Page 162 - Social Media Marketing

Tapping the Power of Social Media Marketing 147

• Blogs: Short for Web log, a blog is an online publication of one's
personal thoughts, experiences, and insights presented in re-
verse chronological order that allows visitors to respond to
each post with their own comments. As with most things on
the Internet, businesses now tap blogging for commercial use.
The popularity of blogs combined with their ease of use make
them a perfect social networking tool for corporations. For
more about blogging, refer to Chapter 11, "Blogging Your Way
to Credibility."

• Collaborative infonnation sites: Although all social media
sites are involved in information sharing, some do it in a
more traditional format, gathering the collective knowledge
of users and then providing free access to that knowledge.
The leader in this area is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com).
which offers an online encyclopedia written by Internet users.
Another online encyclopedia written by users is Nupedia
(nupedia.8media.org).

• Social news: Sites in this category allow users to post
their own news stories and vote and comment on sto-
ries others have posted. Social news sites include Digg
(www.digg.com), StumbledUpon (www.stumbledupon.com),
Reddit (www.reddit.com), Shoutwire (www.shoutwire.com),
and Bringr (www.bringr.com).

• Photo sharing: At photo-sharing sites, you can upload pho-
tographs, and comment and vote on other people's pho-
tographs. Popular photo-sharing sites include Flickr (www.
flickr.com), Photobucket (www.photobucket.com). Picasa
(picasa.google.com), and SnapFish (www.snapfish.com).

• Video sharing: Video sharing is becoming more and more
popular as businesses of all sizes produce their own short
clips and post them on the Web. By far the most popular
video-sharing site, as I was writing this book, was Google's
YouTube (www.youtube.com). Other such sites include Live-
Leak (www.liveleak.com), Metacafe (www.metacafe.com),