The Online Sunshine Plan

We start under the general name of “social media” which has come to mean a great variety of organized meet-and-greet groups and publishing platforms. As I tell you about these, I’ll work in how to effectively use these to give value to the community while you let people know you exist and develop their trust. (And those three steps actually define promotion, regardless of what you may have been told.)

Let’s first simply define the major kinds of social media out there:

Networking
Facebook is probably the most famous of these. And while it’s morphed into many more applications, it’s principle function is still to keep track of people you know (like the college buddies it started out with) and be able to expand this network. LinkedIn is another example.

Blogs
Short for Web Log, these started out as public journals or diaries that people would keep. Now they have all sorts of uses and are known for making (or making up) news on their own, instead of just recording it. These have become extremely easy to set up on many platforms. Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga and others fit this.

Micro-blogs
Mostly these are some identity statement about “what am I doing now?” – Like you really care. However, the most successful of these are constantly giving out links to other sites they find. Many of the network sites have included this function (as well as blogging) into their layout and format. Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku, and others are examples.

Bookmarks
One of the oldest functions since browsers were created was to collect your bookmarks to keep track of all the great sites you find. When these went online, they became an incredible way of sharing your data and allowing people to see how brilliant you actually are – at being able to find amazing sites they liked. While Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Stumbleupon are well known, I’ve got a list of nearly a hundred of these that exist out there. (Whew!)

Forums
Don’t underestimate the power of a group to change things. Forums are perhaps the most social and historic of social media, having their origins in the old text-based bulletin boards which were accessed only by direct dial-up – before the browser was created. Newsgroups are another format which shared their ancestry. They are so common now, you only have to type in your keyword and then “forum” or “board” or “group” in order to find one that fits your niche.  And if you search on Ning.com, you can even start your own if you don’t seen something that you like.

News
Submitting stories you like has become more mainstream. Digg and Slashdot are perhaps one of the oldest, but several others (Propeller, Reddit, NewsVine, Mixx, etc.) are coming right along. When you have a popular story on these networked the traffic spikes are named after them. Being digged or slashdotted has been known to overload servers.

Audio
Podcasts were perhaps the first of truly social media to break the mold of network broadcasting. With a computer and microphone, you could publish your own news, commentary, or drama with ease. Hosting has usually been the problem due to file size – archives.org allows you to host your audio and then use the RSS feed to promote it. Other audio sites are now sharing playlists, so that people can follow what you are listening to. And last.fm is hosting incredible amounts of music and radio programming so that groups are forming up and your friends can now listen to your playlists.

Images
The breakthrough of being able to have graphics on the Internet was the brainchild of Marc Andressen while he was still at college. He went on to form Netscape, which was the dominant browser for some time (and still survives as Mozilla Firefox). Image sharing is popular through Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, and others.

Video
YouTube created a real breakthrough in creating a free video hosting site. There are now over a hundred video sites – which describe an expanding scene as true broadband becomes more widespread. All the major search engines each own some sort of video hosting platform, which is how they sell advertising and expand their experiential base of how people look for things.  There are even video syndication sites,  so you can submit once and they re-publish your video across the other sites they serve.

Micro-Sites
While “old-timers” like Geocities (just recently shut down by Yahoo) and Freewebs featured free website hosting, other marketing companies have gotten into this loop, such as Squidoo, Hubpages, and WetPaint. Here you can create alternative sites who expressed purpose is self-promotion. These are quite useful, and – with the proper tools – don’t have to suck your time. Obviously a marketing and promotion plus.

Document Sharing
It’s not just blog posts that can be shared. PDF’s, Word .docs, even text files can be shared online – on someone else’s dime. Scribd.com is a great site, but Google has gotten into the mix with Google Docs, which gives you the ability to edit online and share your document with the world.

Aggregators/Syndicators
Aggregators have arrived since the burgeoning world of social media made it nearly impossible to keep up with all the different places that people told about their lives. Friendfeed was first to pick this up (while Facebook is now honing in on this action by popular demand). They actually aggregate all the various blogs, micro-blogs, images, audio, video, etc. that you post to the net. This was named life-streaming – and you can share your life-stream with others.  Syndicators are the reverse. Ping.fm was probably the first to enable you to take your feed and micro-broadcast it to an expanding (more than 40 as I write this) different social media sites you can post to with a single entry. One caveat – only use a single syndication platform. They can echo to each other and your feed will start getting multiples – annoying to followers/clients.

Everything else
There are ping sites, RSS, sites, wiki’s, answers, and even sites that  build widgets for you that you can give away so others can host your content on their site. I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the expansion of social media by any means. Just search for it, and if there is a group or platform that supports sharing or talking about it, it’s probably social media.