Saravanan Sahadevan

Recently, I had to present a talk on my friendly topic Social Media to a general crowd. I prepared a not too short presentation and I have converted it into text. It’s pretty basic and it’s just an introduction of the whole picture of what social media is about. Feel free to pass it out around to anyone trying to figure out on “What the heck is Social Media”. The whole presentation are as follows.

The Internet has been a vibrant medium over the years which has been filled with enormous amounts of static pages and information. The medium itself has been continuously growing since the booming era’s of the 90’s. But in the last 3 years in pursuit, there has been a significant change on the Internet. The beginning of the 2nd generation internet users has lead into an evolution of the internet in to what we call today as the Web 2.0 and more recently, it has been redefined and has created a subset known as the Social Media. 

A common way to illustrate social media is by marking out or comparing it with Main stream media. When we say main stream media, it actually consist of the common media platforms such as newspapers, magazines, radio channels, television networks and so on. This platforms are more often not interactive and where majority of our human populations rely upon for information, entertainment and education. Where else, Social Media is never static. It’s highly interactive. When a content is produced and distributed over the internet, there is now a room for feedback. It may be in the forms of comments or ratings. As social media evolves, the options of feedback grows too. As by many definitions, the term Social Media is best described as tools, websites and softwares on the web that allows people to connect and share.  

Content over Social Media is distributed on 4 forms which is text, image, audio and video. However, this forms are channeled into various social media platforms as we call it. These common platforms are as follows. 

Blogs & Microblogs - The word blog is a contraction of the term called Web Logs. Often individuals use this as a platform to publish post of interest. Commonly the post is displayed in a reverse-chronological order. A typical blog would consist of text, images, links and other media related to its niche. The fact that makes a blog a social media platform are the ability to put down a comment on a particular blog post. Notice that now there is an immediate interaction going on with the author of the post and commenters. This could not happen in mainstream platforms such as newspapers. Now this is a serious advantage for the editorial industry. Looking deeper into blogs, we have another platform called, Microblogging which consist streams of post that are very short in nature. Example of a popular Microblogging network application would be Twitter. Twitter restricts you to a post of only 140 characters and that is a length of a text message. 

Wiki’s - Wiki is a page or a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who access it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wiki’s are often used today for collaborative purposes and to power community based websites. For instance, the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best known wiki’s on the web. 

Social Networks - Social Networks are virtual communities that allows people to connect within their interest or beyond that. The ability to socialize online has become very interactive in the recent days. It has come to a state that it is even possible for people to virtually poke and provide a virtual bear hug. The most used social network online till date would be Facebook that has over 70 million users on its community. People these days use this networks to not only socialize but even to market a brand or product and even find a job.

Social App’s (Web Applications) - Social Web Applications are web applications that allows people to create contents and as well have the ability to share them with friends or the public. For a better understanding, we would look at Evernote ; a social remember everything software. Evernote allows you to capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform and makes this information accessible and searchable from anywhere. At the same time, It has the ability to share this information at instant to anyone you like. The whole backbone of the system is the web 2.0 architecture known as cloud computing.

Well, we can say Social Media is important as the capacity of audience in it is pretty huge. With facts such as 115 million blogs tracked by Technorati last quarter, 70 over million users on Facebook, and 70 over million videos shared on Youtube says it all. This enormous volume has already reached the eyes of large corporates and they have already begin serious campaigns on brand awareness and customer relationships. As you can see, the power of social media is the ability to share and rate information. This would really impact us in the future in a positive way as informations would become rich in value. To sum it all up, I would say that Social Media is a change or shift in how people communicate more efficiently and how people provide values in content authority. 

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