Social interaction is the reason humans create societies. There is some mysterious yet powerful value inherent to the way people interact with each other. We have a yearning desire to be “in the loop” with everyone in our environment; to know the business of those with whom we interact. Unified socially, we are able to produce, consume and thrive on a level unattainable without the construct of society. When observed through the current state of technology, social interaction is a driving force for advancements in public and private infrastructure, as well as an increased amount of interaction between the members of society. Studying this interaction can provide you with insight into the sociological happenings of modern society. It can also give you or your business a competitive edge in developing products or services that will meet peoples’ needs & wants. It is these traits that give social networks an intrinsic value beyond their surface use of connecting people.
“The World Wide Web”. “The Internet”. “Social Networks”. The word “social” itself implies interaction. We visualize Networks as webs of connections, whether it be connections between people, content, or content and people.
Social Media is composed of two overlapping rings, one ring comprised of people while the other is comprised of content. Both rings must be stimulated in a spot where the two overlap in order to provoke the social interaction that is sought from utilizing social media. To be the most useful, the point should be somewhere that both attracts people and provokes new, similar content.
Every place social media exists should have both of these rings, with a unique demographic for each ring.
We have provided a brief examination of the rings of popular social media networks, the mediums that we feel are the most important as of this papers’ writing:
Facebook enjoys a very large amount of highly accurate personal information about a massive section of the public. Its user base spans the entire globe capturing content from virtually every culture, location and lifestyle on earth. Boasting an impressive adoption rate, Facebook offers its users an extensive personal bio, pic/vid hosting, wall, chat client, and a calendar full of friend’s events, all in a tightly controlled domain inspiring interaction. Facebook is responsible for reconnecting people with many of the people from their past and provokes a large amount of interaction in the real world.
The People Ring is composed of highly validated information, not only by the Facebook infrastructure, but also largely by the community. Facebook is built in a way that prevents false identities by placing each user’s identity on every action they perform.
Content is highly personal and revolves around each person’s real life identity, offering each user an extensive personal bio. One of Facebook’s main features is the status, a micro blog that allows users to update as often as they like, which has seen large adoption in the mobile industry. Additionally, each person is given a wall which provokes a lot of interaction between individuals and groups. The integrated chat comes close to replacing, and in some cases completely replaces, the need for an external instant messaging system.
Content is highly personal and revolves around each person’s real life identity, offering each user an extensive personal bio. One of Facebook’s main features is the status, a micro blog that allows users to update as often as they like, which has seen large adoption in the mobile industry. Additionally, each person is given a wall which provokes a lot of interaction between individuals and groups. The integrated chat comes close to replacing, and in some cases completely replaces, the need for an external instant messaging system.
The business value of Facebook comes from the Content Ring. The types of data that people are sharing on Facebook are both a powerful tools for marketing as well as for market research. Facebook is now the most popular social media website on the Internet, with more unique hits per day than any of the other social media sites mentioned in this paper. Hacked Existence has conducted studies into Facebook based on data collected from active profiles. Facebook reaches a large audience with quality data. If you want a social media presence, Facebook is the best place to start to get the word of your business out to the people around you.
For more information on Facebook, check out "A Look at Facebook Five Years Later", a white paper written by the members of Hacked Existence here.
Twitter is a micro blog with a small bio for each blogger. It is based around constant updates that are very short in length and often links to external sources. Its count of following/followers gives each user a pretty accurate estimation of the initial level of exposure they will receive. Twitter is perfect for mobile platforms, and as such, has seen great adoption by people who have Web enabled cellular phones.
Twitter is composed of individuals, groups and companies who actively update and read through small grained content. Because the content is small grained, it is perfect for mobile platforms, so many tweets are generated and consumed by people who have web enabled mobile phones.
Twitter content can be anything under the sun, and often links to external content. Twitter also has a built in tagging system allowing search engine like functionality of tweets as well as creating links between large amounts of related tweets. Content can be anything from current news topics to personal status updates. Tweeting picture updates from mobile phones is also popular.
Overlap: In order to attract an audience on twitter, tweets should be useful and pertinent content. This can be gauged by how often your tweets are re-tweeted. Finding the overlap that provokes more interaction is as simple as making tweets that other people find pertinent or interesting enough to retweet.
The business value of Twitter comes from the Overlap. Twitter is currently the hot new social media service. Everybody and everything seems to have a twitter feed sending out “tweets” to an eager audience. Even popular celebrities use twitter themselves. Most of Twitter’s value comes from “trending topics”, or topics that appear in a large number of tweets. This gives you an insight into the public zeitgeist, as well as the ability to stay abreast of hot topics. Twitter is easy to manage and can reach a vast audience quickly. It is recommended to acquire a twitter as soon as possible. It is important to acquire a twitter name that closely relates to your business or product.
YouTube is a video hosting platform. YouTube gives users the ability to post and comment on videos as well as the ability to post video responses. Alternatively, a user can make a YouTube channel and simply add videos from other users without posting any videos themselves.
YouTube users come in two main groups, the people who post their own videos and the people who make channels out of other people’s videos.
YouTube content is mostly videos, the topics of which span just about everything, from personal video blogs to internet video memes. The ability to comment and make video responses to videos on YouTube prompts users to interact with other video posters.
YouTube can make videos go viral, but something must be really special about your content. Provided you have viral worthy content, giving the video a small push at the beginning can lead to viral exposure almost instantly, as the YouTube infrastructure is built around exposing videos that gain fast views. Video view count is the metric used to evaluate the amount exposure a video receives on YouTube.
The business value of YouTube comes from the People Ring. The people are the ones generating content and posting it for anyone else to view. People seem to enjoy this “on-demand” video content. Everything from TV shows to video reviews of products to user opinions to comedy videos can be found. Even just uploading old commercials your company has run on a TV network will get people viewing them, at zero cost to you. Having a presence on YouTube guarantees that you will be able to interact on a visual level with people who your product will touch.
How the individual represents themselves within the company, as well as how they represent themselves to individuals in other companies. LinkedIn can be used to provide a more personal feel during interaction between an employee and the employees of a client company. It allows each person to establish their capabilities and qualifications within their career and can be used to convince clients that your company is composed of individuals capable of delivering the level of quality necessary. Finally, it can be used to maintain networks of people whom an individual has interacted with in the business world. LinkedIn can be used to gain exposure for your firm as the amount of people in the “People Ring” grows.
The people ring on LinkedIn is composed of business professionals. It is a subsection of the public who take pride in their resumes, experience, skills and networks of like minded people.
The content on LinkedIn is composed of each person’s work histories, resumes, qualifications and skills. Things like blogs and widgets can be added to each person’s profile to provide content beyond personal corporate histories.
The overlap for LinkedIn lies in the fact that each person works for a company, and is expanded through the relationship that each person makes with members of other companies. Things like recommendations can help grow exposure as well as increase brand value.
The business value of LinkedIn comes from its Overlap. The types of individuals who are using LinkedIn are professionals who are working, or people who are looking for work. With the information that LinkedIn provides about each person, companies can gain access to background information on potential employees, business partners and competitors alike.
MySpace is one of the earliest social networks that enjoys a massive user base. It is largely comprised of members of the general public. It does not have a rigorous verification system and therefore has some element of anonymity within its user base. It is a mashup of a Blog, Wall, pic/vid posting and a small bio. It is rich in multimedia content. MySpace has also implemented a chat client allowing for real time chatting within the network. MySpace has a highly customizable interface allowing each and every user to create a completely unique personal page.
MySpace is composed largely of the general public. Because it is so rich in multimedia content, many musicians find MySpace useful. MySpace saw large growth during the early adoption of social networking. Today it draws in users who want a multimedia oriented, highly customized presence on the internet.
Many people use MySpace as their personal blog, as well as creating personal photo albums. The wall gives users the ability to post animated images, each profile can have a music playlist and with powerful access to the CSS underbody, the layout for each page becomes a blank canvas for the user to paint.
MySpace allows people to share their multimedia, blogs and comments with their real life friends and less personal internet friends. Creating content that people are attracted to is achieved through constant updates of pictures, cycling of music on your page and the volume of posts that each person makes on other peoples walls.
The business value of Myspace comes from its People Ring. Its advantage comes from being the first mover in the market of social media on the web. However, over time the demographic has evolved, and Rupert Murdoch’s media group has purchased Myspace, in an attempt to cash in on the social media phenomenon. This was the first real concentrated effort to monetize social media by an old media conglomerate. Myspace’s large user base & old media support structure would be advantageous for businesses looking to target a large market with a mass media style message.
Blogs are your way to say anything you want to the world. They can be used by individuals as diaries or by corporations as a way of communicating to the outside world what the people inside the company are doing. Blogs are one of the oldest forms of social media, giving readers all the historical posts as well as the current ones. Blogs should be thought of as an online newspaper, whether it’s for personal news or corporate news.
Blogs are for everyone, individual and corporation alike. Many people and companies utilize them to give the public a view of the current happenings.
Content on blogs is highly geared towards the publisher of the blog. Because it can be thought of like a newspaper, the content in blogs should be news oriented, implying that it is about the poster, but pertinent to the readers.
Blogs provoke more of a one-on-one interaction between individuals and a one-to-many interaction between companies and customers. This is because the content on blogs is generated by a single entity, be it a person or a company.
The business value of Blogs comes from the Content Ring. You can have individuals in your company who hold certain positions of power/authority write about interesting insights if they are HR/PR people or about new developments if they are technical or in R&D. This will get people excited for what they can expect from your company, and it is a good feedback mechanism to let people comment on the blog. They are free to host and take relatively little time to create and update with weblog content management systems.
PodCasts are highly targeted in nature. They generally follow a specific genre or corporate agenda. Because PodCasts are normally lengthy, the target audience is usually people who are very interested in what you/your company have to say.
The people who listen to PodCasts are people who are already interested in what you/your company have to say. PodCasts are a good way to keep clients informed on things like current agendas/projects and the state of the company, so the People Ring is composed of people who actively care about the company already.
The content of PodCasts can be anything relevant to the current state of the company. This includes things like C level conference calls, weekly status updates and any other recorded audio.
The overlap in PodCasts does not work well to provoke a lot of interaction, but can be used to keep the people in the People Ring informed and satisfied with the company producing the content.
The business value of PodCasts comes from the Content Ring. People will tune into your podcast if the topic appeals to them. PodCasts can best be summarized as “new age on demand radio shows”. If this is a type of media that your company would be interested in, consider a syndication system for posting your PodCasts to your website, and soon you will see a steady stream of listeners and traffic to the PodCast webpage on your hosting site.
Cloud Creative Group can help you plan your Social Media Strategy. Feel free to Contact Us.
Social interaction is the reason humans create societies. There is some mysterious yet powerful value inherent to the way people interact with each other. We have a yearning desire to be “in the loop” with everyone in our environment; to know the business of those with whom we interact. Unified socially, we are able to produce, consume and thrive on a level unattainable without the construct of society. When observed through the current state of technology, social interaction is a driving force for advancements in public and private infrastructure, as well as an increased amount of interaction between the members of society. Studying this interaction can provide you with insight into the sociological happenings of modern society. It can also give you or your business a competitive edge in developing products or services that will meet peoples’ needs & wants. It is these traits that give social networks an intrinsic value beyond their surface use of connecting people.
“The World Wide Web”. “The Internet”. “Social Networks”. The word “social” itself implies interaction. We visualize Networks as webs of connections, whether it be connections between people, content, or content and people.
Social Media is composed of two overlapping rings, one ring comprised of people while the other is comprised of content. Both rings must be stimulated in a spot where the two overlap in order to provoke the social interaction that is sought from utilizing social media. To be the most useful, the point should be somewhere that both attracts people and provokes new, similar content.
Every place social media exists should have both of these rings, with a unique demographic for each ring.
We have provided a brief examination of the rings of popular social media networks, the mediums that we feel are the most important as of this papers’ writing:
Facebook enjoys a very large amount of highly accurate personal information about a massive section of the public. Its user base spans the entire globe capturing content from virtually every culture, location and lifestyle on earth. Boasting an impressive adoption rate, Facebook offers its users an extensive personal bio, pic/vid hosting, wall, chat client, and a calendar full of friend’s events, all in a tightly controlled domain inspiring interaction. Facebook is responsible for reconnecting people with many of the people from their past and provokes a large amount of interaction in the real world.
The People Ring is composed of highly validated information, not only by the Facebook infrastructure, but also largely by the community. Facebook is built in a way that prevents false identities by placing each user’s identity on every action they perform.
Content is highly personal and revolves around each person’s real life identity, offering each user an extensive personal bio. One of Facebook’s main features is the status, a micro blog that allows users to update as often as they like, which has seen large adoption in the mobile industry. Additionally, each person is given a wall which provokes a lot of interaction between individuals and groups. The integrated chat comes close to replacing, and in some cases completely replaces, the need for an external instant messaging system.
Content is highly personal and revolves around each person’s real life identity, offering each user an extensive personal bio. One of Facebook’s main features is the status, a micro blog that allows users to update as often as they like, which has seen large adoption in the mobile industry. Additionally, each person is given a wall which provokes a lot of interaction between individuals and groups. The integrated chat comes close to replacing, and in some cases completely replaces, the need for an external instant messaging system.
The business value of Facebook comes from the Content Ring. The types of data that people are sharing on Facebook are both a powerful tools for marketing as well as for market research. Facebook is now the most popular social media website on the Internet, with more unique hits per day than any of the other social media sites mentioned in this paper. Hacked Existence has conducted studies into Facebook based on data collected from active profiles. Facebook reaches a large audience with quality data. If you want a social media presence, Facebook is the best place to start to get the word of your business out to the people around you.
For more information on Facebook, check out "A Look at Facebook Five Years Later", a white paper written by the members of Hacked Existence here.
Twitter is a micro blog with a small bio for each blogger. It is based around constant updates that are very short in length and often links to external sources. Its count of following/followers gives each user a pretty accurate estimation of the initial level of exposure they will receive. Twitter is perfect for mobile platforms, and as such, has seen great adoption by people who have Web enabled cellular phones.
Twitter is composed of individuals, groups and companies who actively update and read through small grained content. Because the content is small grained, it is perfect for mobile platforms, so many tweets are generated and consumed by people who have web enabled mobile phones.
Twitter content can be anything under the sun, and often links to external content. Twitter also has a built in tagging system allowing search engine like functionality of tweets as well as creating links between large amounts of related tweets. Content can be anything from current news topics to personal status updates. Tweeting picture updates from mobile phones is also popular.
Overlap: In order to attract an audience on twitter, tweets should be useful and pertinent content. This can be gauged by how often your tweets are re-tweeted. Finding the overlap that provokes more interaction is as simple as making tweets that other people find pertinent or interesting enough to retweet.
The business value of Twitter comes from the Overlap. Twitter is currently the hot new social media service. Everybody and everything seems to have a twitter feed sending out “tweets” to an eager audience. Even popular celebrities use twitter themselves. Most of Twitter’s value comes from “trending topics”, or topics that appear in a large number of tweets. This gives you an insight into the public zeitgeist, as well as the ability to stay abreast of hot topics. Twitter is easy to manage and can reach a vast audience quickly. It is recommended to acquire a twitter as soon as possible. It is important to acquire a twitter name that closely relates to your business or product.
YouTube is a video hosting platform. YouTube gives users the ability to post and comment on videos as well as the ability to post video responses. Alternatively, a user can make a YouTube channel and simply add videos from other users without posting any videos themselves.
YouTube users come in two main groups, the people who post their own videos and the people who make channels out of other people’s videos.
YouTube content is mostly videos, the topics of which span just about everything, from personal video blogs to internet video memes. The ability to comment and make video responses to videos on YouTube prompts users to interact with other video posters.
YouTube can make videos go viral, but something must be really special about your content. Provided you have viral worthy content, giving the video a small push at the beginning can lead to viral exposure almost instantly, as the YouTube infrastructure is built around exposing videos that gain fast views. Video view count is the metric used to evaluate the amount exposure a video receives on YouTube.
The business value of YouTube comes from the People Ring. The people are the ones generating content and posting it for anyone else to view. People seem to enjoy this “on-demand” video content. Everything from TV shows to video reviews of products to user opinions to comedy videos can be found. Even just uploading old commercials your company has run on a TV network will get people viewing them, at zero cost to you. Having a presence on YouTube guarantees that you will be able to interact on a visual level with people who your product will touch.
How the individual represents themselves within the company, as well as how they represent themselves to individuals in other companies. LinkedIn can be used to provide a more personal feel during interaction between an employee and the employees of a client company. It allows each person to establish their capabilities and qualifications within their career and can be used to convince clients that your company is composed of individuals capable of delivering the level of quality necessary. Finally, it can be used to maintain networks of people whom an individual has interacted with in the business world. LinkedIn can be used to gain exposure for your firm as the amount of people in the “People Ring” grows.
The people ring on LinkedIn is composed of business professionals. It is a subsection of the public who take pride in their resumes, experience, skills and networks of like minded people.
The content on LinkedIn is composed of each person’s work histories, resumes, qualifications and skills. Things like blogs and widgets can be added to each person’s profile to provide content beyond personal corporate histories.
The overlap for LinkedIn lies in the fact that each person works for a company, and is expanded through the relationship that each person makes with members of other companies. Things like recommendations can help grow exposure as well as increase brand value.
The business value of LinkedIn comes from its Overlap. The types of individuals who are using LinkedIn are professionals who are working, or people who are looking for work. With the information that LinkedIn provides about each person, companies can gain access to background information on potential employees, business partners and competitors alike.
MySpace is one of the earliest social networks that enjoys a massive user base. It is largely comprised of members of the general public. It does not have a rigorous verification system and therefore has some element of anonymity within its user base. It is a mashup of a Blog, Wall, pic/vid posting and a small bio. It is rich in multimedia content. MySpace has also implemented a chat client allowing for real time chatting within the network. MySpace has a highly customizable interface allowing each and every user to create a completely unique personal page.
MySpace is composed largely of the general public. Because it is so rich in multimedia content, many musicians find MySpace useful. MySpace saw large growth during the early adoption of social networking. Today it draws in users who want a multimedia oriented, highly customized presence on the internet.
Many people use MySpace as their personal blog, as well as creating personal photo albums. The wall gives users the ability to post animated images, each profile can have a music playlist and with powerful access to the CSS underbody, the layout for each page becomes a blank canvas for the user to paint.
MySpace allows people to share their multimedia, blogs and comments with their real life friends and less personal internet friends. Creating content that people are attracted to is achieved through constant updates of pictures, cycling of music on your page and the volume of posts that each person makes on other peoples walls.
The business value of Myspace comes from its People Ring. Its advantage comes from being the first mover in the market of social media on the web. However, over time the demographic has evolved, and Rupert Murdoch’s media group has purchased Myspace, in an attempt to cash in on the social media phenomenon. This was the first real concentrated effort to monetize social media by an old media conglomerate. Myspace’s large user base & old media support structure would be advantageous for businesses looking to target a large market with a mass media style message.
Blogs are your way to say anything you want to the world. They can be used by individuals as diaries or by corporations as a way of communicating to the outside world what the people inside the company are doing. Blogs are one of the oldest forms of social media, giving readers all the historical posts as well as the current ones. Blogs should be thought of as an online newspaper, whether it’s for personal news or corporate news.
Blogs are for everyone, individual and corporation alike. Many people and companies utilize them to give the public a view of the current happenings.
Content on blogs is highly geared towards the publisher of the blog. Because it can be thought of like a newspaper, the content in blogs should be news oriented, implying that it is about the poster, but pertinent to the readers.
Blogs provoke more of a one-on-one interaction between individuals and a one-to-many interaction between companies and customers. This is because the content on blogs is generated by a single entity, be it a person or a company.
The business value of Blogs comes from the Content Ring. You can have individuals in your company who hold certain positions of power/authority write about interesting insights if they are HR/PR people or about new developments if they are technical or in R&D. This will get people excited for what they can expect from your company, and it is a good feedback mechanism to let people comment on the blog. They are free to host and take relatively little time to create and update with weblog content management systems.
PodCasts are highly targeted in nature. They generally follow a specific genre or corporate agenda. Because PodCasts are normally lengthy, the target audience is usually people who are very interested in what you/your company have to say.
The people who listen to PodCasts are people who are already interested in what you/your company have to say. PodCasts are a good way to keep clients informed on things like current agendas/projects and the state of the company, so the People Ring is composed of people who actively care about the company already.
The content of PodCasts can be anything relevant to the current state of the company. This includes things like C level conference calls, weekly status updates and any other recorded audio.
The overlap in PodCasts does not work well to provoke a lot of interaction, but can be used to keep the people in the People Ring informed and satisfied with the company producing the content.
The business value of PodCasts comes from the Content Ring. People will tune into your podcast if the topic appeals to them. PodCasts can best be summarized as “new age on demand radio shows”. If this is a type of media that your company would be interested in, consider a syndication system for posting your PodCasts to your website, and soon you will see a steady stream of listeners and traffic to the PodCast webpage on your hosting site.
Cloud Creative Group can help you plan your Social Media Strategy. Feel free to Contact Us.