http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/23/facebook-750-million-users// "Boomers Joining Social Media at Record Rate" . CBS News . 2010-11-15.
Social media are media for social interaction which means that instead of merely receiving information, people can also share their thoughts, opinion, and even give new information. Because of the practice of this kind of activities, social media allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. From the point of view of businesses, social media can be called consumer-generated media. In order to facilitate the interactive activity, web-based and mobile technologies are used as it is inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone to publish or access information.
Social media can take on many different forms, including Internet forums , weblogs , social blogs , microblogging , wikis , podcasts , photographs or pictures, video , rating and social bookmarking .
Time magazine acknowledged growing level of influence in its 2010 Time 100 most influential people. To determine the influence of people it used a formula based on famous social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook. The list ranges from Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey to Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher . This shows how major the role of Twitter and facebook are in social media. Let’s take a closer look.
Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets . Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Twitter was launched in July 2006 . Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 200 million tweets a day . The top 5 Global Markets by reach are Indonesia, Brazil, Venezuela, Netherlands, and Japan. Twitter has been used for a variety of purposes in many different industries and scenarios. From simply for communication between individuals or among groups/organization, organizing protests ( which include the 2011 Egyptian protests , 2010–2011 Tunisian protests , 2009–2010 Iranian election protests , and 2009 Moldova civil unrest ), emergencies, political campaign, to business marketing/advertising. San Antonio -based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories: [57] Pointless babble – 40% Conversational – 38% Pass-along value – 9% Self-promotion – 6% Spam – 4% News – 4%
Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest groups and "like pages" (called "fan pages" until April 19, 2010), some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising. Facebook was launched in February 2004. In April 2010, according to The New York Times , countries with the most Facebook users were the United States, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia . [134] Indonesia has become the country with the second largest number of Facebook users, after the United States, with 24 million users, or 10% of Indonesia's population. However, Facebook's market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011 . Facebook has affected the social life and activity of people in various ways. It can reunite lost family members and friends. One such reunion was between John Watson and the daughter he had been searching for 20 years. They met after Watson found her facebook profile. [150] Another father-daughter reunion was between Tony Macnauton and Frances Simpson, who had not seen each other for nearly 48 years. Some studies have named Facebook as a source of problems in relationships. Several news stories have suggested that using Facebook causes divorce and infidelity , but the claims have been questioned and refuted by other commentators. Facebook's role in the American political process was demonstrated in January 2008, shortly before the New Hampshire primary , when Facebook teamed up with ABC and Saint Anselm College to allow users to give live feedback about the "back to back" January 5 Republican and Democratic debates. [154] [155] [156] Charles Gibson moderated both debates, held at the Dana Center for the Humanities at Saint Anselm College . Facebook users took part in debate groups organized around specific topics, register to vote, and message questions. [157] Over 1,000,000 people installed the Facebook application 'US politics' in order to take part, and the application measured users' responses to specific comments made by the debating candidates. [158] This debate showed the broader community what many young students had already experienced: Facebook was an extremely popular and powerful new way to interact and voice opinions. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including the People's Republic of China , [139] Vietnam , [140] Iran , [141] Uzbekistan , [142] Pakistan , [143] Syria , [144] and Bangladesh on different bases. For example, it was banned in many countries of the world on the basis of allowed content judged as anti-Islamic and containing religious discrimination.
Specialists say that while Facebook users in the United States tend to recreate real-life social relationships online, many Japanese use Web anonymity to express themselves, free from the pressures to fit into a conformist workplace. The Japanese sites let members mask their identities, in distinct contrast to the real-name, oversharing hypothetical user on which Facebook’s business model is based. Japanese Web users, even popular bloggers, typically hide behind pseudonyms or nicknames. In a 2010 survey by Microsoft of social network use among 3,000 people in 11 Asia-Pacific countries and regions, respondents on average said that only about one-quarter of their friends on social networking sites were close friends. In Japan, more than half of all respondents said that not one of their acquaintances on social networks was a close friend. Still, Facebook may have a powerful force on its side: Japanese consumers’ penchant for all things new. I n India, after struggling for years, Facebook has become dominant thanks to exchange students and other returning travelers who got hooked to the site overseas, and the same thing might happen in Japan.
Immediacy Through social media, the time lag between events/occurence with the information flow can be minimized significantly. for ex, japan’s earthquake. Social media allows people to comment and edit the content of information. Therefore, if there’s any misinformation, it can be clarified quickly. S ocial media are by their very nature more decentralized, less hierarchical, and distinguished by multiple points of production and utility so that anyone can access it. Of course using social media requires much lower cost than industrial media especially when we want to publish information. This makes social media very appealing for business marketing, political campaign, humanity campaign, or even self-promotion.
Lady Gaga is one example of social media success. A billion views on Youtube, 30 million likes on Facebook, and even became the Queen of Twitter. Her record label has been hiring ThinkTank Digital in 2008 to take care of her social media and online marketing strategies. To create some early buzz, they started with music bloggers. They provided interesting material for the bloggers such as interviews, photos, and video clips. The early focus for her social media brand was also on Myspace as in 2008 the site was still neck and neck with Facebook for social dominance . Not until 2009 do they began shifting more of their efforts toward Facebook and Twitter. The key point of the success is how promotion and authenticity are balanced. She took great pride in engaging directly with her fans across every medium available to her . Still, content is king, Lady Gaga is unique and awesome to begin with. In the course of the 2008 US election cycle, candidates used the web and social media tools to connect to their followers and organize campaigns. Clearly, Obama is the first candidate to successfully use the Internet and social media to get his message out. Nearly 500million blog postigns mentioned him, over 800,000 MySpace friends, and over 100,000 followers on twitter. What Obama did so successfully is that he went to where his supporter base was. He could no longer afford to meet with everyone at their kitchen tables, but he could friend them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. He could connect with specific ethnic groups through MiGente (Latinos), BlackPlanet (African-Americans), Glee ("gay, lesbian and everyone else") and others . Further, he used sites like Flickr and YouTube to distribute his "message of hope." He encouraged supporters to create their own content and that idea, and those images and videos, went viral. So how does social media help in a crisis like the earthquake in Japan? Victims After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, US Google developers created Person Finder for families looking to discover the health and whereabouts of loved ones. Person Finder was then adapted for the victims of the New Zealand earthquake and now for those victims affected in Japan. At last count, Person Finder contains 306,600 names, a staggering reminder of how one website can be so influential in victims' lives. News Outlets In Japan, as traditional modes of communication like telephone lines were lost almost immediately after the earthquake struck – social media channels buoyed. Only an hour after the earthquake, tweets coming out of Tokyo reached 1,200 a minute, according to Mashable . Just a few hours after, and hashtags like #prayforJapan, #earthquake and #tsunami were being tweeted thousands of times per second . Relief Aid With such a large scale disaster, getting charitable donations and relief aid to affected areas is critical – and with the aid of websites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube raising awareness with various messages, groups and blogs, the opportunities to raise significant funds are increased. Similarly, social media can make donations that much easier : there really are plenty of available channels (games, sms, etc) that were unavailable only as recently as 2005.
As the platform of social media does not require its users to have certain skills or training, anyone with access can operate the means of social media production. The nature of social media which allows people to comment and edit the information floating around might lead to the creation of wrong information. This can be unintentionally but can also be intentionally. Certain parties might do it to take advantages. Also, people can pass information in social media around freely. This makes scandalous news spread in no time even though it’s not necessarily proven to be true. There has always been a huge debate on the ownership of the content on social media platforms since it is generated by the users and hosted by the company. Critics contend that the companies are making huge amount of money by using the content that does not belong to them. Social media have also become likely places for identity theft and fraud. As user have to provide certain information such as your e-mail address, name, and location, others use these information and pretend to be the user , especially when they are into illegal activities. A study by the University of Maryland suggested that social media services may be addictive,and that users of social media services leads to a "fear of missing out". According to Nielsen, global consumers spend more than 6 hours on social networking sites . And as the impact of rapid technology development, people can access the sites through mobile devices , increasing the duration. Facebook even has also been banned at many workplaces to prevent employees wasting their time on the site.
Social media expert Chris Brogan does not believe traditional media will go away but sees social and traditional media will work together in the future. Chris says traditional media is failing because it is not reaching the same audience that it used to reach. Instead, social media is reaching that mass audience. So, what impact does this have on publishers? According to Chris, content producers need to target their content. He suggests making the content addressable because people want to be able to interact on a personal level. Mass Media also can take advantage of social media as resource in getting information, but of course they have to know how to filter it
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