Social Media - Wayne MacPhail

On February 20, I had an opportunity to hear Wayne MacPhail in my class at Sheridan. This was one of the best presentations in my life, very nicely presented, and very informative.

Wayne is a cutting-edge content producer for print media and the web and has been a magazine editor, a photographer and a newspaper writer/editor.

Mr. MacPhail’s topic was “Mashing Up Social Media”. He started with the introduction of Web 2.0 and discussed the following four concepts:

● Tagging
● Social Bookmarking
● RSS Feeds
● Embeded Codes

So, what is Social Media? It is media of the people, for the people, and by the people. The typical media is TV and radio where people are passive viewers, but online Social media is open information sharing in an online community where ordinary people become an active participant by collaborating and becoming part of it by contributing in its creation, e.g. Facebook, YouTube, etc.

The top social networks are MySpace and Facebook, to name a few. The way you can use social networks for your own benefits is to setup a profile and reach out to your customers. Once you have built a good solid network of friends you can then post comments on people’s pages to increase your earnest or become friend for their friends. You can then also post bulletins or you can communicate through your profile image; any sort of contest or something like that going on. You can market yourself and can further increase the awareness for your company.

Social Media as a marketing platform: As a marketing platform televisions and radio have been used for over decades, where as social media has been gaining recognition only from the past few years, but a very strong recognition. Social Networks like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube are not just network of people, but actually marketing platforms, where people or companies are doing business, said Mr. MacPhail.

In order to be successful in social media market, Wayne used the following terms:

● “You don’t use a social network, you become part of it“
● “Contribution is participation”
● “Social media encourages engagement & evangelism”
● “Social media: is local first; is viral; is granular; is a conversation, not a broadcast; is mobile; wants to be free”

Following are the social media Related Websites Mr. Wayne MacPhail showed:

Jaiku: Social networking and micro-blogging service, purchased by Google, that lets you continually broadcast (lifecast) yourself by sending personal updates via phone or computer, similar to Twitter.

Mogulus: Broadcast online, live, from a web connection.

Sprout: Create sophisticated, dynamic and interactive multimedia content online.

Twitter: Social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you to send updates to Twitter website via a SMS from a mobile phone. Like, what you are doing and what other’s are doing.

TwitterVision: For a graphic sense of the implications of Twitter, there’s TwitterVision, which combines Twitter and Google Maps.

Utterz: Social networking and micro-blogging that lets you post in voice, video, pictures and text from your mobile phone to your blog or social network page.

Qik: Stream videos directly from your mobile phone to the Web.

Digg: Community-based news article popularity website. Readers can view all of the stories that have been submitted by fellow users. Once a story has received enough "diggs", it appears on Digg's front page.

GoogleReader: RSS Feeds reader.

Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.

Note: Jaiku, Twitter, and Utterz are similar.

Relevant Links:

● SocialMarker
● Social Media – Web 2.0
● Content, Life & Everything
● Did You Know?
● Social Bookmarking in Plain English
● Android