Social Media can be a very confusing topic. What exactly is Social Media?

Social media can take many different forms,

including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Youmeo (social network aggregation), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Avatars United (social networking), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging), Tenporium (social polling and consumer product reviews) and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce.

Taken from Wikipedia.

Social Media refers to web sites and applications that are primarily driven by the users.

Social media is driven by communities, a group of people with common interests who connect – in loose or organised forms – with one another to learn, play, work, organize or socialize. Communities can be large, small, local or global, public or restricted to members.

Social media uses the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner.

Social media describes a new set of internet tools that enable shared community experiences, both online and in person.

Social media is democratic and distributed.

Some times, social media content is intended as the starting point for larger conversations.

Social media…

…can be changed – Blog authors update posts, or someone comments on it and thus adding to the conversation)

…can be syndicated and reused.

…can offer some sense of the popularity of stuff in real time – Number of comments on a Flickr image, popularity of links to a post etc.

…can be mixed by the media owner (blogger, site host) or the user – Text, audio, video, photos, sketches etc.

…is direct – Publish it when you want to.

…is Infinite – Post as many blog posts, videos, comments etc as you want. No limits.