Читать книгу The New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott, Kevin Nalty, Steve Garfield - Страница 52

Since social media is such an important concept (and is so often misunderstood), I’ll define it:

Social media provides the way people share ideas, content, thoughts, and relationships online. Social media differs from so-called mainstream media in that anyone can create, comment on, and add to social media content. Social media can take the form of text, audio, video, images, and communities.

The best way to think about social media is not in terms of the different technologies and tools but, rather, how those technologies and tools allow you to communicate directly with your buyers in places where they are congregating right now.

Just as a point of clarification, note that there are two terms that sound similar here: social media and social networking. Social media is the superset and is how we refer to the various media that people use to communicate online in a social way. Social media include blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing, and much more. A subset of social media is social networking, a term I use to refer to how people interact on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and similar sites. Social networking occurs when people create a personal profile and interact to become part of a community of friends and like-minded people and to share information. You’ll notice throughout the book that I use both terms. This chapter is about the larger concept of social media, whereas in Chapter 14 we dive into detail about social networking.

I’m fond of thinking of the web as a city—it helps make sense of each aspect of online life and how we create and interact. Corporate sites are the storefronts on Main Street peddling wares. Craigslist is like the bulletin board at the entrance of the corner store; eBay, a garage sale; Amazon, a superstore replete with patrons anxious to give you their two cents. Mainstream media sites like the New York Times online are the newspapers of the city. Chat rooms and forums are the pubs, saloons, cafés, and coffeehouses of the online world. You even have the proverbial wrong-side-of-the-tracks spots: the web’s adult-entertainment and spam underbelly.