Social Media?
Social Media is both a collection of internet tools that enable and facilitate connectivity as well as being a term that defines the manner in which informational content is disseminated and distributed – socially.
The tools that enable content to be disseminated are too numerous to list; however the most popular are:
- Blogging
- YouTube
Each tool empowers any individual, group or professional entity to freely share knowledge, stories or general content to whomever they are connected to. The power in this is that each person is connected with a different group of people and many groups overlap in terms of members contained therein. Connections continue to grow as shared interests are related and interesting information is spread. Because of this a single person can have a reach that far outnumbers the immediate connections that he/she has accumulated. It is this reach and the ability to share any form of information that makes Social Media so intriguing and sort after. A mother can share a photo of her new born to everyone she is connected to with a single message, or what she ate for breakfast, or the emotional pain she is suffering, in all cases the information will be freely accessible through the tools that she uses.
To what end? Well everyone has a different goal. Some seek popularity and endeavor to gain a social rank or rating. Some use the tools to aid in propagating important informaton and calls for help or assistence. Others seek to leverage them to attain a certain goal. Or maybe just to make connections and forge new relationships.
