Social media is (according to Safko & Brake, 2009) a jungle, or stated otherwise a defined area where things eat each other to survive. A perfect metaphor for business. Biologists would call a jungle an ecosystem, a good term to use here. In an effort to talk about ecosystems, biologists have developed a classification system to group and categorize the animals, plants, bacteria, fungi and protista that inhabit the ecosystem. Using this system makes it easier to talk about the living world. Using such a system for the Social Media world could also be a very helpful thing. But of course the Social Media ecosystem has not been a topic of debate and discussion for 300 years, so there is still no universally accepted classification system for Social Media tools and application. Safko and Brake give in their Social Media bible a relatively and handy 15-category classification system that will make it easier to talk about the Social Media ecosystem. The 15 categories are: Social Networking, Publish, Photo, Audio, Video, Microblogging, Livecasting, Virtual Worlds, Gaming, Productivitity applications, Aggregators, RSS, Search, Mobile and Interpersonal.

The following are the 5 categories I would like to describe in this blog:

  1. Social Networking: the key of networking is participation. Examples are LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and any other social network platform you can think of. To be successful: first listen and then participate!
  2. Publish: content is king, and if you have content, publish it! Realize that your starting point all ways should be passion about a certain area. Then followed by transforming this passion into experience about this topic, translating this experience into good content and finally participation in an active community. Examples are: WordPress, Slideshare, Wikipedia and Blogger.
  3. Photo: a category I personally think we (ScanYours) are not using in the proper way. We will have to develop more interesting content in this category. Because uploading photo’s and creating communities is all about building credibility and trust with your clients and prospects. As often said: a picture is worth a thousand words. Since we have photo’s of the ScanYours people on our website, I can say for sure that the level of trust in our organization is going up! Examples of photo tools are: Flickr, Picasa, Slide, SmugMug, Twitxr and Zooomr.
  4. Audio: podcasting (sorry, we (ScanYours) are not doing this yet, but we will have to) is an effective way for your business to be heard. And like nearly all of the social media tools in the Social Media ecosystem, it’s free! Examples are: iTunes and PodBean.
  5. Video: video sharing is the easiest and fastest way to start building your Social Media portfolio. The opening of your new office is a nice moment to produce such a video, or the presentation on a summit, the demo of a new product an so on. One thing here: just do it! Examples: Brightcove, Google Video, Metacafe, Viddler and YouTube.

Next time I will explain the next 5 categories!

Greetings

Jerryscanyours


Tagged: social, Social Media, System