What is Social Media and can it be used for business?

Social Media is published media created by internet and mobile communication network users by means of easy and scalable web technologies. The purpose of Social Media is to influence interaction and to facilitate communications between people and public audiences. Social Media can be used in various ways using various platforms.

So how can this chatter, photos, videos and other content help a business? The answer is simple. All Social Media content is generated by the user or consumer. The best way to look at it is to see it as a very accurate database. A business can make their products and/or services public using these mediums. But also, make these products and/or services available at the time when a user is interested in it.

Second to the huge marketing advantage,Social Media is also seen as a method used to build market confidence. The more you talk about you products and/or services, the better people get to understand it and know that your company offers it. Social Media is a brand building tool.

Social Media platforms can be used to provide or get information and you can bounce your ideas off a wide "also experts in the field" audience.

We offer 2 solutions to clients wishing to engage in the powerful medium -

1. Fully Managed Social Media Solution: Wobble can create profiles, add content, configure blogs and manage this entire public relations aspect of you business for you. In order to handle this process on your behalf we need to clearly understand your business and the philosophy model behind it. We can handle 80% of the process for you. For the 20% balance a certain level of interaction between us will be required and in order to do this we choose a single contact person on your and on our side. All communications flows through these contacts to ensure that all information is carried over successfully. 
   
   
   
   We sign a 12 or 24 month contract where you will be charged a monthly fee. The monthly fee is easy on company's cash flow and you can make use of the services immediately.
   
   
2. Social Media Consultation: We do an analyses of your business and consult you on which services would work best for your business. You will be briefed on how frequently the platforms should be use, what content to publish and how to publish to increase traffic to your website. The consultancy fee can be once-off or on an ad hoc basis.
   
   

List of suggested Social Media platforms to use

Communication

• Blogs: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress (our favourite platform for blogs) and Vox
• Internet forums: vBulletin and phpBB
• Micro-blogging / Presence applications: Twitter (Click here to read how to use Twitter for marketing your business online), Plurk, Pownce and Jaiku
• Social networking: Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Skyrock
• Social network aggregation: Youmeo and FriendFeed
• Events: Upcoming, Meetup.com and Eventful

Collaboration

• Wikis: Wikipedia, PBwiki, wetpaint
• Social bookmarking (or Social tagging) (Golder & Huberman 2006): Delicious, Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Stumpedia, CiteULike
• Social news: Mixx, Digg, Reddit
• Opinion sites: epinions, Yelp

Multimedia

• Photo sharing: Flickr, Photobucket, Zooomr, SmugMug
• Video sharing: YouTube, Vimeo, Revver
• Art sharing: deviantART
• Livecasting: Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Skype
• Audio and Music Sharing: imeem, The Hype Machine, Last.fm, ccMixter

Reviews and Opinions

• Product Reviews: MouthShut.com, epinions.com
• Q&A: Yahoo! Answers

Entertainment

• Virtual worlds: The Sims Online, Second Life
• Online gaming: World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Age of Conan, Spore (2008 video game)
• Game sharing: Miniclip