Social Media

A significant shift is afoot that is changing everything. That change is the Internet is starting to actually mirror the real world.

In the beginning the Internet was dominated by geeks whose most endearing characteristic was their attention to detail.

It was the geeks attention to detail and their ability to identify problems, create a language (HTML among others), and software to communicate from computer to computer. Search engines rose to the occasion who were once again dominated by geeks and they created software to help the rest of us find information online. Adoption and use of the Internet grew with the creation of a user-friendly publishing tools i.e. the blog - which fueled a new information revolution - consumer generated media.

Consumer Generated Media is More Relational and Social

The geeks creation of user friendly publishing tools put the power of ‘publishing’ online into the hands of the average Joe and Jane. Today consumer generated media (CGM) includes blogs, podcasts (a.k.a. audio blogs), and video podcasts.

Types of Blogs

Wikipedia defines 19 different types of blogs including:

1. Personal Blogs: an online diary or journal, such as LiveJournal which was one of the earliest uses of blogs.
2. Professional or career: focused on an individuals professional focus, craft, or passion.
3. Paid: individual(s) is paid on behalf on an employee as a full time or contract basis for the absoulte sole purpose to blog on behalf of the company.
4. Cultural: discuss music, sports, theater, other arts, and popular culture.
5. Social: Social blogs have had a relatively slow start. However, they find increasing popularity and may very well appear as the next major contributor to the blogging community.
6. Topical: focus on a niche. For example, the Google Blog covers nothing but news about Google.
7. Business: Business blogs are used to promote and defame businesses, to argue economic concepts, to disseminate information, and more.
8. Science: an excellent new way to disseminate and discuss data.
9. Moblog: content posted to the Internet from a mobile phone.
10. Collaborative: Collaborative blogs can be open to everyone or limited to a group of people.
11. Educational: Students can use blogs to record what they learn and teachers can use blogs to record what they teach.
12. Directory: Directory blogs provide regularly-updated links to topics of interest. Directory blogs are usually focused on a particular news topic.
13. Link: link blog is a way to share interesting links (URLs). Link blogs often reference other blog entries and web sites without commentary on the subject matter.
14. Forum: An internet forum is not a blog (technically speaking), but a blog can function as an internet forum.
15. Spam: Spam blogs (splogs) are a form of high-pressure advertising. Like spam e-mails, splogs are characterized by bold lettering and outrageous claims. Affiliated splogs often link to each other to increase their Internet presence.
16. Sketch: are blogs where an artist or a group of artists mainly post different sketches and other types of visual art on a regular basis.
17. Photoblogs: Photoblogs consist of a gallery of images published regularly.
18. Clubbox: A clubbox is a type of blog prevalent in East Asia where the owner, upon paying a monthly fee, can post daily personal entries, pictures, and videos and usually has a large amount of bandwidth to share.
19. Political: Most political blogs are news driven, and as such political bloggers will link to articles from news web sites, often adding their own comments as well.

Podcasting

While not technically recognized as a blog by Wikipedia podcasts do use a blog as a platform as their home on the web. Personally, I currently have three active podcasts including Buying a Business, Business Tips and Traps, and a collaborative podcast No Bullshit Leadership. I have experimented with a couple of video podcasts and expect to do my own version of a video podcast in the near future.

Wikipedia defines podcasting as “the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio programs or music videos, over the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. The distribution format of a podcast uses either the RSS or Atom syndication formats.”

Enter the Relationship Geeks

As the Internet has grown, matured, and developed into an easy to use publishing platform. Adoption among what I will label the ‘relationship geeks’ is rapidly gaining momentum. These are people who are highly social, connected, networked, and naturally warm.

What makes them distinct from the technical geeks is their emphasis on the ‘relationship’. Information is important to them but secondary to building a relationship and connecting with real people. They use the Internet as a tool to reach out through email, blog comments, and tools like Skype and del.icio.us.

Blogs, Podcasts, and Social Bookmarking tools all have one thing in common - they are relationship and network dependent. Each uses information differently but with the same goal in mind - connecting with real people, building relationships, and being a part of a network.

Another example of the network effect is LinkedIn which is a social networking site, mainly used for business. As of March 2006, it had more than 5 million registered users. The goal is to build a business network by leveraging the power of the Internet to locate people and build a relationship.

Difference Between Relationship 1.0 and 2.0

In the Relationship 1.0 world it was all about hypertext or hyperlinks. You built a website or a blog and actively linked to other websites to gain traffic. Soon the search engines began to recognize these hyperlinks as a vote of authority. With the natural linking habits of bloggers and being search engine friendly the power of the blog to attract users from the search engines was recognized and blogging has continued to grow across the world and every society.

The ‘technology’ of hyper linking from other websites provided the authority that search engines use to link people interests with blogs and websites. The practice of hyper linking often referred to as ‘link love’ because of the influence that hyper links have in improving your position on a search engine results page. Link love will always exist but it’s importance is soon to be eclipsed.

Relationship 2.0 - The Trump Card of Online Promotion

I believe we are now witnessing new behaviors that I am defining as Relationship 2.0 - characterized by people exploiting technology to help them connect, relate, and network. They use technology to build relationships and make connections - other than being a tool to help them connect with other people with similar interests - technology has no meaning to them.

The importance of relationship is an important distinction because I think the next wave of online growth will come as a result of the wide spread adoption of social tools being used by the warm, friendly, social, and networked users.

They are natural promoters, often work in sales, have the gift of the gab, and are a party waiting too happen. The only question is how will this change the party?