Social Media

Everybody can create content (like me :) but not everyone can create unique ideas. Even though I have this blog I cannot consider myself as a content creator. I think I belong to the 90% of population that looks for the information on the net and shares it. I guess I trust too much unknown people who put up information on the net :) Well, not entirely, of course. I definitely restrain myself from sharing all kinds of posts on FB. You really need to be critical about the info that's out there. I agree, that niche publications on the net are becoming more and more popular because people publishing their ideas are specialists in their fields. What is happening with the minds of people?

Many companies employ interactive value creation, i.e. creating content with the help of customers / partners. Customer involvement may bring you a lot of good marketing and sales, not to speak about increased revenue. There is a noticeable shift from monologue to dialogue happening nowadays, literally, companies ask help from customers. There are many names for interactive value creation: collaboration, crowd sourcing, crowd funding. There is a clear shift in thought going on: taking customers as part of a company, finding out what's going on out there. It's a fast way to understand the changes on the market, in people's mind. And the customers love you for that :)

The technology behind social media is Web 2.0. Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. By increasing what was already possible in "Web 1.0" (this term did not really exist before the new term was thought up) they provide the user with more user-interface, software and storage facilities, all through their browser. Major features of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, user-created sites self-publishing platforms, tagging and social bookmarking.

In social bookmarking system users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but can be saved privately, shared within groups or certain networks. Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders.

The side-effect of Web 2.0 is increasing spamming. But the benefits are more important: openness, freedom, collective intelligence, user participation. Key features of Web 2.0 include

1. folksonomy (= free classification of information)
2. rich user exxperience
3. user as a contributor
4. long tail
5. user participation
6. basic trust
7. dispersion