Social Media is one of the emerging technology trends, forming one part of the ‘SMAC’ quartet. SMAC is an acronym for Social media-Mobility-Analytics-Cloud computing. Social Media (SM) refers to interaction among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. SM depends on mobile & web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals & communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. They introduce substantial & pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, & individuals.
Geocities, (1994), was one of the first SM sites. The concept was for users to create their own websites, characterized by one of six “cities” that were known for certain characteristics. There is an increasing trend towards using SM monitoring tools that allow marketers to search, track, & analyze conversation on the web about their brand or about topics of interest. This can be useful in PR management & campaign tracking, allowing the user to measure ROI, competitor-auditing, & general public engagement.
Types of social media:
- Collaborative projects (Wikipedia)
- Blogs and microblogs (Twitter)
- Social news networking sites (Digg and Leakernet)
- Content communities (YouTube and DailyMotion)
- Social & Professional networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn)
- Virtual game-worlds (World of Warcraft)
- Virtual social worlds (Second Life)
- Online bulletin board (Reddit)
- Visual bookmarking (Pinterest)
The honeycomb framework of social media is based on the following 7 functional building blocks:
- Identity: represents the extent to which users reveal their identities in a social media setting. This can include disclosing information such as name, age, gender, profession, location, and also information that portrays users in certain ways.
- Conversations: represents the extent to which users communicate with other users in a social media setting. Many social media sites are designed primarily to facilitate conversations among individuals and groups.
- Sharing: represents the extent to which users exchange, distribute, and receive content. The term ‘social’ often implies that exchanges between people are crucial. In many cases, however, sociality is about the objects that mediate these ties.
- Presence: represents the extent to which users can know if other users are accessible. It includes knowing where others are, in the virtual world and/or in the real world, and whether they are available.
- Relationships: represents the extent to which users can be related (associated) to other users. ‘Relate’ means that two or more users have some form of association that leads them to converse, share objects of sociality, meet up, or simply just list each other as a friend or fan.
- Reputation: the extent to which users can identify the standing of others, including themselves, in a social media setting. In most cases, reputation is a matter of trust, but since information technologies are not yet good at determining such highly qualitative criteria, social media sites rely on ‘mechanical Turks’: tools that automatically aggregate user-generated information to determine trustworthiness.
- Groups: The group functional block represents the extent to which users can form communities and sub-communities. The more ‘social’ a network becomes, the bigger the group of friends, followers, and contacts.
The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks. These building blocks help explain the engagement needs of the social media audience. For instance, LinkedIn users are thought to care mostly about identity, reputation, and relationships, whereas YouTube’s primary features are sharing, conversations, groups, and reputation.
Many companies build their own social containers that attempt to link the seven functional building blocks around their brands. These are private communities that engage people around a narrower theme, as in around a particular brand, vocation or hobby, rather than social media containers such as Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. PR departments face significant challenges in dealing with viral negative sentiment directed at organizations or individuals on social media platforms (dubbed “sentimentitis”), which may be a reaction to an announcement or event.
#tag (hashtag) is a word or an unspaced phrase prefixed with the hash symbol (#). It is a form of metadata tag. Words in messages on microblogging and social networking services such as Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Twitter etc. may be tagged by putting “#” before them, either as they appear in a sentence, (e.g., “New artists announced for #SXSW 2013 Music Festival!”) or appended to it.
Hashtags make it possible to group such messages, since one can search for the hashtag and get the set of messages that contain it. A hashtag is only connected to a specific medium and can therefore not be linked and connected to pictures or messages from different platforms.
Source: Internet