Do you really know and understand Social Media?

Posted by Anton Koekemoer on May 12, 2010 in Social Media Marketing

Even though it has been around for a while, most people and online marketers still has doubts about Web 2.0 and how it is busy changing the online business world. Web 2.0 is a powerful term first adopted and made publicly by O’Reilly Media in 2003. They named it as the second generation of the web. This second generation web is defined by a powerful interactive online world.

The first is the interactive usage of blogs, micro-blogging, social networking, social bookmarking sites and wikis to name but a few.

The Second Generation

The second is new technologies such as Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript And Xml) and the usage of different API’s available which allows online applications to work more like desktop software applications. Web 2.0 presents new opportunities and challenges for online marketing strategies.

Web 2.0 includes the changing from individual static and isolated websites to blogging with RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds to quickly broadcasts and allow responses.

CMS (Content Management Systems) where prominent in Web 1.0 and then Wiki’s came into being allowing any web user to update the content. Web 2.0 has been made more powerful which allows online applications such as Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools to be implemented in almost any dynamic online application.

The web is social

Web 2.0 is marked by a powerful social interaction. Blogs, short for “web-log” as they are called are quite easily updated and created by those with even a minimum of technology skills.

Most blogging systems relies and make use of RSS. RSS is another great adoption of Web 2.0 and it consist of a file written in basic XML containing basic information regarding your blog posts with a short description regarding the blog post and a link to the full content of the post. These RSS files “feeds” gets broadcasted over the internet every time you publish and create new content making it available instantly in a couple of seconds to everyone.

A couple of years ago, new content had to be discovered before the world could know about it. This was quite a slow process as you had to “wait” before you content was listed on the search engines. It almost works the same as the advertisement marketing in a magazine. You place your advertisement about a specific lawnmower model in a magazine. Now you have to wait and hope that someone will see your advertisement and contact you.

With Web 2.0 and social media, that has changed. Content can now be broad casted to any corner of the world to targeted prospects in mere seconds. No need to wait any more to make others aware of your business, brand and services.

Web 2.0 (social media) may have started out as a marketing hype, but it has evolved into a real way to the describe the evolution of the web. Never fear change! The online universe continues to change and evolve. Businesses needs to re-evaluate their traditional marketing, SEO and online marketing strategies to make use of Web 2.0.