We are already familiar with traditional communication media such as newspapers, films & television, and of course the good old radio set. But with the advent of Internet, a completely new communication media has arrived on the web demographic. You guessed it! We are talking about Social Media.

Not very long ago, computers were being used only for defense and secret military purposes. Eventually their use expanded for the benefit of the educational society and finally with the development of the Internet and Information Technology, they reached our living rooms. We started chatting and sending emails to each other. The next thing we knew, we were sharing music, photographs and files – all online! At the end of this tunnel, what you and me got is a powerful and potential medium of communication with the society; more commonly known as Social Media.

Web2.0 essentially has a lot to do with the way users interact (read: communicate) with the internet. People write their views and opinions in blogs (origin: weblogs) like this one, share and download digital audio & video files using podcast, and make friends online on virtual social networks. Social Networking has become the latest buzzword of Web2.0 with more people joining popular social networks. Once they join, they can create their profiles and upload and share their content through the web. A few popular online social networks are facebook, myspace and Linkedin.

A number of social media software tools have emerged after the Web2.0 revolution

While facebook and myspace are looked upon as casual social engagement platforms, Linkedin is considered more of a professional network that lets you enhance your professional/business circle, find jobs and get recommended by colleagues.

But just how useful is social media to the online community? You can of course find and share information and media with others. But at the same time you can also make connections and initiate conversation with like minded people irrespective of their location. One major achievement of social media is the fact that it has made distributed team work possible. So now, even when my manager lives across the globe and sleeps when I’m awake, we can still work in perfect tandem

But perhaps the greatest arena where social media strikes glittering gold is that of internet marketing. Skilled internet marketers exploit the potential of social media to promote their products and businesses extensively. Right from blogs to forums, to microblogs to social networks and social bookmarking sites, online marketing battleground is just increasing in area as we speak! We will probably need a completely separate post to go into the depth of this issue; so lets just keep this one aside for now.

Lastly, here are are a few social media platforms that you should know about:

1. Blogs: A Blog is an online journal or diary, usually updated from a few times a day to a few times a week. Popular platforms: Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, Typepad.
2. Micro-blogging: blog entries limited to just 140 characters; great for Mobile interaction, quick interaction, and branding. Popular sites: Twitter, Jaiku.
3. Social Networks: socially interact and network with friends and colleagues. A lot of personal/professional crossover in these spaces. Popular sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace.
4. Article distribution: Distribute useful, educational content and establish yourself as an authority to potential clients. Popular sites: Ezinearticles, Squidoo.
5. Photos, Video, Podcasting: Distribute your content in a visual, more interactive format. Popular sites: Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube.
6. Social News: Users submit content/news stories which are voted on by the online community. Popular sites: Digg, Reddit.
7. Social Bookmarking: Users catalog and share sites they like. Popular sites: StumbleUpon, Delicious.
8. Social Shopping: Users share and review products. Popular sites: Stylehive, Kaboodle.
9. Forums/Q&A: online chat rooms for just about any topic you can imagine. A great place to establish yourself as an authority and answer questions. Popular site: Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers.

So here we are. If you are new to the concept of social media, I’m pretty confident that this article would have been a good refresher course for you. Do send us your valuable feedback about what you thought of this post.

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