to create and share Jetpaks™.

Jumptags.com is a revolutionary Web 2.0 social bookmarking jumptags.com web service for collecting, storing, sharing and distributing web bookmarks, notes, rss feeds, contacts, and much more. Based

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Linkroll Linksgutter Mister Wong Mylinkvault Netvouz

Oyax

Plime Reddit

Squidoo

Startaid

Stumbleupon

Trendhunter

Vi.sualize.us

on AJAX and other next generation web development techniques, Jumptags.com offers the easiest, fastest, most intuitive and productive way of maintaining and collaborating bookmarks and other internet resources online.

Linkroll is a free link blogging service. At a personal level you can bookmark, categorize and comment on all the great web pages/links you find.

A complete free social bookmarking site.

Mister Wong is a leading social bookmarking service with over 1 million users globally. online links made easy -­‐ store your links online.

Netvouz is a social bookmarking service that allows you to save your favorite links online and access them from any computer, wherever you are. Organize your bookmarks in folders and tag each bookmark with keywords.

Oyax is a social bookmark manager. It allows you to add web sites to your personal collection of links, categorize those sites with tags and share your collection not only with your own browsers and machine, but also with other people.

Plime is an editable wiki community where users can add and edit weird and interesting links.

Reddit is a social news and entertainment website where registered users submit content in the form of either a link or a text. Other users then vote the submission “up” or “down”, which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site’s pages and front page. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called “subreddits”.

Squidoo is the popular publishing platform and community that makes it easy for you to create "lenses" online. Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles that gather everything you know about your topic of interest-­‐-­‐and snap it all into focus. Like the lens of a camera, your perspective on something. (You're looking at a lens right now).

StartAid is a Social Bookmarking site. Startaid give you the ability to make a custom homepage where you can have all your Bookmarks at your fingertips. With Startaid you can you Category and/or Tag filing systems.

StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-­‐quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of over 15 million other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-­‐minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.

With 35,000,000 monthly views, TrendHunter.com is the world's largest, most popular trend community. Trend Hunter, Trend Hunter TV and Trend Hunter PRO feature 112,000 micro-­‐ trends and cutting edge ideas. Routinely sourced by the media, Trend Hunter is a source of inspiration for industry professionals, aspiring entrepreneurs and the insatiably curious.

VisualizeUs is a social bookmarking website for visual contents

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linkroll.com linksgutter.com mister-­‐wong.com mylinkvault.com netvouz.com

oyax.com

plime.worth1000.com reddit.com

squidoo.com

startaid.com

stumbleupon.com

trendhunter.com

vi.sualize.us

Xmarks

Zootool

— VisualizeUs (read visualize us) allows you to remember your favorite images from all over the web, and share them with everyone.

Xmarks was founded in 2006 under our original name Foxmarks. Our bookmark sync browser add-­‐on is one of the most popular in the world with over twenty million downloads and counting. Our products are actively used in over four million browsers and we manage over a billion bookmarks for our users.

Zootool is about collecting, organizing and sharing your favorite images, videos, documents and links from all over the internet. Driven by a passion for design, web, code and all kind of nerdery, we are working hard to build the most awesome bookmark tool for geeks like us and people who love the web.

xmarks.com

zootool.com

Chinese collaborative projects include Baidu bookmarks, QQ Bookmarks, Sina viv, Hudong, Soso baike, Baidu baiki and MBAlib.

Blogs In 2005, Merriam-­‐Webster added the word “blog” to its dictionary, calling it, “a web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.” The Website Webopedia defines a blog as, “a web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual.” The term originated from the word “weblog”, which was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997 when he used it to describe the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that “logged” his internet wanderings (Wortham, 2007).

In April or May of 1999, Peter Merholz broke the word weblog into the two words “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com (The Economist, 2006). The term “blog” was picked up by Evan Williams at Pyra Labs who used “blog” as a noun and a verb to mean “to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog” and created the term “blogger” for Pyra Labs' Blogger product, which led to the term's worldwide popularity (Baker, 2008).

Representing the earliest form of Social Media, blogs are the “Equivalent of personal web pages and can come in a multitude of different variations, from personal diaries describing the author’s life to summaries of all relevant information in one specific content area” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010).

In its article “It's the links, Stupid”, The Economist (2006) claims that a blog is: A web page to which its owner regularly adds new entries, or “posts”, which tend to be (but need not be) short and often contain hyperlinks to other blogs or websites. Besides text and hypertext, posts can also contain pictures (“photoblogs”) and video (“vlogs”). Each post is stored on its own distinct archive page, the so-­‐called “permalink”, where it can always be found.

The Economist (2006) explains that blogging is a quintessentially social activity, highlighted by two features:

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A “blogroll”, along the side of the blog page, which is a list of links to other blogs that the author recommends (not to be confused with the hyperlinks inside the posts). In practice, the blogroll is an attempt by the author to place his blog in a specific genre or group, and a reciprocal effort by a posse of bloggers to raise each other's visibility on the internet (because the number of incoming links pushes a blog higher in search-­‐engine results). The other feature is “trackback”, which notifies (“pings”) a blog about each new incoming link from the outside—a sort of gossip-­‐ meter, in short.

According to Dave Winer, the influential software engineer who pioneered several blogging techniques and has, by his own estimate, the longest running blog of all time (The Economist, 2006), weblogs should be: •

• • •

Personalized: Weblogs are designed for individual use (a multi-­‐person weblog is also possible through collaboration, such as the ‘‘team blog’’ offered by www.blogger.com). A Weblog style is personal and informal.

Web-­‐based: Weblogs can be updated frequently. They are easy to maintain and accessible via a Web browser.

Community-­‐supported: Weblogs can link to other weblogs and Websites, enabling the linkage of ideas, and hence stimulating knowledge generation and sharing between bloggers.

Automated: Blogging tools help bloggers to present their words without the hassle of writing HTML code or any other programming language; instead, bloggers can just concentrate on the content.

Winer argues that blogging should have a raw, unpolished authenticity to it (The Economist, 2006). “Blogging is all about style” and the essence of blogginess is “the unedited voice of a single person,” preferably an amateur (The Economist, 2006). For Winer, editors do not belong in the Blogosphere, even though, today, they very much do (The Economist, 2006).

Blogs are incredibly popular because they are cheap, easy to set up and they provide maximum exposure with limited effort. As Jeff Jarvis, Director of the Interactive Journalism at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism points out, they are the “easiest, cheapest, fastest publishing tool ever invented” (Wortham, 2007). Blogs are everywhere, affecting every sector of society and, because of their ease of use and low barrier to entry, they will continue to be a big part of the national and worldwide discourse (Wortham, 2007).

Technorati lists over 1,274,415 blogs, broken down into categories such as “Entertainment”, “Business”, “Sports”, “Politics”, “Autos”, “Technology”, “Living”, “Green” and “Science”, and yet this list only barely scratches the surface of the blogosphere. Blogs can take many forms, including a diary, a news service, a collection of links to Internet resources, a series of book reviews, reports of activity on a project, the journal of an expedition, a photographic record of a building project, or any one of a number of other forms.

One amusing story from Germany might explain the popularity of blogs: when Jung von Matt, a German advertising firm, came up with their “Du bist Deutschland” (“You are Germany”) advertising campaign to, as Jean-­‐Remy von Matt, the firm's Belgian boss, put it, “fight grumpiness” about the country's sluggish economy, he, unwittingly, stepped into Germany's first blogging controversy (The Economist, 2006). Not only did German bloggers find the idea kitschy, but one industrious researcher

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dug up an obscure photograph from a Nazi convention in 1935 that showed Hitler's face on a poster above a sign containing the awkwardly similar slogan “Denn Du bist Deutschland” (“Because you are Germany”) (The Economist, 2006).

The German blogosphere erupted and the advertising campaign, to put it mildly, went down in flames (The Economist, 2006). An outraged Jean-­‐Remy von Matt fired off a terse email to his colleagues claiming blogs were “the toilet walls of the Internet” and he demanded to know: “What on earth gives every computer-­‐owner the right to express his opinion, unasked for?” (The Economist, 2006).

Once von Matt's email found its way into the hands of those very same bloggers, the reply was fast, furious and so ferocious that Mr. von Matt quickly turned tail in retreat, very publicly apologizing for his misdirected rant (The Economist, 2006). As The Economist's (2006) article so succinctly points out, “Inadvertently, Mr. von Matt had put his finger on something big: that, at least in democratic societies, everybody does have the right to hold opinions, and that the urge to connect and converse with others is so basic that it might as well be added to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

By 2004, blogs had gone mainstream; Robert Scoble blogged for Microsoft, giving the oftentimes hegemonic company a human face as he conversed with customers; Matt Drudge went from convenience store clerk to one to Time Magazine's 2006 100 most influential people in the world when he blogged about the Clinton-­‐Lewinsky scandal (Time Magazine, 2006). In its piece about the fedora wearing blogger, Time Magazine (2006) claimed: “With 10 million readers daily, Drudge, 39, has paved a generous path for the blogs; without his example, semipro scribes might not have unearthed ‘Rathergate’. Of course, the price for such cyberscoops has been the coarsening of the evening news; Drudge has goaded traditional media into playing catch-­‐up on sordid stories they once safely ignored” (Time Magazine, 2006). To be successful, a blog should include the following key elements: •

•

• • •

Great content: as the old adage goes, “Content is king” and that old axiom should be kept very much in mind when it comes to blogging. Competition is fierce so one’s content better be relevant, valuable and captivating.

Posts frequently: along with having great content, bloggers should constantly post new material.

A constant stream of new material will garner more views, which should result in many more followers.

User friendly navigation: readers prefer navigation that is simple and straightforward so have links that make logical sense.

Eye pleasing content: as with any other type of marketing, the prettier something looks, the more likely it is to be viewed, so keep the design element in mind when creating a blog.

Connect to other content: linking and back-­‐linking is exceptionally important so feel free to add links to other content that expands upon or references your content.

Legal Issues Anyone who chooses to blog should be aware that anything posted in a chat room, at an online forum or on a blog can make the blogger liable to a lawsuit. According to the US Copyright Office, Copyright “protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed.”

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Bloggers should be careful not to infringe upon the rights of others or unjustly demean corporations or people. New software analytic tools—some of which I detail later—allow companies to troll the Internet for copyrighted material and negative remarks about their companies.

In the Wall Street Journal article “Bloggers, Beware: What You Write Can Get You Sued” (McQueen, 2009), journalist M.P. McQueen warns that, “Web sites that purport to rate everything from college professors to doctors and contractors are being sued by recipients of disparaging reviews” (McQueen, 2009). Bloggers are increasingly getting sued for everything from defamation to invasion of privacy to copyright infringement, so caution must be taken (McQueen, 2009).

The Media Law Resource center keeps track of legal actions against bloggers and, as of March 24, 2009, such high profile cases as Banks v. Milum, Cornwell v. Sachs (II), Kaplan v. Salahi, Kono v.

Meeker; Laughman v. Selmeier; Omega World Travel v. Mummagraphics, Inc., Scheff v. Bock, Staten v Steele and Wagner v. Miskin have each resulted in verdicts against the bloggers and a total of $16,128,280 has been awarded to the plaintiffs.[2] First Amendment protection only goes so far, so anyone considering blogging what could be construed as a negative comment about a particular person or a company should take out insurance policies that include liability insurance for defamation, libel and slander. Policy language differs by state and country so bloggers should check with their insurers. According to the Insurance Information Institute, a $1 million umbrella policy costs an average of $200 to $350 per year on top of regular homeowner and auto premiums (McQueen, 2009). In this writer's estimation, it is money very well spent.

Also, when commenting negatively about something, discuss your own personal subjective opinion and "if you’re going to assert negative facts, provide hyperlinks to your sources as a form of citation" (Goldman, 2013). In a 2013 defamation lawsuit involving Sheldon Adelson and a former Las Vegas Sands employee, the court agreed that the plaintiff wasn't guilty of slander because he had used hyperlinks to quote sources (Goldman, 2013). "The hyperlink is the twenty-­‐first century equivalent of the footnote for purposes of attribution in defamation law, because it has become a well-­‐recognized means for an author or the Internet to attribute a source….[Hyperlinking to sources] fosters the facile dissemination of knowledge on the Internet" (Goldman, 2013), the court ruled.

The court concluded that hyperlinks were superior to footnotes because readers didn’t have to make a “sojourn to the library” to check the citation (Goldman, 2013). In a footnote, the court acknowledged the risk of link rot, but saw "it as a minor concern because defamation claims must be brought quickly, which reduces the odds link rot will occur during the relevant legal period." (Goldman, 2013). The court even concluded that the defendants qualified for anti-­‐SLAPP protection, meaning the case was over and Adelson was responsible for the defendants legal fees (Goldman, 2013).

List of Blogging Websites As the Blogging landscape changes on a daily basis, it is impossible to list all of the available blogging Websites out there, but these are some of the most common and popular platforms I have found: NAME AlterNet

ABOUT AlterNet is an award-­‐winning news magazine and online community that creates original journalism and amplifies the best of hundreds of other independent media sources. AlterNet’s aim is to inspire action

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WEBSITE alternet.org

Blog Catalog Blog Drive Blogger Blogigo Blurty Carbonmade

Disqus Gabbr Instablogs

IntenseDebate Issuu

Jigsy

LiveJournal Momentile Pen.io Plinky

Soup.io Tumblr

and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media, health care issues, and more.

Blog Catalog is the premiere social blog directory on the internet. blogcatalog.com Search, Browse, Rate and Review thousands of blog sites.

A weblog publishing service that is easy enough for a beginner and blogdrive.com advanced enough for an expert. Free Blog sites that have never been better.

Blogger is a free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing blogger.com your thoughts with the world.

A free blog, quick and easy. blogigo.com Community site desgined for adults, based on livejournal source blurty.com code.

With Carbonmade, you can manage your online portfolio with a carbonmade.com variety of tools that allow you to change how you display your work.

The core idea behind the design of Carbonmade is to keep your images or videos at the forefront.

Disqus (dis·∙cuss • dĭ-­‐skŭs') is all about changing the way people think disqus.com about discussion on the web. We're big believers in the conversations and communities that form on blogs and other sites.

Gabbr allows you to view and comment on the news in a large social gabbr.com news community as well as promote content for web publshers, authors and bloggers.

Instablogs is a news ecosystem bringing bloggers, citizen journalists instablogs.com and traditional media together. It's a place to discover, share, contribute and connect with the world and the people who are changing it.

IntenseDebate's comment system enhances and encourages intensedebate.com conversation on your blog or website.

Issuu is the leading digital publishing platform delivering exceptional issuu.com reading experiences of magazines, catalogs, and newspapers.

Millions of people have uploaded their best publications to create beautiful digital editions.

Jigsy serves personal blogs, small business websites, news portals, jigsy.com bands, churches, pet groomers, artists, musicians, and... well, you name it. People are flocking to Jigsy by the thousands and we're pleased to keep on doing what we do -­‐ enabling people to create and maintain great looking dynamic websites.

Rooted in a tradition of global participation, LiveJournal is on the livejournal.com forefront of personal publishing, community involvement, and individual expression.

Momentile is a “picture a day” photo diary that makes it dead simple momentile.com to chronicle your days and observe the interesting moments of others. Trust us, it’s for the greater good.

Pen.io is the fastest way to publish online. pen.io Every day we provide a new prompt (like a question, or a challenge), plinky.com and everyone gets a chance to answer. It's simple to add photos, maps, playlists and more. You can easily share your Plinky answers on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, and most major blogging services.

Soup is a tumblelog; a super-­‐easy blog that can do more than just soup.io text: post links; quotes; videos; audio; files; reviews and events Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, tumblr.com

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TypePad

Wordpress WPScoop

Zimbio

links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme's HTML. TypePad blogs make it simple for you to share your interests and get noticed. Easily design and customize your own blog, and use our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) tools to promote your blog and attract an audience and following.

A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

WP-­‐Scoop (WordPress Scoop) is website dedicated to bringing you WordPress related News, Reviews and Stories. All the latest and greatest information on the WordPress blogging platform can be found on the pages of WPscoop. We are a Social Bookmarking Site for you to use and a place for you to discover what is hot in the Wordpress world.

Zimbio is an interactive magazine publisher focused on entertainment, style, current events, and other pop culture topics.

Zimbio.com, one of the fastest growing web publications and one of the 10 most popular magazines on the web, is now read by over 20 million people each month.

typepad.com

wordpress.com wpscoop.com

zimbio.com

Chinese blogging sites include Weibo, Hexum, Sina blog, Blogus and Bolaa.

Microblogs Although similar to a blogging website, a microblog site differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate size. “Social networking and microblogging services such as Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ allow people to broadcast short messages, so-­‐called microposts, in continuous streams. These posts usually consist of a text message enriched with contextual metadata, such as the author, date and time, and sometimes also the location of origin” (Lohmann, Burch, Schauder, Weiskopf, 2012). While individual posts can be no longer than 140 characters, “aggregated posts of multiple users can provide a rich source of time-­‐critical information that can point to events and trends needing attention” (Lohmann, Burch, Schauder, Weiskopf, 2012). The 140 character limitation is much less restrictive in character-­‐based languages such as Chinese and Japanese.

Twitter Twitter is a real-­‐time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.[3] A free social networking and micro-­‐blogging service, Twitter allows users to send and receive Tweets— messages that can be up to 140 characters in length. “Connected to each Tweet is a rich details pane that provides additional information, deeper context and embedded media” (Twitter.com 2011).

Because it is happening in near real-­‐time, “Twitter is a ‘what’s-­‐happening-­‐right-­‐now’ tool that enables interested parties to follow individual users’ thoughts and commentary on events in their lives” (Bifet and Frank, 2010). Some interesting facts about Twitter from Twitter.com (2011) include: • • • • • •

Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day.

There are currently 110 million users of Twitter’s services.

Twitter receives 180 million unique visits each month.

There are more than 600 million searches on Twitter every day.

Twitter started as a simple SMS-­‐text service.

Over 60% of Twitter use is outside the U.S.

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• • •

There are more than 50,000 third-­‐party apps for Twitter.

Twitter’s web platform only accounts for a quarter of its users—75% use third-­‐party apps.

Twitter has donated access to all of its tweets to the Library of Congress for research and preservation.

In his article “100 fascinating social media statistics and figures from 2012”, Brian Honigman (2012) includes some additional interesting facts about Twitter: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

There were 175 million tweets sent from Twitter every day in 2012.

The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times.

Since the dawn of Twitter, there have been a total of 163 billion tweets.

56 percent of customer tweets to companies are being ignore.

Barack Obama's victory tweet was the most retweeted tweet ever, with over 800K retweets.

Top three countries on Twitter are the US at 107 million, Brazil 33 million and Japan at nearly 30 million.

The average user follows (or is followed by) 51 people.

The 2012 election broke records with 31.7 million political tweets.

32 percent of all Internet users are using Twitter.

Twitter is projected to make a total of $540 million in advertising revenue by 2014.

69 percent of follows on Twitter are suggested by friends.

In 2012, one million accounts were added to Twitter every day.

The most followed brand on Twitter is YouTube with 19 million followers.

The USA's 141.8 million accounts represent 27.4 percent of all Twitter users.

50 percent of Twitter users are using the social network via a mobile device.

34 percent of marketers have generated leads using Twitter.

On its Website, Twitter recommends building a following, increasing a businesses' reputation, and raising a customer's trust by following these best practices (Twitter.com, 2011): •

• • • • • • •

Share: disseminate photos and behind the scenes info about your business. Even better, give a glimpse of developing projects and events. Users come to Twitter to get and share the latest, so give it to them!

Listen: regularly monitor the comments about your company, brand, and products.

Ask: question your followers to glean valuable insights and show them that you are listening.

Respond: reply to compliments and feedback in real time.

Reward: Tweet updates about special offers, discounts and time-­‐sensitive deals.

Demonstrate wider leadership and know-­‐how: Reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business.

Champion your stakeholders: Retweet and publicly reply to great tweets posted by your followers and customers.

Establish the right voice: Twitter users tend to prefer a direct, genuine, and, of course, likable tone from your business, but think about your voice as you Tweet. How do you want your business to appear to the Twitter community?

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Twitter also offers three ways to advertise on its service; promoted tweets; promoted trends; and promoted accounts. Promoted tweets are regular Tweets that are amplified to a broader audience and they are offered on a Cost-­‐per-­‐Engagement (CPE) basis. A business is charged when a user Retweets, replies to, clicks on or favorites the Promoted Tweet (Twitter.com, 2011). Retweeted impressions by engaged users are free, and can exponentially amplify the reach and cost-­‐effectiveness of a marketing campaign (Twitter.com, 2011).

Twitter is a very useful tool that connects businesses to customers in real-­‐time. It can help a business quickly share information with people who are interested in their products and/or services, as well as gather real-­‐time market intelligence and customer feedback (Twitter.com, 2011). Using Twitter, a business can build strong relationships with its customers and partners as well as raise the profile of its brands, direct sales and engage a primed audience (Twitter.com, 2011). Twitter can also help a business build a following, increase its reputation as well as raise a customer’s trust by sharing, listening, asking questions, responding to replies, rewarding customers with special offers and discounts, demonstrating wider leadership and championing the right stakeholders.

“Promoted Trends” give a business the exclusive opportunity to feature a Trend related to its business at the top of the “Twitter Trends” list (Twitter, 2011). When a user clicks on the “Trend”, he is taken to the conversation for that trend and a “Promoted Tweets” tag is attached to the tweet at the top of the timeline. Because of its placement, the ad receives substantial exposure, thereby initiating or amplifying a conversation on Twitter and beyond (Twitter, 2011).

“Promoted Accounts” can help companies quickly increase their Twitter followers (Twitter, 2011). Part of “Who to follow” (Twitter's account recommendation engine), “Promoted Accounts” will highlight a business account to users who will most likely find it interesting (Twitter, 2011). According to Twitter's Website, “Users find Promoted Accounts a useful part of discovering new businesses, content, and people on Twitter.”

List of Microblogging Websites As the Microblogging landscape changes on a daily basis, it is impossible to list all of the available Websites online, but these are some of the most common and popular platforms I have found: NAME Audioboo.fm

Cuzo Friendfeed

Mobango

"ABOUT US" DESCRIPTION We’re a small team based in London UK who launched Audioboo in March 2009 as a simple way of recording audio while on the move and adding as much useful data to it as possible, such as photos, tags and location. We’ve seen audioboo grow from a small side project in 2009 to a fully-­‐fledged business in 2010 and we’re committed to making it the platform of choice for anyone who wants to record, listen or share audio.

At Cuzo you create your own micro blog where you are in real time to tell your friends, relatives or colleagues what you do with the help of max 140 characters!

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online.

It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends.

MOBANGO is the first Universal Mobile Community that allows cell phone users to publish, convert, and share with friends all kinds of user generated content -­‐via the web and mobile devices-­‐ for

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WEBSITE audioboo.fm

cuzo.com friendfeed.com mobango.com

Plurk

Twitter

Wadja

personalizing and empowering the new cell phone's generation. You can publish, convert, and share Personal Content of all types for your cell phone -­‐ Videos, Photos, Ringtones, Applications, Games.

Noun. plurk (plüer-­‐kh) -­‐ A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life in deliciously digestible chunks. Low in fat, 5 calories per serving, yet chock full of goodness.

Verb. plurk (plüer-­‐kh) -­‐ To chronicle the events of your always on, action-­‐packed, storybook, semi-­‐charmed kinda life.

Twitter is a real-­‐time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations..

A simple and social way to publish web content, and connect with people who share your interests.

plurk.com

twitter.com

wadja.com

Chinese Microblogging sites include Sina Weibo, Tencent weibo, Netease weibo and Souhu weibo.

Content Communities Content communities exist for a wide range of media types, including text, photos, videos, and PowerPoint presentations (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010). In general, users are not required to create a personal profile page or, if one is required, only basic information need be uploaded (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010). Kaplan and Haenlein (pg. 63, 2010) state that, “The main objective of content communities is the sharing of media content between users” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010).

Although businesses run the risk of these platforms being used for the purpose of sharing copyright-­‐protected materials, the advantages of getting one’s content into the social media community seriously outweighs the disadvantages of potential copyright infringement (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010). The popularity of these content communities make them a very attractive contact channel for many businesses. This fact isn’t surprising when one considers that a site such as YouTube has over 2 billion views per day (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010). Personally, I have found Slideshare to be a particularly good site to generate business leads as well.

YouTube According to its website, YouTube was founded in February 2005 and it “allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-­‐created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.”[4] On 23rd April, 2005, the very first video-­‐-­‐“Me at the Zoo”-­‐-­‐uploaded to YouTube was a video.

Today, YouTube receives more than 2 billion views per day. YouTube allows users to create accounts, upload videos, “Like” or “Dislike” videos, leave comments on a video and create channels, among other things. Some other facts from the YouTube.com press center include:[5] • • •

Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month.

Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.

72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Page 17 of 51

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US. YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 different languages.

In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on earth.

Created in 2007, the YouTube Partner Program has more than a million partners from 27 countries around the world.

Thousands of advertisers are using TrueView in-­‐stream and 60% of those in-­‐stream ads are now skipable.

YouTube has more than a million advertisers using Google ad platforms, the majority of which are small businesses.

Three hours of video are uploaded per minute to YouTube from mobile devices.

YouTube’s Content ID scans over 100 years of video every day for any sign of copyright infringement.

More than 3,000 partners use Content ID, including every major US network broadcaster, movie studio and record label.

YouTube has more than eight million reference files (over 500,000 hours of material) in its Content ID database; it's among the most comprehensive in the world.

Over a third of YouTube's total monetized views come from Content ID. More than 120 million videos have been claimed by Content ID. 500 years’ worth of YouTube videos are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute.

100 million people take a social action on YouTube (such as likes, shares, comments, etc.) every week.

More than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community.

Music videos account for 20% of uploads.

The video for K-­‐Pop star Psy’s “Gangnam Style” was the first video to clock up more than one billion YouTube views (Jones, 2012). YouTube's owner, Google, claims the video was watched, on average, between seven-­‐to-­‐10 million times a day (Jones, 2012) and it has netted the Korean rapper over US $8 million. "Psy's success is a great testament to the universal appeal of catchy music -­‐ and ‘er, great equine dance moves," wrote Kevin Allocca, YouTube trends manager, on the service's blog (Jones, 2012). YouTube even got into the act, adding a dancing Psy animation above the hit counter once the video eclipsed the one billion views milestone (Jones, 2012).

List of Content Community Sites As the Content Community landscape changes on a daily basis, it is impossible to list all of the available Websites, but these are some of the most common and popular platforms I have found: NAME 23hq 8tracks

ABOUT Keep all your photos in one safe place. With 23 you can organise the photos, share them with anyone you want, and you can even order real prints of your digital photos.

8tracks is handcrafted internet radio. It offers a simple way for people to share and discover music through an online mix, a short playlist containing at least 8 tracks. Listeners can search for a mix by artist or genre, stream it in a legal, radio-­‐style manner, and

Page 18 of 51

WEBSITE 23hq.com 8tracks.com

Artician Arto

BabyCenter

Bambuser

Bandsintown Blinkx

Blip.fm Blip.tv

Blogtv Breakmedia

Brickfish

Brightcove Bukisa

Clipmoon

follow others who make compelling mixes.

Artician is a community for creative professionals. We allow artists, designers, photographers, and other creative individuals to build completely personalized portfolios for free.

On Arto you can share pictures, videos, create friendbooks, make a blog and much more. You can participate in fun quizzes, interesting threads in the forum and join thousands of groups -­‐ or try some of the fun games.

BabyCenter is the voice of the 21st Century Mom® and modern motherhood. Now the Web's #1 global interactive parenting network, it has nurtured more than 100 million parents since its launch in 1997.

Bambuser lets you broadcast live and interactive video from your mobile phone, webcam or DV-­‐camera — and it's free! Alert people when you go live; Shoot with almost no delay & chat with your viewers while broadcasting.

Bandsintown was started in Boston, MA back in 2007. Our goal was to make the discovery of local live music easier, through personalized recommendations and notifications. blinkx is the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine. Now, with an index of over 35 million hours of searchable video and more than 720 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries, it has cemented its position as the premier destination for online TV. Internet radio made social -­‐ Free music streaming and sharing Blip.tv is the place to discover the best in original web series, from professional and up-­‐and-­‐coming producers. We give viewers free access to a wide variety of dramas, comedies, arts, sports and other shows and make it easy to find what you want when you want it. blogTV is a leading live, interactive, internet broadcasting platform that enables anyone with an internet connection and a camera to connect to their audience in an evocative, direct way.

Break Media is a leading creator, publisher, and distributor of digital entertainment content including video, editorial, and games. The company’s properties include the largest humor site online—Break.com—as well as Made Man, GameFront, HolyTaco, ScreenJunkies, CagePotato, AllLeftTurns, Chickipedia, and TuVez. Founded in 2005, Brickfish® is based on the idea that peer to peer interactions around a brand's product and services have great value and relevance to consumers and brands alike. The Brickfish platform allows brands and agencies to launch engagement based social media programs.

Brightcove Inc, the cloud content services company, provides a family of products used to publish and distribute the world's professional digital media.

BUKISA is a one stop shop for how-­‐to, informational & educational content. We are both an aggregator and a UGC website. We provide content in the form of articles, videos, presentations, audio recordings and image slideshows.

Your online video sharing community portal. Watch, upload and

Page 19 of 51

artician.com arto.com

babycenter.com

bambuser.com

bandsintown.com blinkx.com

blip.fm blip.tv

blogtv.com breakmedia.com

brickfish.com

brightcove.com bukisa.com

clipmoon.com

Clipshack Clipsyndicate Coull

Dailymotion

Discogs Docstoc

Dropshots

Flickr

Filmnet

Fotki

Fotolog

share videos. Get unlimited video hosting space. It is easy, funny and free.

ClipShack is always ahead of the crowd, and now we have integrated Google Maps™ so that you can map your content and search by location.

Publish broadcast quality news on your web site.

Coull is the market-­‐leading Video Performance Network. The company's platform is aimed at the video advertising market where it drives revenue generation, firstly, through capturing the attention of the customer, and secondly via product pull through.

Dailymotion is about finding new ways to see, share and engage your world through the power of online video. You can find -­‐ or upload -­‐ videos about your interests and hobbies, eyewitness accounts of recent news and distant places, and everything else from the strange to the spectacular.

Discogs is a user-­‐built database containing information on artists, labels, and their recordings. Discogs also incorporates a Marketplace where you can buy and sell the recordings.

Docstoc is the premier online destination to start and grow small businesses. It hosts the best quality and widest selection of professional documents (over 20 million) and resources including expert video, articles and productivity tools to make very small business better. Docstoc is among the top 500 most visited websites (quantcast) and has over 25 million registered users.

DropShots, Inc. was born from a passionate mission: To improve the interaction and strengthen the emotional connection between friends and family through the use of advanced technologies.

DropShots is accomplishing this mission by becoming the leading subscription based service for family and friends to connect, converse and share their life experiences captured on photo and video.

Flickr -­‐ almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world -­‐ has two main goals: 1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them; 2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.

Founded in May 2009 and officially launched on October 22nd, 2009, FilmNet is a social community based around video content.

We bring together filmmakers and viewers through a rich content library, advanced social networking tools and an in-­‐depth database with information about film industry professionals and web-­‐based movie-­‐making.

The organic, fat-­‐free photo and video sharing site, which uses steroids only on its technology, delivers state of the art yummy photo products and prints, and grows healthy professional photographers’ business without cruelty to eyes, wallets and customers.

Fotolog is the world's leading photo-­‐blogging site, one of the world's largest social networking sites and a global cultural phenomenon. More than 22 million members in over 200 countries use Fotolog as a simple and fun way to express themselves through online photo diaries or photo blogs.

Page 20 of 51

clipshack.com clipsyndicate.com coull.com

dailymotion.com

discogs.com docstoc.com

dropshots.com

flickr.com

filmnet.com

fotki.com

fotolog.com

Fotopedia

Funnyordie

Gotcast

Godtube Gogoyoko

Helpfulvideo

Howcast

Hulu

Ihiphop

Instructables

Issuu

Jalbum.net

Fotopedia is breathing new life into photos by building a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web.

Funny Or Die is a comedy video website that combines user-­‐ generated content with original, exclusive content. The site is a place where celebrities, established and up-­‐and-­‐coming comedians and regular users can all put up stuff they think is funny.

GotCast was born from one simple idea -­‐ you deserve your shot at stardom! Until now, getting there was nearly impossible for everyone. Aside from moving to Hollywood and hoping to get discovered, the only chance you may have had was to show up at a talent competition or send a video to a TV Network -­‐ both of these never seem to work.

Godtube.com is a video sharing platform offering online Christian videos with faith-­‐based, family friendly content. gogoyoko is: a new music-­‐community that gives us something we have all been waiting for… Fair Play in Music; for all artists and music fans who want to interact in a fair music market place; a website where everyone can listen to and buy music directly from artists and anyone can sell and promote their music, unlike iTunes and MySpace. helpfulvideo.com is a website to share videos about everyday knowledge and skills among everyday people. It is better to see once than to hear or read ten times. We hope you like helpfulvideo.com!

Howcast empowers people with engaging, useful how-­‐to information wherever, whenever they need to know how. Known for high-­‐quality content, Howcast streams tens of millions of videos every month across its multi-­‐platform distribution network.

Hulu is an online video service that offers a selection of hit shows, clips, movies and more at Hulu.com, numerous destination sites online, and through our ad-­‐supported subscription service, Hulu Plus. Hulu's selection of premium programming is provided by more than 260 content companies. iHipHop, a property of Triumph Media Holdings, Inc., is the most technologically advanced social network catered to the hip hop community. The site offers music, videos, news, and networking features to almost 800,000 users.

Instructables is a web-­‐based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others. The seeds of Instructables germinated at the MIT Media Lab as the future founders of Squid Labs built places to share their projects and help others.

Issuu is the world’s fastest growing digital publishing platform.

Millions of avid readers come to Issuu every day to read free publications, created by enthusiastic publishers from all over the globe.

The jalbum.net site is not just a place where you store your albums. Follow great photographers from all over the world, like and comment on other peoples' albums and get feedback on

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fotopedia.com

funnyordie.com

gotcast.com

godtube.com gogoyoko.com

helpfulvideo.com

howcast.com

hulu.com

ihiphop.com

instructables.com

issuu.com

jalbum.net

Jamendo Jelli Justin.tv

Kcoolonline

Keepvid Kincafe Kinzin Lafango

Last.fm LiveLeak

Livestream

Livevideo Meemi Metacafe

yours. Connect with Facebook or Twitter and share your albums with your friends.

Jamendo is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses. Share your music, download your favorite artists!

Jelli is an interactive radio broadcasting service launched in 2009.

Justin.tv is the easiest way to create live video and show anyone in the world what's happening right now. Using only a laptop, you can share your event, class, party or thoughts, live, to anyone in over 250 countries while they chat in real-­‐time with you and with other viewers.

Kcoolonline currently works for over 288 streaming video sites, and more are being added every week. Supported sites include many popular stream sites. If you've got a site that you'd like to download videos from, leave a message in the Guestbook and we'll look into it.

Download videos from many video sharing sites, including YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Videos, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Revver and other services.

Kincafe is your family network to connect, bond and cherish loved ones -­‐ the ones you grew up with, the ones you care for at the center of your heart.

We’ve created this Social Publishing™ service to allow groups to privately share photos, collaborate and create printed mementos that everyone can enjoy.

From musicians to comedians, singers to dancers, and models to photographers Lafango gives everyday people the ability to showcase their talents with the world. Lafango serves as a multimedia platform for artists and talent seekers to connect through multiple features including distinctive categories, advanced social networking and live media distribution.

Last.fm is a music recommendation service. You use Last.fm by signing up and downloading The Scrobbler, which helps you discover more music based on the songs you play.

LiveLeak is a video sharing website that lets users post and share videos. Liveleak places emphasis on current events, politics and reality-­‐based footage such as war scenes from various parts of the world.

Livestream is the leading live video destination and platform.

Event organizers, content owners, celebrities and artists around the world use Livestream's social broadcasting tools to engage and grow their audiences on the web, mobile devices, and connected TVs. LiveVideo broadcast yourself live, watch, chat, interact, connect and share videos with people all over the world.

The easiest way to share and collect your texts, your quotes, your images, your favourites links, to organize your events with your friends or collect your favourites video.

Metacafe is a video entertainment site that focuses on: Short-­‐form -­‐ Metacafe specializes in short-­‐form original video -­‐ content that is made for the interactive Internet medium.

Entertainment -­‐ We're all about entertaining a large audience by

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jamendo.com Http:jelli.com justin.tv

kcoolonline.com

keepvid.com kincafe.com kinzin.com lafango.com

last.fm liveleak.com

livestream.com

livevideo.com meemi.com metacafe.com

Mevio

Mog

Motortopia

Mp3 Myplick

Myshutterspace

Netvibes

Oovoo

Ourmedia

Ourstage

featuring only those videos that amaze, inspire and make viewers laugh.

Community Auditions -­‐ A community review panel of more than 80,000 volunteers takes a first look at each of the thousands of videos submitted to the site every day.

MEVIO hosts networks of personality-­‐driven episodic mevio.com entertainment to best engage our customers-­‐comprised of viewers, producers, advertisers and partners. MEVIO is one of the fastest growing entertainment sites on the web.

MOG has one simple goal: to perfect your music-­‐listening mog.com experience. MOG’s all-­‐you-­‐can-­‐eat, on-­‐demand listening service provides access to a deep library of over 11 million songs and a million albums through its mobile apps on iPhone and Android, as well as on the Web and streaming entertainment devices for TV. Our goal at Motortopia is to bring motor enthusiasts and the motortopia.com information they desire together in one place. Whether you are into cars, bikes, boats or planes, Motortopia enables you to share your passion with others.

MP3 Music Downloads -­‐ MP3.com offers links to legal digital mp3.com music downloads from a wide variety of services. Buy MP3 music online from your favorite artists with MP3.com.

Myplick is a free service that lets you share, embed and discover myplick.com presentations and slide shows online. You can upload your presentation documents in a variety of formats such as powerpoint, pdf, openoffice odp, etc.

MyShutterspace is a social network for digital photography myshutterspace.com enthusiasts. This is your place to connect with other digital photographers (both amateur and pro), share photos, videos & stories, get critiques on photos, and discuss photography techniques and gears.

Founded in 2005, Netvibes pioneered the first personalized netvibes.com dashboard publishing platform for the Web. For consumers, Netvibes.com is the most awarded start page where millions of people around the world personalize and publish all aspects of their daily digital lives. For agencies and publishers, Netvibes’ universal widget technology (UWA), widget distribution services and Premium Dashboards help rapidly deliver brand observation rooms and user-­‐personalized marketing campaigns. For companies, Netvibes Enterprise delivers secure, scalable personalized workspaces, portals and industry dashboards. ooVoo offers the ability to video chat face-­‐to-­‐face with family and oovoo.com friends, anytime and anywhere. With ooVoo you can have free video chats one-­‐to-­‐one, or have a group video chat with up to 6 people at once!

Welcome to Ourmedia, a community of individuals dedicated to ourmedia.org spreading grassroots creativity: videos, podcasts and other works of personal media. Have a creative streak? This is a place where you can discuss home-­‐brew media, store your stuff for safekeeping and show off your works to a global audience.

We’re not just another music-­‐centric social networking site. The ourstage.com OurStage community is made up of undiscovered artists hungry for exposure, music lovers with insatiable appetites and industry

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Pandora Pbase

Photobucket

Photopeach

Photoshow

Photosynth.net

Picasa.google Picturepush Picturesocial Picturetrail

Pikchur

Podomatic Redux Revision3

professionals committed to bringing incredible talent to the masses.

When was the last time you fell in love with a new artist or song?

At Pandora, we have a single mission: To play only music you'll love.

PBase was conceived in July of 1999 after observing countless camera wielding people that take cool photos but find it difficult to share their work. The primary mission of PBase is to be the best place on the web to display photos.

Photobucket is the premier destination for uploading, downloading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos and graphics. Host all your images and videos for free, then share them by email or on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Our idea is to help you tell better stories online using photos. With PhotoPeach you can create a rich slideshow in seconds to engage your friends or family. We also support background music, captions, and comments so you can elaborate on your story further.

Share your family's favorite stories with friends and relatives.

They'll feel like they were there! Roxio PhotoShow makes it simple to combine your favorite photos and video clips from birthdays, vacations, or any other occasion with fun stickers, animations, effects, and music to create one-­‐of-­‐a-­‐kind online PhotoShows they're sure to love.

Photosynth is a powerful set of tools for capturing and viewing the world in 3D. You can share these views with your friends on Facebook, publish them to Bing Maps, or embed them in your own Web site. Here’s the big picture: Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Sharing your best photos with friends and family is as easy as pressing a button!

PicturePush is a photo and video hosting service. It is built on the philosophy that you can upload everything you have in the highest quality possible and worry about what to show to whom later.

PictureSocial is a new place where photographers from all experience levels can share their knowledge and learn from others.

PictureTrail, Inc. operates a leading photo sharing social network and widget destination. Members and visitors share photos online, host images, order prints and utilize most other options available through the top photo sharing sites.

Pikchur is a simple service that updates your social networks / micro-­‐blogging platforms with pictures & videos! No need to signup! Just login with one of our many supported platforms and start sending your Piks today!

PodOmatic podcast portal: Create, Find, Share Podcasts!

Redux helps you find and enjoy videos, photos, music, and websites recommended by people who love the same stuff you do.

Revision3 has emerged as the leading special interest video network, and has attracted top Internet video talent, advertisers

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pandora.com pbase.com

photobucket.com

photopeach.com

photoshow.com

photosynth.net

picasa.google.com picturepush.com picturesocial.com picturetrail.com

pikchur.com

podomatic.com redux.com revision3.com

Shazam

Skyrock SlideShare

Smugmug Soundcloud

SCribd

Thesixtyone

Throwpile Tinychat Twitxr

Ustream.tv Veoh

Viddler Videojug

and distribution partners.

Grown into an established business, but retained our start-­‐up approach and work ethic: Shazam believes in creating a magical experience and is passionate about developing innovative products and services.

A community with blogging as well as sharing of music, videos and more SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations. With 50 million monthly visitors and 90 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 250 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.

The ultimate in photo sharing. Easily create online photo albums.

Share, store, organize and print.

SoundCloud is a platform that puts your sound at the heart of communities, websites and even apps. Watch conversations, connections and social experiences happen, with your sound as the spark.

Scribd is the world’s largest digital library, where readers can discover books and written works on the Web or any mobile device and publishers and authors can find a voracious audience for their work. Launched in March of 2007 and based in San Francisco, California, more than 40 million books and documents have been contributed to Scribd by the community. Scribd content reaches and audience of 80 million people around the world every month.

On thesixtyone, new artists make music and listeners decide what's good. We're nurturing a growing ecosystem where talented folks can sell songs and merchandise directly to their fans.

Throwpile enables you to keep in touch with friends via quick and easy photo, art, and picture updates.

Tinychat is a dead-­‐simple, live video communication platform. By providing dead simple, free to use, video chat rooms that just work!

Share pictures from your mobile phone. Automatically publish them on social networks and photosharing sites. Tell your friends where you are and what you are doing. Automatically add your location to your pictures and status updates Ustream is the leading live interactive broadcast platform. Anyone with an internet connection and a camera can start engaging with their family, friends or fans anytime, anywhere.

By bridging the gap between uniquely social interactive user experiences and the portability of online video, games, music and other multimedia, Qlipso empowers users to share the Flash-­‐ based media content they find and enjoy on the Web and interact with friends and family in a secure and friendly virtual environment.

Viddler is a platform for video publishers Videojug is a next-­‐generation digital media company that helps people to ‘get good at life', wherever they are. Our aim is to be a world-­‐leading factual and learning resource for the 100s of

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shazam.com

skyrock.com slideshare.com

smugmug.com soundcloud.com

scribd.com

thesixtyone.com

throwpile.com tinychat.com twitxr.com

ustream.tv veoh.com

viddler.com videojug.com

Vidque

Vimeo

Webshots

Woophy Youlicense

Youtube

Zenfolio

millions of global internet users hungry for knowledge on how to perform a million large and little life tasks, as well as practical and valuable information on any subject under the sun.

Vidque is a free curation platform designed to help discover, filter and archive online video content. Controlled and curated by its users, Vidque aims to simplify the discovery of quality video content through the joint effort of the online community.

From the beginning, Vimeo was created by filmmakers and video creators who wanted to share their creative work, along with intimate personal moments of their everyday life. As time went on, like-­‐minded people came to the site and built a community of positive, encouraging individuals with a wide range of video interests.

With 7.2 Million monthly visitors and more than 520 million photos to explore, Webshots is one of the largest photo-­‐ and video-­‐sharing sites. Webshots provides you with a variety of ways to enjoy photos and videos.

The goal of Woophy's founders is to create an accessible, visual, current, democratic and collective work of art comprised of a database picturing our remarkable world.

YouLicense is an online music licensing marketplace. We have developed a platform which enables artists and those seeking musical content to conduct business directly with one another in a safe and secure environment.

Founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-­‐created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.

At Zenfolio we believe that a beautiful photograph requires an equally impressive viewing experience. And because every photo tells a story, we've made it our business to display them with the same precision and attention to detail that went into making them.

vidque.com

vimeo.com

webshots.com

woophy.com youlicense.com

youtube.com

zenfolio.com

Chinese content communities include YouKu, Ku6 and Qiyi.

Social Networks Perhaps the most recognizable of all social media sites are the social networks, sites such as Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and MySpace are instantly recognizable. According to Wikipedia, “a social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called ‘nodes’, which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.”

Boyd and Ellison (2007) define social network sites (SNS) as: “web-­‐based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-­‐public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.” What makes a social network site unique is its “ability to enable users to articulate and Page 26 of 51

make visible their social networks” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007), which can result in connections between individuals that would otherwise not have been made (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). This is one of the key aspects of social networking that makes it so primed for marketing, an area I will delve into further in chapter five.

“While SNSs have implemented a wide variety of technical features, their backbone consists of visible profiles that display an articulated list of friends who are also users of the system” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). When signing up, a user creates a profile by answering questions posed on the Website, which can include things such as age, location and interests (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Most sites encourage users to upload a profile photo, while others allow multimedia content such as video, music or image files (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Facebook even allows users to add modules that can include everything from news feeds to notifications to other social plugins that can substantially enhance a user’s profile (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Once a user joins a social networking site, she is prompted to identify other users in the system with which she has a relationship (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). “The label for these relationships differs depending on the site–popular terms include ‘Friends’, ‘Contacts’, and ‘Fans’” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

This public display of connections is an important element of SNSs. “The Friends list contains links to each Friend's profile, enabling viewers to traverse the network graph by clicking through the Friends lists” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). On most sites, the list of Friends is visible to anyone who is permitted to view the profile, but some sites such as LinkedIn allow users to opt out of displaying his network should he choose that option (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Most SNSs allow users to leave messages on his or her friends' profiles (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

This feature typically involves leaving “comments” on a “wall” or some other place that allows a thread of commentary. Most SNSs include a private messaging feature that is similar to webmail (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Social networks can also be important platforms for a business. In their paper Expanding Opportunities in a Shrinking World (2009), Avimanyu Datta and Len Jessup state that “Social networks promote social entrepreneurship by means of (a) technology and knowledge transfer; (b) locating information; (c) generating entrepreneurial opportunities; (d) building entrepreneurial competency; (e) financing innovation; and (f) building effective networks for commercialization of innovations.

History of Social Networks According to Boyd and Ellison's (2007) definition of SNS, the first recognizable social network site was SixDegress.com, which launched in 1997. The site allowed users to create profiles, list their friends and, starting in 1998, surf their friends’ lists (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Each of these features existed in some form before SixDegrees, but SixDegrees aggregated them all into one site (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Launched in 1995, Classmates.com was one of the first social networks to introduce the concepts of “friends” who either knew each other or shared something in common with the other members of the group, such as a high school or a college affiliation. However, it was years before users could actually create groups of friends.

The option to add a profile existed on most major dating sites and many community sites at the time as well as on AIM—AOL's Instant Messaging platform. ICQ’s buddy lists also supported lists of

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friends, but SixDegrees was the first to combine these features together (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool “to help people connect with and send messages to others,” but, although it had more than 3,500,000 registered users at one time, it failed to make money and it shut its doors in 2000 (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

From 1997 to 2001, sites such as AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGentea came online (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). These included community tools that allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles as well as to identify “friends” on their personal profiles without seeking approval from those connections (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

LiveJournal went online in 1999 and it allowed people to mark others as friends, which would then give those friends the ability to follow journals as well as to manage privacy settings (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

The influential Korean virtual world Cyworld, which began in 1999, added SNS features in 2001 (Boyd and Ellison, 2007), while in Europe, the Swedish web community LunarStorm evolved into an SNS in 2000 when it added Friends lists, guestbooks, and diary pages (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Launched in 2001, San Francisco-­‐based Ryze.com was formed to help people leverage their business networks (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Its members included several leaders of the San Francisco business and technology community, many of whom would later lead and invest in some of today's most successful SNSs, including Tribe.net, LinkedIn, and Friendster (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze, Friendster was designed to compete against Match.com by attempting to foster romantic connections between friends-­‐of-­‐friends rather than between strangers, which is the way most dating Websites work (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). It found initial success among three groups of early adopters—“bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man arts festival, and gay men” (Boyd, 2004). Friendster grew quickly through word of mouth before positive press coverage in May 2003 really put it on the map (O'Shea, 2003).

Friendster immediately encountered technical difficulties, however, because its servers were ill-­‐ equipped to handle its rapid growth and the site regularly faltered, alienating its users (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). “Because organic growth had been critical to creating a coherent community, the onslaught of new users who learned about the site from media coverage upset the cultural balance of the site” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Furthermore, exponential growth meant a collapse in social contexts: users had to face their bosses and former classmates alongside their closest friends. To complicate matters even further, Friendster began restricting the activities of its most passionate users” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Friendster was initially designed to restrict users from viewing profiles of people who were more than four degrees away from them (friends-­‐of-­‐friends-­‐of-­‐friends-­‐of-­‐friends) (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). In order to circumvent this rule, users began adding acquaintances and interesting-­‐looking strangers to expand their reach (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Some users started collecting Friends en masse, an activity that was implicitly encouraged through the site's “most popular” feature (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). The ultimate collectors were fake profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such entities (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Friendster quickly caught on to the game and immediately deleted the "Fakesters" (as they became known), as well as many genuine users who were using non-­‐ realistic photos in their profiles (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Many early adopters left Friendster for other

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social media networks and today the site has evolved into a social gaming platform focused on gaming and music (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

In 2003, MySpace was launched in Santa Monica, CA, and it competed against sites like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). “After rumors emerged that Friendster would adopt a fee-­‐based system, users posted Friendster messages encouraging people to join alternate SNSs, including Tribe.net and MySpace” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Because of this, MySpace capitalized on Friendster's alienation of its users and grew rapidly (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). MySpace quickly encouraged indie-­‐rock bands to switch as they were expelled from Friendster for failing to comply with restrictive profile regulations (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Although not technically launched as a destination for musicians, MySpace welcomed them with open arms (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Soon after MySpace courted them, Indie-­‐rock bands from the Los Angeles area created profiles showcasing their bands and their songs. Local promoters also used MySpace to advertise VIP passes for popular night clubs and concerts (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Intrigued, MySpace contacted local musicians to see how they could support them (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

“Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former Friendster users. The bands-­‐and-­‐fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands wanted to be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands and used friend connections to signal identity and affiliation” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Unlike other sites, MySpace also allowed users to personalize their pages by adding HTML code into the forms that framed their profiles (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). By 2004, teenagers were flocking to MySpace to connect with their favorite bands (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). “As the site grew, three distinct populations began to form: musicians/artists, teenagers, and the post-­‐college urban social crowd” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Two years after it was launched, MySpace was purchased by the News Corporation for $580 million (BBC, 2005). Three years later, after losing substantial ground to Facebook, MySpace was sold to Specific Media for $35 million (Stelter, 2011). Today, MySpace is returning to its roots, calling itself a “Leading social entertainment destination powered by the passion of fans” (MySpace.com) but it has lost the user count race to Facebook, undoubtedly, forever.

SNS aren't a uniquely American phenomena, however. Although it lost support in the US, Friendster flourished in the Pacific Islands (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Orkut rose to prominence in Brazil and India (Madhavan, 2007). “Mixi attained widespread adoption in Japan, LunarStorm took off in Sweden, Dutch users embraced Hyves, Grono captured Poland, Hi5 was adopted in smaller countries in Latin America, South America, and Europe, and Bebo became very popular in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). After it added profiles and made friends visible, China's QQ instant messaging service quickly grew to become the largest SNS in the world (McLeod, 2006), while Cyworld captured the Korean market when it introduced homepages and “buddies” onto their platform (Ewers, 2006).

While most SNS want to grow broadly and exponentially, some, like aSmallWorld and BeautifulPeople, intentionally restrict access to appear selective and elite (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Other sites, such as “activity-­‐centered sites like Couchsurfing, identity-­‐driven sites like BlackPlanet, and affiliation-­‐focused sites like MyChurch—are limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Boyd and Ellison (2007) argue that, “The rise of SNS indicates a shift in the organization of online communities. While websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist Page 29 of 51

and prosper, SNSs are primarily organized around people, not interests.” Early public online communities such as Usenet and public discussion forums were structured by topics or according to topical hierarchies, but social network sites are structured as personal (or “egocentric”) networks, with the individual at the center of their own community. This more accurately mirrors unmediated social structures, where "the world is composed of networks, not groups" (Wellman, pg. 37, 1988).

There are several sites such as Facebook, Foursquare, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest that I will delve into next because they are some of the most important social networking sites around and they should be foundation for most company's social media marketing strategies.

Facebook Unlike most other SNSs, Facebook was initially built to only support distinct college networks (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). At first, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address to join the site. As Facebook rolled out to other universities, it kept its sense of exclusivity by requiring new users to also have university email addresses (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).

Beginning in September 2005, “Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Another unique feature of Facebook was “the ability for outside developers to build ‘Applications’ which allow[ed] users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie preferences and chart travel histories” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). From these humble beginnings, Facebook has arguably grown into perhaps the most recognizable social media site in the world outside of China. According to the Facebook press office (2012): • • • • • • • • •

More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each month.

Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application.

More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.

Two-­‐thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.

There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

People that access Facebook via mobile are twice as active as non-­‐mobile users.

The average Facebook user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events.

People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

There are more than 1 million entrepreneurs and developers from 180 countries on Facebook.

In his article “100 fascinating social media statistics and figures from 2012”, Brian Honigman (2012) adds a few other interesting facts about Facebook, including: • • • • •

The average Facebook user has 130 friends.

25 percent of users on Facebook don't bother with any kind of privacy control.

21 percent of Facebook users are from Asia, which is less than four percent of Asia's population.

488 million users regularly use Facebook mobile.

Brazil publishes the most number of posts out of all Facebook countries.

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• • • • • • • • • •

23 percent of Facebook users check their account five or more times a day.

Facebook hosts 42 million "Pages" with 10 or more likes.

More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook in various ways.

During 2012, Facebook saw a 41 percent growth in active users from Russia, South Korea, Japan, India and Brazil.

250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day.

As of 2012, 210,000 years of music have been played on Facebook.

As of 2012, 17 billion location-­‐tagged posts and check-­‐ins were logged on Facebook.

80 percent of social media users prefer to connect with brands through Facebook.

43 percent of Facebook users are male, while 57 percent of Facebook users are female.

A whopping 77 percent of B2C companies and 43 percent of B2B companies acquired customers from Facebook.

These impressive statistics make it clear that Facebook is a great place for businesses to both market their products as well as to build fanbases.

Facebook claims there are four steps to business success on Facebook, including building an audience, connecting with people, engaging an audience and influencing them through their friends and family members (facebook.com/business).

Facebook is also the perfect place for businesses to manage their brands and reputations, to understand their customers, to recruit talent, and to promote events as well as to network and build relationships. I will delve further into how Facebook and other social media sites can be used to promote businesses in chapter five. I will also explain how Facebook advertising works and how such target-­‐specific advertising can be extremely beneficial to businesses.

Foursquare According to its website,[6] “Foursquare is a location-­‐based mobile platform that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. By ‘checking in’ via a smartphone app or SMS, users share their location with friends while collecting points and virtual badges.” Foursquare has over 30 million users worldwide that have “checked-­‐in” over three billion times.[7] Over a million businesses are using its Merchant Platform, which offers “free tools to help businesses discover and connect with customers”.[8] Once again, according to its website, Foursquare claims it can guide “real-­‐world experiences by allowing users to bookmark information about venues that they want to visit and surfacing relevant suggestions about nearby venues. Merchants and brands leverage the foursquare platform by utilizing a wide set of tools to obtain, engage, and retain customers and audiences.”[9] The Foursquare “Friends” tab shows a live-­‐stream of check-­‐ins, tips, and updates from a user’s friends, as well the brands they love, and the businesses they frequent.[10] The “Explore” tab gives people the ability to search for businesses, whether that business is a restaurant, a retail establishment, or any other business that might have a Foursquare presence. Businesses show up in the Explore tab when users search for places near them.[11] A user’s “Profile” tab is filled with personal stats, photos, tips, badges and lists.[12]

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For a business, marketing through Foursquare can be some of the best viral marketing around.

When a person check-­‐ins to an establishment, he can immediately inform all of his friends and contacts about that establishment. That checkin would be seen as a recommendation coming from a trusted friend, which is, once again, one of the best forms of marketing around. Because Foursquare also uses past check-­‐ins to personalize a user’s recommendation, a strong customer relationship can be built.

Foursquare can inform businesses what their customers are saying about them and their brand. Specials can also be used “to attract and reward customers or create unique experiences for fans.”[13]

Google+ Launched on June 28, 2011, Google+ is a multilingual social networking and identity service owned and operated by Google Inc. As of December 2012, Google+ had over 500 million registered users, 235 million of whom were active on a monthly basis (Gundotra, 2012). “Unlike other conventional social networks which are generally accessed through a single website, Google has described Google+ as a ‘social layer’ consisting of not just a single, but rather an overarching ‘layer’ which covers many of its online properties” (Olanoff, 2012).

In his article “100 fascinating social media statistics and figures from 2012”, Brian Honigman (2012) lists the following interesting facts about Google+: • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The Google +1 button is used five billion times per day.

48 percent of fortune global 100 companies are now on Google+.

The automotive industry has 2.7MM circlers on Google+, compared to 1.9MM for electronics, and 1.3MM for luxury goods.

H&M has the most Google+ posts of any brand, with 740, compared to 571 for Google, 515 for Ferrari, and 460 for MTV. 47 percent of Hispanic consumers use Google+, compared to the U.S. average of 18 percent.

40 percent of marketers use Google+, 70 percent want to learn more about it and 67 percent plan on increasing Google+ activities.

42 percent of worldwide Google+ users are single; 27 percent are married.

68 percent of Google+ users are Male, while 32 percent are female.

Google+ active users spend over 60 minutes a day across Google products.

Websites using the +1 button generate 3.5 times the Google+ visits than sites without the button.

At least 60 percent of Google+ users log in daily.

At least 80 percent of Google+ users engage with the site on a weekly basis.

Google+ cost $585 million and took 500 employees to build.

30 percent of users who make a public post never make a second one.

Instagram Instagram is an online photo-­‐sharing and social networking service that allows users to take a picture, apply a digital filter to it, and share it on various social networking sites (Wikipedia.org). Unlike most other mobile device cameras, Instagram confines photos to a square shape, similar to a Kodak Instamatic and a Polaroid image (Wikipedia.org). The service was launched in October 2010 and it was distributed through the App Store and Google Play.

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By September 2012, there were over 100 million active users (Wikipedia.org). In April 2012, Facebook bought Instagram in a deal worth approximately $1 billion in cash (BBC, 2012), the company’s largest deal to date. Some of Instragram’s impressive statistics (from Honigman’s (2012) article, of course) include: • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • • • • •

In August 2012, Instagram hit 80 million users and had an average of 7.3 million daily active users.

More than 5 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day.

Nearly 4 billion photos have been shared on Instagram since its inception.

There are 575 likes and 81 comments by Instagram users every second.

Users uploaded more than 800,000 photos of Hurricane Sandy using the hashtag #Sandy.

The average Instagram user spent 257 minutes accessing the photo-­‐sharing site via a mobile device in August, while the average Twitter user over the same period spent 170 minutes viewing Tweets.

40 percent of brands have adopted Instagram for marketing purposes.

Of the top brands, 20 percent surveyed had 10,000 or more followers.

In a six-­‐month span, Instagram's average daily mobile visitors jumped from 886,000 to 7.3 million, which is a 724 percent leap.

In 2012, Instagram users liked 78 million photos.

By August 2012, Instagram had 432,000 more daily users than Twitter.

By August 2012, users on Instagram had spent 257 minutes using the app, as opposed to the 169.9 minutes spent on Twitter.

The Android version received over 430,000 pre-­‐registrations.

When the Android app launched, Instagram had over 1 million downloads in a day.

Instagram was one of the largest acquisitions of a venture capital-­‐backed consumer Web company since Zappos was bought by Amazon for $1.22B in 2009.

According to Followgram's research, 37 percent of Instagram users have never uploaded a single photo and only five percent of users have more than 50 pictures.

The top five of the top 100 hashtags on Instagram are #love, #instagood, #me, #tbt and #cute.

Facebook's billion-­‐dollar valuation of Instagram makes the less-­‐than-­‐two-­‐year-­‐old startup more valuable than the venerable 161-­‐year-­‐old New York Times Company.

LinkedIn Founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, LinkedIn is the largest social networking site for professionals. As of January 2013, it had more than 200 million registered users in more than 200 countries. LinkedIn allows registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship, called “Connections”. Users can invite anyone to become a connection.

According to LinkedIn.com, a user’s list of connections can then be used in a number of ways, including: •

•

Building up a contact network that consists of a user’s direct connections, the connections of each of their connections (termed “second-­‐degree connections”) and also the connections of second-­‐degree connections (termed “third-­‐degree connections”). This can be used to gain an introduction to someone a person he or she wishes to know through a mutual contact.

Users can upload their resume or design their own profile in order to showcase work and community experiences.

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• • • •

LinkedIn can then be used to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended from one's contact network.

Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.

Job seekers can review the profile of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them to this person.

Users can save (i.e., bookmark) jobs that they would might want to apply for.

LinkedIn Answers allows users to ask questions of the LinkedIn community. This feature is free, and it differs from Yahoo! Answers in that questions are usually more business-­‐oriented, and all identities of the people asking and answering questions are revealed.

In mid-­‐2008, LinkedIn launched LinkedIn DirectAds as a form of sponsored advertising (www.LinkedIn.com). In October 2008, LinkedIn revealed plans to open its social network of 30 million professionals globally as a potential sample for business-­‐to-­‐business research (Neff, 2008).

In his article “100 fascinating social media statistics and figures from 2012”, Brian Honigman (2012) lists the following interesting facts about LinkedIn: • • • • • •

Oracle’s Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Epstein, was headhunted for the position via his LinkedIn profile.

80% of companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.

A new member joins LinkedIn every second.

LinkedIn receives almost 12 million unique visitors per day.

Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn. Recruiters account for 1-­‐in-­‐20 LinkedIn profiles.

Pinterest One of the most successful social media sites of 2012, Pinterest is a pinboard-­‐style photo sharing website that allows users to upload, save, sort and manage images—known as pins—and other media content through collections known as pinboards (Wikipedia.org). Users can create and manage theme-­‐ based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies, and more. Here are some more of those fascinating facts and figures from Honigman’s (2012) article “100 fascinating social media statistics and figures from 2012”, this time about Pinterest: • • • • • • • • • •

It hit 10 million U.S. monthly unique visitors faster than any independent site in history.

97 percent of the fans of Pinterest's Facebook page are women.

Over 80 percent of pins are repins.

80 percent of Pinterest users are women, while 50 percent of all Pinterest users have children.

American users of Pinterest spend an average of 1 hour and 17 minutes on the site per month.

Pinterest referrals spend 70 percent more money than visitors referred from non-­‐social channels.

28.1 percent of Pinterest users have an annual household income of $100,000 or more.

Total unique visitors to Pinterest increased by 2,702.2 percent since May 2011.

Users spend an average of 16 minutes on each Pinterest visit.

Pinterest pins with prices get 36 percent more likes than those without.

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• • • • • • • •

83.9 percent of a pinner’s time is spent “Pinning”, while 15.5 percent is spent liking and 0.6 percent is spent leaving comments.

Out of 17 million brand engagements, 15 percent occurred on the brand's boards and 85 percent occurred elsewhere on Pinterest.

69 percent of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they've bought or wanted to buy, compared with 40 percent of Facebook users.

Over one fifth of all Facebook-­‐connected users are on Pinterest daily, which represents more than two million members.

The most popular age group on Pinterest is 25 -­‐ 34 year olds.

43 percent of people prefer Pinterest over associating with retailers and/or brands; 24 percent chose Facebook.

25 percent of Fortune Global 100 companies have Pinterest accounts.

57 percent of Pinterest users interact with food-­‐related content, the #1 content category.

One of the most important statistics about Pinterest is the fact that “47% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from Pinterest”.[14] Another surprising statistic is the fact that Pinterest has generated more referral traffic for businesses than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined.

In 2012, Pinterest started offering business accounts (the How to Guide can be found here: http://offers.hubspot.com/guide-­‐to-­‐pinterests-­‐new-­‐business-­‐accounts) and, since it is entirely focused on the visual, it is a particularly good place for photographers, chefs, fashion designers, architects, interior designers, web and app developers, non-­‐profits, restaurants, hotels, travel agencies and businesses that sell handmade products.

List of Social Network Sites As the Social Network landscape changes on a daily basis, it is impossible to list all of the available Websites, but these are the most common and popular platforms in use today: NAME

43things Academia.edu Anobii

AsianAvenue Asmallworld

Badoo

ABOUT 43 Things is the world's largest goal-­‐setting community. Join over 3 million people who list their goals, share their progress, and cheer each other on.

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers.

The company's mission it to accelerate the world's research. aNobii is an online reading community built by readers for readers allowing you to shelve, find and share books. Our mission is to bring book lovers together and encourage reading. Use the aNobii website and Apps to find your next read and tell your friends about it.

Asian Avenue is a social networking website targeted to the Asian American community.

ASMALLWORLD is the world’s leading private online community that captures an existing international network of people who are connected by three degrees of separation. Members share similar backgrounds, interests and perspectives. ASMALLWORLD’s unique platform offers powerful tools and user generated content to help members manage their private, social and business lives.

Badoo is already the world’s largest and fastest growing social network

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WEBSITE 43things.com academia.edu anobii.com

asianave.com asmallworld.net

badoo.com

Bebo

Blackplanet Buzznet CafeMom Couchsurfing

Crunchyroll

Dailyburn Dailystrength

Deviantart

Dispora

Eons Exploroo

Facebook

Faceparty

for meeting new people as proven by the millions who have joined and the hundreds of thousands who sign up daily.

Bebo is a popular social networking site which connects you to everyone and everything you care about. Bebo combines community, self-­‐expression and entertainment, enabling you to consume, create, discover, curate and share digital content in entirely new ways.

The largest Black community online for a reason. We have music, jobs, forums, chat, photos, dating personals and groups all targeted to the specific interests of the black community.

Find online communities featuring emo, pop, punk, rock and screamo bands. View thousands of pictures, music videos and connect with fans.

CafeMom is the #1 site on the internet for moms and the premier strategic marketing partner to brands that want to reach moms in a rapidly changing digital environment.

CouchSurfing is an international non-­‐profit network that connects travelers with locals in over 230 countries and territories around the world. Since 2004, members have been using our system to come together for cultural exchange, friendship, and learning experiences.

Crunchyroll is an online video service and community that offers full-­‐ length episodes and movies of the very best in Japanese anime and Asian entertainment. Crunchyroll's content is provided by Asian media leaders including TV TOKYO, Shueisha, Fuji Creative Corporation, Pony Canyon, Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation, Toei Animation, Gonzo, Munhwa Broadcasting of America, and many others.

Share your training with friends and stay motivated. Find training partners, local events, routes, and groups. Social training for runners, triathletes, and cyclists.

DailyStrength was created by internet veterans with more than 20 years of experience conceiving, building, and running the largest communities on the web, including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Photos, Yahoo Personals, Yahoo Groups, GeoCities, Facebook, My Yahoo, Yahoo Message Boards and more. deviantART was created to entertain, inspire, and empower the artist in all of us. Founded in August 2000, deviantART is the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 13 million registered members, attracting 35 million unique visitors per month.

Diaspora lets you sort your connections into groups called aspects.

Unique to Diaspora, aspects ensure that your photos, stories and jokes are shared only with the people you intend. You own your pictures, and you shouldn’t have to give that up just to share them.

Eons.com is the premier online community for Baby Boomers and beyond, who want to learn and do more to make the most of every stage of life.

Travel and explore, meet friends and share experiences with a one-­‐stop social networking community, connecting users to post blogs, articles, videos, and events, book hotels or tours, get travel advice or simply submit your favourite travel photos.

Facebook is a social networking website — a gathering spot, to connect with your friends and with your friends friends. Facebook allows you to make new connections who share a common interest, expanding your personal network.

Faceparty is a UK-­‐based social networking site allowing users to create

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bebo.com

blackplanet.com buzznet.com cafemom.com couchsurfing.org

crunchyroll.com

dailyburn.com dailystrength.org

deviantart.com

disapora.com

eons.com exploroo.com

facebook.com

faceparty.com

Faces

Families Flixster Foursquare

Friendster Gather Geni

Goodreads Google+

hi5networks

Kiwibox

LinkedIn Livemocha MySpace

online profiles and interact with each other using forums and messaging facilities similar to email.

Faces is a social network with an online fraternity, its a great way to make friends. Meet women and men for dating, a relationship, or find people looking to have fun. It is completely free to use and has a 3D compatible free online chat. If you are fun loving and outgoing this is the place to be.

Parenting. Education. Planning. Join our community and meet other parents that you can share tips and ask advice from.

Flixster is a social movie site allowing users to share movie ratings, discover new movies and meet others with similar movie taste.

Foursquare is a location-­‐based mobile platform that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. By “checking in” via a smartphone app or SMS, users share their location with friends while collecting points and virtual badges.

Friendster, a pioneer and leading global online social network, is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them.

Gather is the place where millions of people come for fresh perspective on what's happening now. Gather members can share their own views and join in conversations with others who share their interests.

Geni is solving the problem of genealogy by inviting the world to build the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users add and invite their relatives to join their family tree, which Geni compares to other trees. Matching trees are then merged into the single world family tree, which currently contains nearly 50 million living users and their ancestors.

Goodreads is the largest social network for readers in the world. We have more than 5,100,000 members who have added more than 160,000,000 books to their shelves.

Google+ is a multilingual social networking and identity service owned and operated by Google Inc. It was launched on June 28, 2011. Unlike other conventional social networks which are generally accessed through a single website Google+ as a "social layer" consisting of not just a single site, but rather an overarching "layer" which covers many of its online properties.

Social gaming and entertainment for the worldwide market. hi5 is the world's leading social play network, focused on delivering a fun, interactive and immersive experience online to audiences around the world.

Kiwibox.com is a social networking destination and online magazine for young adults, with over half a million members. Kiwibox is a social network with user profile pages, forums, blogs, and an online magazine.

LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 100 million members in over 200 countries and territories.

Livemocha is the world’s largest online language learning community, offering free and paid online language courses in 35 languages to more than 9 million members from 195 countries around the world.

Aimed at a Gen Y audience, Myspace drives social interaction by providing a highly personalised experience around entertainment and

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faces.com

families.com flixster.com foursquare.com

friendster.com gather.com geni.com

goodreads.com plus.google.com

hi5.com

kiwibox.com

linkedin.com livemocha.com myspace.com

Mywebprofile Netlog Nexopia Pinterest

Playlist Plazes

Raptr Reverbnation Ryze

Shelfari Snapchat

Stickam

Tagged

connecting people to the music, celebrities, TV, movies, and games that they love.

Create your free profile page and stay in touch with your friends all over the world Netlog is an online social portal, specifically targeted at the European youth. On Netlog, you can create your own web page with a blog, pictures, videos, events and much more to share with your friends.

With over 1.2 million members, and hundreds of new accounts created every day, Nexopia is quickly solidifying its reputation as the online place for teens to connect and express themselves.

Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard. Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people.

Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Playlist.com is the world's largest music community. We're here to help our 48 million music fans discover, create, organize, enjoy and share their music playlists.

With Plazes you can now easily coordinate activities online with your friends. Whether it's initiating a spontaneous lunch date or coordinating a trip abroad, Plazes lets you and your friends update each other about what you are doing when and where.

Raptr is the best place for gamers to share, interact, and discover personalized content from all over the web. Raptr is also the only platform that integrates all major gaming platforms and IM services.

ReverbNation.com is the leading online music-­‐marketing platform used by over 1,422,000 artists—plus managers, record labels, and venues— to grow their reach, influence, and business across the internet.

Ryze helps people make connections and grow their networks. You can network to grow your business, build your career and life, find a job and make sales. Or just keep in touch with friends. Members get a free networking-­‐oriented home page and can send messages to other members.

Shelfari is a gathering place for authors, aspiring authors, publishers, and readers, and has many tools and features to help these groups connect with each other in a fun and engaging way.

Snapchat is a photo messaging application developed by Stanford University students. Using the app, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. These sent photographs and videos are known as "Snaps".

Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps (as of May 2012, the range is from 1 to 10 seconds), after which they will be hidden from the recipient's device and deleted from the Snapchat server.

Created in 2005, Stickam is the pioneer of the live interactive video streaming space. With over 7 million registered members, we are home to the largest live community online. The Stickam platform enables anyone to stream live video to audiences large or small, from a computer or mobile device.

Other social networks are for staying in touch with people you already know. At Tagged, we make it easy to meet new people through social

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mywebprofile.com en.netlog.com nexopia.com pinterest.com

playlist.com plazes.com

raptr.com reverbnation.com ryze.com

shelfari.com Snapchat.com

stickam.com

tagged.com

games, friend suggestions, browsing profiles, group interests and much more.

TravBuddy is a free site for people who love to explore the world travbuddy.com Travbuddy around them. You can use TravBuddy to find travel buddies, record travel experiences in travel blogs, or share travel tips with travel reviews.

Travellerspoint Travellerspoint is one of the web's largest and most active travel travellerspoint.com communities with members representing every country in the world.

More than 30,000 blogs have shared 175,000 stories to date and over 1.2 million photos have been posted. Our forums and travel helpers answer numerous travel-­‐related questions 365 days of the year.

TravelPod.com was released in 1997 when it was introduced as the travelpod.com Travelpod web's first site to enable its members to create online travel blogs which revolutionized the way people travel and share their adventures with the world.

The people you connect to can be your friends, people who live in your tribe.net Tribe.net neighborhood, or people who live in your city that share a common interest with you. Tribe.net makes finding those people easier.

Viadeo is a Web 2.0 professional social network with over 50 million viadeo.com Viadeo members worldwide in 2013, and a membership base that was growing by more than one million per month in 2009.[4] Members include business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of enterprises.

Get in touch with people to generate contacts that stay connected to xing.com Xing you for a lifetime. They may well help you in your career by providing contacts, offering jobs, or coming up with ideas. Thanks to XING you can stay in touch with your contacts all the time! On top of that, you can get new contacts, find a job, events, groups, and companies.

Chinese social networks include RenRen, Kaixin, Qzone, Douban, Pengyou and the Foursquares of China, Jiepang and Qieke, and Ushi, a business networking social network similar to LinkedIn.

Virtual Game Worlds According to Wikipedia, “a virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a computer-­‐ based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects.” Wikipedia goes on to add that the term is largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where users take the form of two-­‐dimensional, or three-­‐dimensional avatars visible and, through them, interact with others.

Virtual game worlds, specifically, “are platforms that replicate a three dimensional environment in which users can appear in the form of personalized avatars and interact with each other as they would in real life. In this sense, virtual worlds are probably the ultimate manifestation of Social Media, as they provide the highest level of social presence and media richness of all applications" under discussion” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 64, 2010).

List of Virtual Game World Websites As the landscape for Virtual Game worlds change on a daily basis, it is impossible to list all of the available Websites here, but these are some of the most common and popular platforms in use today:

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NAME 4th Coming, The

9 Dragons

Allods Online

Astro Battle Battlestar Gallactica

Bloomers Island

Continuum

Eggochi

Eve Online

ABOUT x The 4th Coming was one of the first MMORPGs available on the the4thcoming.com Internet, and its success was immediate. Why? The Fourth Coming is one of those unique games in which the ambiance immediately hooks you. The addictive music, the beautiful graphics, and of course the deep story line help pump in a vast player community that is still growing.

9Dragons is a martial arts-­‐themed massively multiplayer online 9dragons.gamescampus. role playing game, developed by Korean video game company com Indy21. The game features 3D graphics and traditional Massively multiplayer online game control schemes. Set in China during the Ming Dynasty, it includes actual Chinese geography and historical features such as the Great Wall of China and the famous Shaolin Monastery.

Allods Online is a free-­‐to-­‐play 3D fantasy MMORPG developed by allods.gpotato.com Astrum Nival and published by Mail.Ru Group in Russia, Turkey and Italy, Webzen Dublin Ltd. in Europe and North America, Cayenne Tech in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, Level Up! Games in Brazil and the Philippines, and Game Power 7 in the MENA region (renamed as Allods the Legend).

Overhead multi-­‐directional shoot-­‐em-­‐up where players design astrobattle.com their own ships.

Battlestar Galactica Online is a browser-­‐based Massively battlestar-­‐ Multiplayer Online Game based on the 2004 television series galactica.bigpoint.com Battlestar Galactica. Released in open beta on February 8, 2011, it was developed by Bigpoint and Artplant using the Unity game engine for the game client in the browser. The game server is written in Erlang. In less than three months of release, the game surpassed 2 million registered users but subsequent retention statistics have not been made available.

The mission of Bloomers! is to bring the magical world of bloomersisland.com gardens, flowers, plants and nature to life, in exciting new ways for young children. When rich play meets a variety of play-­‐ grounds, and compels children to engage with the natural world around them in relevant and fun ways, developmental milestones can be reached, educational moments can be achieved, and most importantly, children learn to take the game offline and keep the play alive.

Continuum began as Sniper in 1995 and proceeded through 2 getcontinuum.com years of beta development as SubSpace and launched commercially on November 30, 1997. So in preparation of the glorious 10th year anniversary in 2007-­‐2008, we're looking for some fresh blood to revitalize the population and to bring some new skills to battle against a decade of veteran spaceship mastery.

An amazing free virtual world located in a huge park. Within the eggochi.com park live remarkable creatures that can fly. A virtual world where there are games, missions island, cinema, mall and more... After registration you get an egg, from this egg an Eggochi come. You need to raise and take care of it.

Eve Online (stylised EVE Online) is a video game by CCP Games. It eveonline.com is a player-­‐driven, persistent-­‐world MMORPG set in a science

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Guild Wars 2

Infantry

Lord of the Rings

Meridian 59

Omerta

PlaneShift

fiction space setting. Characters pilot customizable ships through a galaxy of over 7,500 star systems. Most star systems are connected to one or more other star systems by means of stargates. The star systems can contain moons, planets, stations, wormholes, asteroid belts and complexes.

Guild Wars 2 is a massively multiplayer online role-­‐playing game developed by ArenaNet and published by NCsoft. Set in the fantasy world of Tyria, the game follows the re-­‐emergence of Destiny's Edge, a disbanded guild dedicated to fighting the Elder Dragons, a Lovecraftian species that has seized control of Tyria in the time since the original Guild Wars. The game takes place in a persistent world with a story that progresses in instanced environments.

Infantry Online is a multiplayer combat video game with sprite animation graphics, using complex soldier, ground vehicle and space-­‐ship models on typically complex terrains. Team with gamers from around the world in this adrenaline-­‐pumping collection of online combat games. It's all-­‐out frenetic action in the world of Infantry where battles featuring up to 100+ wage throughout the day. Easy to play and simple to get into, Infantry offers a quick blend of tactics and action unlike any other massively multiplayer online game.

The Lord of the Rings Online (commonly abbreviated to LOTRO, LotRO), initially branded as The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, is a massively multiplayer online role-­‐ playing game (MMORPG) for Microsoft Windows and OS X set in a fantasy universe based upon J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-­‐earth writings and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. It takes place during the time period of The Lord of the Rings.

Meridian 59 was the first 3D massively multiplayer game, released in 1996. It's back, and it's free to play! What makes Meridian fun is the small community of players you'll meet every time you log in. Build up your character by fighting monsters and working together with others to solve puzzles. But watch your back: Meridian has a well-­‐balanced player-­‐versus-­‐player combat system that will keep you coming back for more long after you've mastered the game world.

Omerta is a text-­‐based massive multiplayer RPG game, based on the stories about the legendary don Barafranca. Set in the 1930's gangster and mafia world, the game is all about status, money and respect. Players get rank points by doing crimes, stealing cars and busting friends out of jail. You can even run you're own organised crime ring, robbing local banks and holding up cars on quiet roads. As you delve deeper into the dark gangster world, many players find other business opportunities, such as gambling clubs, reselling booze and even drug dealing.

PlaneShift is a Role Playing Game immersed into a 3D virtual fantasy world which is FULLY FREE to play. Fully free means you will have no surprises of premium content which will limit your gameplay or unbalance the game. There are no limitations in skills, ranks, abilities, items you can gain with your free account.

There are no time limits or additional constraints. Other similar

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guildwars2.com/en

freeinfantry.org

www.lotro.com

meridian59.com

barafranca.com

planeshift.it

games just advertize the "free" concept to sell you premium accounts. We don't. Servers and bandwidth will be donated by sponsors.

Runes of Magic Runes of Magic (RoM) is a massively multiplayer online role-­‐ us.runesofmagic.gamefo playing game (MMORPG) developed by the Taiwanese developer rge.com/news/index Runewaker Entertainment and adapted for the English and German-­‐speaking market by German company Frogster Interactive. Frogster has also opened servers for France, Spain, Poland, Netherlands, and Australia as well as servers dedicated to the European Union.

Terra Terra is a FREE Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) terraoutlands.com persistent world universe in which Warriors battle with heavy weapons on personal and team levels to conquer the Outlands!

Terra is a war game unlike any other, modeled after none, similar to absolutely nothing! Terra is a persistent game world in which you fight both Warriors (humans) and Robots (AI) to gain rank/experience and built your own assets, claim land and protect it. Play with friends, create your own clan, or even meet new friends.

Urban Dead Urban Dead is a free-­‐to-­‐play browser-­‐based multi-­‐player game urbandead.com where you play the survivor or victim of a zombie outbreak in a quarantined city centre, alongside tens of thousands of others.

Xonotic Xonotic is a free and fast-­‐paced first person shooter for Linux, xonotic.org Mac, and Windows. It combines addictive, arena-­‐style gameplay with rapid movement and a wide array of weapons. Xonotic is available under the permissive GPLv2 license.

World of Warcraft World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-­‐ us.battle.net/wow playing game (MMORPG) created by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994.

World of Warcraft takes place within the Warcraft world of Azeroth, approximately four years after the events at the conclusion of Blizzard's previous Warcraft release, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.

More virtual game worlds can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_online_role-­‐playing_games/.

Virtual Social Worlds “Virtual social worlds allow inhabitants to choose their behavior more freely and essentially live a virtual life similar to their real life. As in virtual game worlds, virtual social world users appear in the form of avatars and interact in a three-­‐dimensional virtual environment; however, in this realm, there are no rules restricting the range of possible interactions, except for basic physical laws such as gravity” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 64, 2010).

Founded by San Francisco-­‐based Linden Research Inc., Second Life is arguably the most well-­‐ known of all virtual social worlds. Users—who prefer to be called “residents”—can do almost anything that is possible in real life, such as talking to other avatars, taking a walk, shopping, or even learning about products and services (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 64, 2010). Second Life users can “create content (e.g., to design virtual clothing or furniture items) and to sell this content to others in exchange for

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Linden Dollars, a virtual currency traded against the U.S. Dollar on the Second Life Exchange” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 64, 2010).

“Virtual social worlds offer a multitude of opportunities for companies in marketing (advertising/communication, virtual product sales/v-­‐Commerce, marketing research), and human resource and internal process management” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 64, 2010). For example, working with Second Life, Xerox developed a customer-­‐centric research and development model that allowed its scientists around the world to collaborate with customers to determine which features and products they would like to see offered. The exercise was so successful Xerox attracted more than five million people to its Second Life virtual island (Glagowski, 2007).

Also partnering with Second Life, Cisco Systems, a supplier of networking equipment and network management solutions for the Internet, created a virtual world in which visitors could learn how to use the company’s products. In this virtual world, Cisco has two islands; one that features an amphitheater for mass tutorials and product launch details; the other—Cisco Island—provides an area for people to discuss the company’s products and it allows Cisco to conduct class meetings, executive meetings, as well as provide technical support and training to its customers (Holden, 2006).

The multinational computer technology and services company IBM purchased 12 Second Life islands to serve as virtual meeting places for employees, an information marketing center for IBM customers and a virtual retail area for customers to meet and discuss IBM products (Fathi, 2007). IBM also uses Second Life to both improve customer service and engage customers in discussions (Fathi, 2007).

List of Virtual Social World Websites As the landscape for Virtual Social Worlds changes on a daily basis, it is impossible to list all of the available Websites, but these are the most common and popular platforms in use today: NAME Azivia

Onverse

Second Life

Shaker

ABOUT Azivia is a fully customizable, high-­‐end browser based virtual world. Azivia is a cutting edge 3D web based Virtual World Platform that runs on your browser.

It is fully customized with a huge range of high quality avatars, environments and simulations to meet your specific meeting, training and educational needs.

Onverse is a free online virtual world full of fun people and cool things to do.

We give you an online profile, a free virtual home, clothing, furniture, tools and points to get you started. You can customize your avatar however you like and chat live in a fully 3D environment. You can play games, explore for points, go shopping, decorate your home and avatar, and meet people.

Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab which was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs called Viewers enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore the world (known as the grid), meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another. Second Life is intended for people aged 13 and over, and as of 2011 has more than 20 million registered user accounts.

Shaker creates online venues where you can host events of different kinds for just about any size of audience. From live-­‐stream music events to networking events and conferences.

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WEBSITE azivia.com

onverse.com

secondlife.com

atshaker.com

SmallWorlds

Twinity

SmallWorlds is a new generation of virtual world that runs inside your web smallworlds.com browser, without the need to download or install any other software.

SmallWorlds combines media, web content, and casual games into a highly accessible & compelling 3D world that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the web, bringing Virtual Worlds into the mainstream. SmallWorlds allows users to create and customize their own rooms and worlds, and fill them with a wide variety of items and activities for them and their friends to enjoy together. With their online friends and acquaintances, they can share experiences like playing games, watching YouTube videos, listening to their favorite bands, browsing through photo galleries, and so much more.

SmallWorlds brings together the best aspects of online games, instant messaging, social networks and digital media, and wraps them into a persistent virtual world that is never more than a hyperlink away.

Twinity is a 3D mirror world based on real cities and real people. Virtual twinity.com World is a space for an online community which looks and feels almost like the real world. virtual world People are represented by avatars, and they are able to carry our activities that they can do in real life, without the constraints of real space, such as, having a 3D chat with people who are thousands of miles away (even with voice on VOIP!), modelling without the bother of glue and paint, hanging out in virtual cities and even owning a 3D apartment in areas which would be out of reach in real life! virtual world Twinity does exactly this! Twinity is a 3D Virtual World currently spanning Virtual Berlin, Virtual London and Virtual Miami, where you travel as an avatar, own 3D Apartments and have a 3D Chat, through text or VOIP, with people from across the world!

Conclusion Few companies will succeed in this new millennium without embracing social media. UGC refers to a wide range of applications, including blogs, news stories, digital video, podcasting, mobile phone photography, online encyclopedias and user reviews. UGC can be broken down into three categories— mobile dating and chat room services, personal content distribution sites and social networks.

When a company is first delving into social media, Eley & Tiley's (pg. 85, 2009) state that there are four steps of social media that should be followed—listen, join, participate and create—and these steps must be strictly followed in that order. Listening can be done on blogs, content communities and social networks. By keeping an eye on any comments made to blogs, uploaded content or on actual Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter or a whole host of other social network pages, social media marketers can get a sense of what the community feels about their business.

Once you understand the community and what it is all about, it is time to join a social network.

Many networks require that you have an account on their site to participate in the discussions and you should sign up to these sites as it is always better to have an account because you always want to claim your brand and/or company name to gain credibility.

Once you have joined the discussion, then it is time to participate in the community.

Participating includes replying and posting to online forums and blogs, reviewing products and services and bookmarking sites that you like or find interesting. By participating, you will build your online brand and people will start to respect you as a valuable contributor to the community (Eley & Tilley, pg. 88,

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2009). When respected, others will help to promote you and, possibly, your company without even being asked to do so, which, as most marketers will tell you, is some of the best marketing around.

When you have built yourself an online brand by listening, joining and participating, it is time to create your own content. You will now have an audience to share your content with and they will help you spread your content far and wide.

According to their influential article Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) break Social Media down into the following six different catogories: Collaborative projects, Blogs and micro-­‐blogs, Content communities, Social networking sites, Virtual game worlds, and Virtual social worlds.

The main idea behind collaborative projects is that joint efforts can lead to a better outcome than individual action (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 62, 2010). Collaborative projects can be used to increase productivity. For example, the Finnish mobile manufacturer Nokia “uses internal wikis to update employees on project status and to trade ideas, which are used by about 20% of its 68,000 staff members” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010). Also, the U.S. application software company Adobe Systems “maintains a list of bookmarks to company-­‐related websites and conversations on Delicious” (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010).

Social bookmarking is both the method of storing and managing Web page bookmarks with individually chosen keywords as well as the sharing of this information with others. At social bookmarking sites, users can tag, save, manage and share Websites with their friends and their connections. Users can add descriptions in the form of metadata and these descriptions can be anything from free text comments, favorable or unfavorable votes, or tags that collectively form a social thread of information.

For the promotion of a business, social bookmarking is important because it helps a Website get quality backlinks. When a Website is submitted for ranking by a search engine, the search engine considers the quality of the backlinks, i.e., the quality of the sites linking back to it. This means that if you bookmark popular sites, the search engine spiders will automatically follow the links back to your site.

Blogs are incredibly popular because they are cheap, easy to set up and they can provide maximum exposure with limited effort. Blogs can take many forms, including a diary, a news service, a collection of links to Internet resources, a series of book reviews, reports of activity on a project, the journal of an expedition, a photographic record of a building project, or any one of a number of other forms. Although similar to a blogging website, a microblog site differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate size.

Content communities exist for a wide range of media types, including text, photos, videos, and PowerPoint presentations (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010). Content community sites such as YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr, Metacafe, Picasa, and Vimeo are useful for sharing media content as their users number in the millions. Although businesses might run the risk of having their copyright-­‐protected material stolen, the advantages of getting one’s content into the social media community seriously outweighs the disadvantages of potential copyright infringement (Kaplan and Haenlein, pg. 63, 2010).

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The popularity of these content communities make them a very attractive contact channel for many businesses.

Perhaps the most recognizable of all social media sites are the social networks. Sites such as Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and MySpace are instantly recognizable. In China, RenRen, Kaixin, Qzone, Jiepang, Qieke and Ushi dominate the social network landscape.

Facebook claims there are four steps to business success on Facebook, including building an audience, connecting with people, engaging an audience and influencing them through their friends and family members (facebook.com/business). Facebook is also the perfect place for businesses to manage their brands and reputations, understand their customers, recruit talent, and promote events as well as to network and build relationships.

Instagram can be used by more than just fashion brands. Even though it is a social picture-­‐ sharing platform, companies as diverse as General Electric (GE), the National Football League (NFL), Red Bull, and Sharpie all use it to build their brand. GE “posts neat behind-­‐the-­‐scenes pics of things you wouldn’t normally see, like engineers working on huge engines, industrial machines and new technology they are developing” (Weissman, 2012). The NFL’s Instagram account showcases the NFL's athletes and their important games “by pulling in photos from all of the NFL photographers and mixing in other fun things like vintage football pictures” (Weissman, 2012). Along with using Instagram for contests, Red Bull “posts high-­‐quality action shots of all kind of sports and adrenaline-­‐pumping stunts” (Weissman, 2012). Perhaps the most counter-­‐intuitive of all these examples is Sharpie, the marker pen maker, whose Instagram account features hand-­‐drawn images that use Sharpies as coloring tools (Weissman, 2012).

Interestingly, Pinterest has generated more referral traffic for businesses than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. Since it is entirely focused on the visual, it is a particularly good place for photographers, chefs, fashion designers, architects, interior designers, web and apps developers, non-­‐profits, restaurants, hotels, travel agencies and businesses that sell handmade products.

Another recent addition to the social networking landscape is Snapchat. It was one of the runaway success stories of 2012 (Wasserman, 2013). Users send about 50 million pics (called "Snaps") a day on the platform. Bearing truth to that statement that copying is the highest form of flattery, the success of Snapchat has prompted Facebook to release a competitor, Poke (Wasserman, 2013), which is gaining some traction.

In what might be a first for marketing through Snapchat, the New York frozen yogurt chain 16 Handles “is leveraging Snapchat for a promotion that presents users with a coupon that self-­‐destructs within 10 seconds” (Wasserman, 2013). Noticing that a lot of its young users were using Snapchat handles to interact on social media, the yogurt chain started an advertising campaign that asked users to send them a picture of themselves and their friends at a 16Handles location tasting one of their flavors (Wasserman, 2013). In return, users received a coupon for anywhere from 16% to 100% off their purchase, but they only had 10 seconds to let the cashier scan the coupon (Wasserman, 2013).

Social media is all about adding value to communities of customers and prospects by providing interesting content (blogs, podcasts, webinars, etc.). It allows immediate engagement with groups of customers and prospects. Today, the traditional model of blasting messages to customers and potential

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customers is fading as trust in corporate America is at an all-­‐time low. In today’s difficult economic climate, peer referrals are becoming more and more important. Consumers are tuning out regular advertising and tapping into social media for advice.

Foursquare is another SNS that can prove very beneficial to businesses. Marketing through Foursquare can be some of the best viral marketing around. When a person check-­‐ins to an establishment, she can immediately inform all of her friends and contacts about where she is and why she likes a place. Because Foursquare also uses past check-­‐ins to personalize a user’s recommendation, a strong customer relationship can be built. Foursquare can also inform businesses what their customers are saying about them and their brand.

Social Media is constrained only by the imagination of a company’s marketers and it offers enormous potential both creatively and financially to any company willing to enter the arena.

Tips •

When first delving into social media, there are four steps of social media to remember—listen, join, participate and create. And follow the steps strictly in that order.

•

Use www.knowem.com to claim your brand and then set up accounts at all of the major social networking sites.

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Sign up on social media sites even if you don't plan to use them extensively as it is always better to have an account even if you are not required to have one because you always want to claim your brand and/or company name to gain credibility.

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Join communities where you are most likely to find your customers—I know this sounds obvious, but some research is required to understand your customer's favorite hangouts.

Once you have joined the discussion, it is time to participate in the community; post to online forums and blogs, review products and services and bookmark sites that interest you.

Once you have built yourself an online brand by listening, joining and participating, it is time to create your own content.

For the promotion of a business, social bookmarking is important because it helps a Website get quality backlinks. Discover relevant blogs and ask for backlinks.

Create a blog–they are incredibly popular because they are cheap, easy to set up and they provide maximum exposure with limited effort.

Once you have created a blog remember, first amendment protection only goes so far, therefore anyone planning to blog on subjects others might deem libelous or scandalous should take out liability insurance for defamation.

Although similar to a blogging website, microblog sites such as Twitter and QQ in China allow people to broadcast short messages, so-­‐called microposts that can consist of text messages enriched with contextual metadata.

• • • • •

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Link content and similar keywords throughout your social channels.

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Include a strong call to action in all of your content.

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•

Participate by replying and posting to online forums and blogs, reviewing products and services and bookmarking sites that you like or find interesting.

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Create and ask readers to sign up for an RSS feed.

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Answer all questions and share peer referrals.

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Feature community members on your site.

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Share customer stories throughout your site.

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Ask influencers to share your web links.

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Interview an influencer for web content.

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Have an influencer guest blog.

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Help an influencer write content about your brand.

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Share products with influencers for feedback and web content.

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Create Wikipedia web pages for your company.

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Make yourself an industry leader by curating and aggregating the best content from around the web on subjects that interest you.

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Pull together all of the company’s best customer testimonials in a social bookmark and then link customers and potential customers to it.

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Personalize your blog and ensure that it contains great content, frequent posts, has user friendly navigation, eye pleasing content. It should also connect to other content.

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Build a following on Twitter by sharing, listening, questioning your followers, responding to requests, rewarding customers, demonstrating leadership, referencing articles, and championing your stakeholders.

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Twitter also offers three ways to advertise on its service; promoted tweets; promoted trends; and promoted accounts.

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Facebook four steps to business success include building an audience, connecting with people, engaging an audience and influencing them through their friends and family members.

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Create a Foursquare presence to allow check-­‐ins and promote localized specials and deals.

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Start a LinkedIn group around a subject matter that want to blog about.

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Link back to dedicated landing pages on your Website for conversion.

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Create a forum or community section on your website for like-­‐minded individuals to congregate.

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Post your presentations on Slideshare and embed them on your site.

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•

Include your website in all your social media channel bios and if you have an Academia.edu account, add a link to it in your email signature.

Footnotes:

[1] http://usenet.com/usenet.html [2] Media Law Resource Center. Legal Actions Against Bloggers. http://www.medialaw.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Hot_Topics/Lawsuits_Against_Bloggers/Lawsuits_ Against_Bloggers.htm (Accessed February 2, 2013).

[3] http://twitter.com/about#about [4] www.youtube.com/t/about_youtube [5] http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics [6] www.foursquare.com [7] www.foursquare.com/about [8] www.foursquare.com/basics/about [9] www.foursquare.com/about [10] www.foursquare.com/basics/tour [11] ibid [12] ibid [13] ibid [14] www.pinterest.com

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