Social Media - What is all about!

Social media is media designed to be advertise through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Primarily, social media depend on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words to build shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit. Social media optimization has been touted as presenting a fresh direction for marketing by allowing companies to talk with consumers, as opposed to talking at them.

Social media utilities create opportunities for the use of both inductive and deductive logic by their users. Claims or warrants are quickly transitioned into generalizations due to the manner in which shared statements are posted and viewed by all. The speed of communication, breadth, and depth, and ability to see how the words build a case solicits the use of rhetoric. Induction is frequently used as a means to validate or authenticate different users statements and words. Rhetoric is an important part of today’s language in social media.

Companies have begun to use social media to communicate with consumers. The audience can participate in social media by adding comments, instant messaging or even editing the stories themselves. The new Social media optimization tools and applications online have not only created new ways to communicate and collaborate, but have also opened up new job positions and careers, due to the unique convergence of technology, marketing, and social media.

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis & podcasts.

Examples of social media software applications include.

Communications
Blogs: Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, Vox, .etc
Micro blogging: fmylife, Jaiku, Plurk, Twitter, Tumblr, Yammer.etc
Social networking : Facebook, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Linkedln, MySpace..etc

Multimedia
Photo sharing: Flickr, Zooomr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Picasa.etc
Video sharing : YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, sevenload.etc
Live casting: Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Stickam, Skype…etc

Reviews and Opinions
Product Reviews: epinions.com, MouthShut.com
Business Reviews: Customer Lobby, yelp.com
Community Q&A: Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, Askville, Google Answers

Collaboration
Wikis: Wikipedia, PBwiki,
Social bookmarking: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google Reader, CiteULike
Social news: Digg, Mixx, Reddit, NowPublic
Opinion sites: epinions, Yelp

Entertainment
Media & Entertainment Platforms: Cisco Eos
Virtual worlds: Second Life, The Sims Online, Forterra
Game sharing: Miniclip, Kongregate