What Is Social Media Marketing

Social media is best defined in the context of the previous industrial media paradigm. Traditional media, such as television, newspaper, radio, and magazines, are one-way, static broadcast technologies. For instance. the magazine publisher is a large organization that distributes expensive content to consumers, while advertisers pay for the privilege of inserting their ads into that content. Or you're sitting down, watching your favorite sitcom, and suddenly you're interrupted by commercials (luckily, you have a DVR, so you can fast-forward through them). If you disagree with something you read in the newspaper, you can't send the editorial staff instant feedback. and good luck connecting with your morning radio on-air personality.

New web technologies have made it easy for anyone to create - and, most importantly - distribute their own content. A blog post, tweet, or YouTube video can be produced and viewed by millions virtually for free. Advertisers don't have to pay publishers or distributors huge sums of money to embed their messages; now they can make their own interesting content that viewers will flock to.

Social media comes in many forms, but for our purposes, the most popular: blogs, microblogs(Twitter), social networks(Facebook, LinkedIN), media-sharing sites(YouTube, Flickr), social bookmarking and voting sites (Digg, Reddit), review sites(Yelp), forums, and virtual worlds (Second Life)