What is social media and how can it be exploited?

Social media extends far further than networking sites like Facebook.

People tend to think of social media as social networking: blogs, podcasts, wikis, Second Life, and so on.

At social media consultancy iJump, we have a pretty comprehensive definition - the best one we've found is: "people talking to each other online."

There are a lot of facets to social media, and they all overlap. To make it easier to understand, we've broken them down into five areas. They are:

Tools to:
- Create (blogs, podcasts and online video)
- Connect (mostly social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn)
- Share (like photo-sharing site Flickr)
- Collaborate (like wikis); and
- Define the world (like tagging – which is NOT graffiti)
- Find out more at our online social media learning centre - you'll discover it's a work in progress, as is social media itself!

Why is it called social media?
It's as simple as its name. It's social because it doesn't work with just one person - like the tango, it takes at least two. Social media is an ongoing conversation, which is a different mindset from the way many of us think about marketing. Too often marketing appears to be about launching a message at an audience, and waiting for them to come back and buy stuff. Instead, the social media audience has an opinion.

In some ways, social media is intimate and directed – like a conversation over coffee, or even contact with a call centre, with a key difference: anyone can find it on Google - forever.

It's media because it's a form of communication, the same as broadcast (TV, radio) or print (newspapers and magazines). The barriers to entry have come down dramatically. Now anyone with a few thousand dollars can set up their own TV station - something that was unthinkable ten years ago.

Success in social media still comes down to how well you communicate:
- visually
- verbally
- simply
- with strong ideas

What can social media do for your business?
- It can close the gap between marketing and customer service
- It can help you actively create and develop your product or service with your best customers

How? That depends on your customers, and on the social media tools you use. A high-tech business like Dell has a team dedicated to finding complaints and problems about Dell products on Twitter or blogs.

Why? Because those complaints create a permanent record - a black mark against their reputation – on the internet. Every company makes mistakes, but the companies that respond quickly and effectively will earn loyalty and positive regard from their customers.

If a big company like Dell can be flexible and agile enough to listen to its customers through social media, can you say the same for your start-up? What systems have you put in place to make it work?

- START-UP TV