What is Social Media?

Social media is the new marketing idea to tie social groups together. The major driving force behind social media is the “user created content”. Users or members of the groups are the ones that create and push the direction of the website, not the owners of the site. The content is driven mostly by blogging or by message boards, where users can create and publish there strings of content. Users also get there own personal homepages, can add photos and plug-ins to their pages, and can link their pages to there friends. The major examples of sites that would be social community sites are; MySpace.com, FaceBook.com, Meetup.com, and YouTube.

Can small and medium businesses use Social Media as a tool?

Sure, the most basic way to create a social community is to add a Blog to your existing website. Blogs are really a two way communication tool with the major advantage that Blogs have a powerful distributions system in the form of an RSS feed built in.