CanadaNews’ Reporter Notes

The American Learning Institute, Inc. (ALI) met today at Georgetown University to discuss the advances made in social media and how social media can be used to help various businesses talk to one another. These businesses can also get their messages out to the open public. Social media has increased globally, but particularly in the United States.

Social media is participatory online media where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are made public via social media websites through submissions by the internet surfers. This is normally accompanied with a voting process to make media items become “popular”.

The expanded definition would view social media as the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into content publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people, and peers.

ALI held their first day of conferencing of government industries getting into the social media arena. The morning keynote was Shel Israel, Social Media Consultant & Co-Author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. The attendees had a unique opportunity to listen to one of the first “pioneers” of social media. He explained why government agencies should care about blogging and social media. He said, “Blogging allows people in all levels of government to get closer with constituents, to be more efficient, to be better understood, and have increased overall productivity without increasing cost or work.”

Social media uses the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures, and video. Technologies such as blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, group creation, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook(social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), and Flickr (photo sharing).

Social Media or Social Networking(industry term) has a number of characteristics that make it fundamentally different from traditional media such as newspapers, television, books, and radio. Social media is not finite: there is no set number of pages or hours. The audience can participate in social media by adding comments or even editing the stories themselves. Content in social media can take the form of text, graphics, audio, or video. Several formats can be mixed. Social media is typically available via feeds, enabling users to subscribe via feed readers, and allowing other publishers to create mashups. Social Media signifies a broad spectrum of topics and has several different connotations. In the context of internet marketing, Social Media refers to a collective group of web properties that are driven by users. For example, blogs, discussion boards, vlogs, video sharing sites and dating sites. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the process of trying to get ones content more widely distributed across multiple Social Media networks. Social Media has two important aspects. The first, SMO, refers to on-page tactics through which a webmaster can improve a website for the age of social media. Such optimization includes adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily ’saved and submitted’ to and for these services. Social Media Marketing, on the other hand, is an off-page characteristic of Social Media. This includes writing content that is remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularising it or even by creating a “viral” video on YouTube and other video sites. Social Media is about being social so this off-page work can include getting involved in other similar blogs, forums, and niche communities. Search Engine Marketing or SEM involves utilization of all available Social Networking platforms to brand a product using Search Engine Optimization or SEO techniques of communication, to the end consumer.

The American Learning Institute, Inc. is a Chicago-based organization.