How Social Media Works

Social media has changed the world we market in, and can be used as an integral part of an online marketing campaign. Social media is all about the ways that we create, connect and share online.

bookmarking and aggregating– sharing things you like

If there are web sites that you visit often, or that you would like to keep as a reference to come back to, it is easy to use your browser to “bookmark ” them. This means thatyou store the URL so that you can locate it again easily. It also gives you a personal library of web sites that you can store on your computer.Social bookmarking sites, however, allow you store these links online, use tags to describe them and share these lists with other users. Some of these sites let you submit URLs that other users vote on, while others allow you to use the tags saved to browse through the lists and libraries that have been generated.

Web sites which want to encourage users to submit content to bookmarking and aggregating sites use chicklets. These are buttons placed around the content that make it easier to submit and share the article.

These services allow you to see what the community of web users finds useful, interesting or humorous. You are able to find other users with similar interests to yours, and explore the web sites that they have found that you might not have come across yet.

Social bookmarking allows like-minded people to share interesting and relevant content with one another easily. It can also be an excellent tool for members of a company or organisation to earmark relevant web sites and articles. Content submitted to a social bookmarking or aggregating site can dramatically increase traffic to a web site, and expose the site to many new eyeballs.

del.icio.us (del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site which was created in 2003 by Joshua Schacter and today boasts over 3 million users (Arrington, 2007). It was designed to be a site which would help Internet users organise online media in a quick, easy to access and user-friendly format. Now owned by Yahoo!, the primary function of del.icio.us is to allow you to store all of your bookmarks online and then to allow you to access those bookmarks from any computer anywhere in the world. del.icio.us is more of a community based tool in comparison to the other social bookmarking tools out there, as it allows others to see your bookmarks. Essentially it lets you identify other people whose interests and concerns parallel yours and grants you access to all of their bookmarks as well.

Check out del.icio.us/quirkemarketingtextbook to see some of the URLs we think are relevant to your eMarketing studies and career.

Digg (www.digg.com), Muti (www.muti.co.za) and Reddit (www.reddit.com) are sites where users submit content which other users can then vote on. Popularity, based on votes, moves the submitted content up and down lists which are available on these sites. Submitting and voting requires registration, but there are many, many people who visit these sites to get an overview of content that is “hot”. In fact, in early

2008, Digg was at 170 in the Alexa rankings. Although its traffic is declining, it’s still generating plenty of traffic each day.

Appearing on the top of these lists generates a huge increase in traffic for the content sites, so much so that servers can crash if the leap in visitors is unexpected. Getting into the top listings is a prize eyed by many a marketer, but any attempt to manipulate listings usually backfires and can generate plenty of community backlash.

The communities around these sites differ demographically, and this is reflected in the content. For example, Digg has been technology focused, while Reddit tends to have more general news.

Stumbleupon (www.stumbleupon.com) lets you explore the Web through your interests, based on how other Web users tag content. Users select categories of interest and bookmark URLs to those categories. You can then choose to “stumble” through the Web using the category of your choice. The service will randomly show you a web site that has been submitted to that category.

Stumbleupon allows users to explore the web based on the taxonomy applied by other users. Instead of looking to search engines for relevance, users are instead appealing to the knowledge of a community.

Technorati (www.technorati.com) started life as a real-time blog search engine but has since evolved to incorporate other forms of user generated content including images and videos. According to technorati.com/about, Technorati finds itself tracking over 112 million blogs and 250 million pieces of tagged social media as of early 2008. Internationally it is THE blog aggregator and an essential tool for anyone who operates online.  Technorati’s core is a tag-based index that allows users to conduct searches on topics that interest them. Contributors are able to tag their individual posts – the better tagged a post, the better chance it has of being picked up by a relevant search. Instead of contributors being separated into categories it is the content of each individual post that is indexed. Technorati doesn’t just search the blogs of subscribed members though – it also operates as a normal search engine.

Technorati can also be used to keep tabs on Internet buzz, both to monitor online reputation and to see what trends are emerging.

bookmarking and aggregating as marketing tools
Seeing how users categorise your content will give you an idea of how your web site and company are perceived by your audience. It might be remarkably different to what you think they see you as. Look at what other web sites are tagged similarly. You might find new competitors, and possibly new ideas.

You can also use these services to share what other URLs your company finds interesting. This can be a useful resource to add to an online press room, as well as a utility that fanatics of your company would get really excited about.

To create link love and traffic, investigate what sort of content your target audience loves voting for, and get creating that content. A word of warning: never do the content submission and voting yourself. It’s one sure-fire way to incur the wrath of these communities.

Organic growth is the only way to go here. It might take time as you build your reputation and worth amongst the community, but the end result can be very worthwhile. As a content provider, make sure you have the appropriate chicklets added to your content to make it easier to share.  As a content provider, make sure you have the appropriate chicklets added to your content to make it easier to share.  Content sharing – create and share

YouTube may be the first content sharing site that comes to mind, but users share images, audio and information as well as video. If it can be created, it can be shared. There are many sites that facilitate that sharing of videos, images and audio, and they are exceptionally popular. From Flickr to YouTube, they have all tapped into the fact that we love to create content for others to view.  The key word here is free: there are no fees for joining, whether you are uploading content or viewing content (although premium paid for memberships can allow you further features). This means that these sites attract an enormous audience. In fact, according to Alexa rankings, YouTube is the second most visited site in the world!

Many of these services also encourage distribution of their content. YouTube allows videos to be embedded easily into other web sites, and Flickr has generated a number of applications and widgets that allows the images to be shown all over the web (and even printed onto cards and stickers via (www.moo.com).

Most of these web sites rely on advertising to support the free services they offer and some have a premium paid for membership version which is without adverts.  Video sharing

YouTube (www.youtube.com) is essentially a web site which, by using Flash technology, allows users to upload, view and share videos with the rest of the connected world. These videos can range from music, movie and television clips to homemade amateur videos and vlogs.

YouTube has 60% of all online video viewers with up to 79 million viewers in an evening (Yen, 2008) and over 65,000 videos uploaded every day. This makes it both the premier online video site and social video sharing site online. This implies that most video consumption on the Web is already based on social media, and that there are over 130 million online viewers of video overall (ibid, 2008). YouTube was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. In fact, according to comScore data, the number of searches on YouTube make it the second largest search engine.

YouTube is a complex site offering numerous features, yet it is simple to use. While it is possible for unregistered users to watch most of the publicly available videos, a quick, straightforward registration process allows members to upload an unlimited number of clips, comment on and add video responses to them and subscribe to content feeds that catch their attention and interest. Frequently enhanced functionality and clever features on YouTube continually push this site to deliver bigger and better services to its ever-increasing user base.

Many marketers have adopted the opportunities afforded by YouTube. There are two aspects of marketing through YouTube - self-promotion of people and products such as music videos, movie previews, interviews, video-advertisements, and sponsored adverts, supplied by Google AdWords.

YouTube has changed the way we view video adverts. Marketers, such as BMW, have shown that if an advert is good enough, many people will choose to watch it. BMW has created a BMW South Africa channel on YouTube, and has uploaded many of their adverts. One of them has been viewed over a million times since August 2006.  These are people who have chosen to watch this advert at a media cost of zero! Other advertisers have realised that far longer adverts can be created and uploaded. As long as the content is good, there will be viewers. Time constraints are not the same as they are for TV networks.  Savvy marketers also realise the potential of watching for organic mentions of their brand, and then capitalising on this. An unknown teenage girl, with the YouTube account name Bowiechick, made a 75 second video clip about her break-up with a boyfriend. While making the clip she played with some of the effects on her new webcam, like putting ears on her head and a moustache on her face with its facial

tracking software. Three days after uploading the video, 178,000 people had seen this video and 900 had commented on it. The comments had nothing to do with the break up but with the Logitech webcam she had used in the video. Following this, the camera broke into Amazon’s Top 100 bestselling products list. Logitech were obviously listening and made the most of the opportunity by becoming YouTube’s official partner (Sandoval, 2006).

The medium of online video sharing also means that conferences are able to generate a far greater audience than ever before. The companies that sponsor or run these conferences are able to engage with a larger audience by making freely available videos of the various sessions held. TED (www.ted.com) and Nokia’s Nokia World are excellent examples of organisations that increase interest by making their remarkable presentations available for free.

Knowledge sharing – the wiki

Howard G. “Ward” Cunningham, pioneer of the wiki, began programming the WikiWikiWeb software in 1994 and installed it on the web site of his software consultancy in 1995. Back then he described a wiki as “The simplest online database that could possibly work.” 13 years later this is probably still the most accurate description.  Essentially, a wiki is a piece of software which users can create and edit online, using simple mark-up language via a web browser. They support hyperlinks and have a simple text syntax for creating new pages and links between internal pages. In its most basic form, a wiki is a web site that supports user collaboration through a variety of functions.

There are numerous types of wiki software available that share the following characteristics:

Create and update documents: Wiki users have the ability to create and update documents easily.

Review versions: Most wikis store each version of a document. This functionality makes it easy for users to view the various modifications that a document has undergone over time.

Community-oriented tools: Most wikis provide users with an ability to engage in some form of discussion about the documents on which they are collaborating.

 Wikis can be open to all, such as Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) and Wikitravel (www.wikitravel.org); they can be open to or aimed at certain communities only, such as Geek Dinner attendees (geekdinner.pbwiki.com); or they can be private and open only to individuals within an organisation. Internal wikis are exceptionally useful for creating knowledge bases within organisations and companies.

Wikipedia: the most famous wiki of all

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a free, web-based, content encyclopaedia that is rated one of the top ten visited sites in the world. Originally created in 2001 by James Wales and Larry Sanger, this online encyclopaedia has received both praise and criticism. Roughly 15 times the size of Encyclopaedia Britannica, with more than 9 million articles in over 250 languages, this encyclopaedia is increasing in size at an exponential level (Wikipedia: About). However, with the increased adoption of this tool,

criticism has also increased as to the validity of the definitions.  All definitions seen on Wikipedia are written by a collaborative team of volunteers from around the world. Anyone can submit a definition and these can then be edited by anyone who has access to the Internet. This combination of contributors leads to a democratic way of including the most up to date information. Since definitions are reviewed frequently, it should decrease the amount of bias and inaccuracy, while building a unique social network with people of similar interests contributing.

All Wikipedia definitions should also be referenced externally. Although anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, there is a permission ranking system which has been instituted to maintain the level of credibility that is associated with Wikipedia. Further measures include a discussion tab on most articles where academics can question the validity of the sources and its content.

Wikipedia articles tend to rank highly in the SERPs, so the allure of a link to your website from a relevant article is tempting indeed. Wikipedia has instituted a policy that all external links are “no follow” links so as to combat spam.

Wikipedia is a useful research tool. With so much information on the Internet, many users are starting to look at a human edited (as opposed to search engine algorithm distilled) way to embark on research. For a company to be reachable via a link from this research base can very traffic and reputation worthy.

Companies should also take note of what is being written about them on Wikipedia, and make transparent efforts to correct information.  Content creating and sharing as a marketing tool

Content sharing sites, from video to photos to music to knowledge, provide marketers with a snapshot of how users interact with and perceive their brand. Most of the sites have RSS feeds available, where marketers can keep a tab on mentions of their brand.

These sites and services allow marketers the opportunity to capitalise on the creativity of their consumers to further amplify their brand. By making content easily available, and removing restrictions on use of that content, companies can nurture creative interactions that are likely to spread.  Wikis can be used when creating an event with a network. Encouraging users to interact allows them greater connection and ownership of the outcome, and provides a means for ongoing communication.

Crowdsourcing – unleashing the power of the online community

A term first used in Wired magazine back in 2006, “crowdsourcing” has become a powerful and cost effective method of achieving business goals through the use of the masses. Simply put, business and corporates invite the public to submit ideas and innovations for new and existing products, in exchange for a once-off or a small percentage of future royalties.

Social media has spurred on this innovation, and has allowed the business world to tap into the consumer psyche with little financial outlay.