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Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web2.0 , and that allow the creation and exchange of user generaeted content. Businesses also refer to social media as user generaeted content (UGC) or consumer generaeted media (CGM). Social media utilization is believed to be a driving factor in the idea that the current period in time will be defined as the attention age.

Social media can be said to have three components;Concept (art, information, or meme).

1. Media (physical, electronic, or verbal).
2. Social interface (intimate direct, community engagement, social viral, electronic broadcast or syndication, or other physical media such as print).

Common forms of social media;

• Concepts, slogans, and statements with a high memory retention quotient, that excite others to repeat.Grass-Roots direct action information dissemination such as public speaking, installations, performance, and demonstrations.
• Electronic media with 'sharing', syndication, or search algorithm technologies (includes internet and mobile devices).
• Print media, designed to be re-distributed.

Social media marketing is a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, blogs, Linkedln,Facebook,Flickr,Wikipedia and YouTube.

In the context of Internet marketing,social media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the property (e.g., the vast majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees).

Concept

Social media marketing has three important aspects:

1. Creating buzz or newsworthy events, videos, tweets, or blog entries that attract attention, and become viral in nature. Buzz is what makes social media marketing work. It replicates a message through user to user contact, rather than the traditional method of purchasing of an ad or promoting a press release. The message does not necessarily have to be about the product. Many successful viral campaigns have gathered steam through an amusing or compelling message, with the company logo or tagline included incidentally.
2. Building ways that enable fans of a brand or company to promote a message themselves in multiple online social media venues. Fan pages in Twitter, MySpace of Facebook follow this model.
3. It is based around online conversations. Social media marketing is not controlled by the organization. Instead it encourages user participation and dialogue. A badly designed social media marketing campaign can potentially backfire on the organization that created it. To be successful SMM campaigns must fully engage and respect the users.

According to Lloyd Salmons, first chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau social media council "Social media isn't just about big networks like Facebook and MySpace, it's about brands having conversations.

Best practices for social media marketing are arguably elusive today and its merits relative to traditional marketing are debated. However a growing consensus suggests social media marketing and Social Media are here to stay. Nielsen published a report indicating that blogs and social networks are key components of the emerging social web. The social web, comprising social media websites and applications is the milieu within which social media marketing takes place.

Social network marketing

Social network marketing or social level marketing, is an advertising method that makes use of social network service and to increase their web presence. This ranges from simply advertising directly on social networking sites,viral marketing that spreads throughout the web, email, and word of mouth, or providing niche social networking sites focused around the item being advertised.

Many sites include features where companies can create profiles. For example, on Facebook companies can create "pages" where users can become fans of this company, product, service, individual, etc. Many companies create MySpace pages for themselves.

Companies sometimes invest in internet presence management, which can include social network marketing.

Studies

According to a 2009 CMO Survey, currently 3.5% of marketing budgets is spent on social media marketing, with that figure predicted to grow to 6.1% within 12 months and 13.7% within five years.The survey also found that social networks (e.g.,Facebook and Linkedln) are most favored by marketers, followed by video sharing sites (e.g.,YouTube), image sharing sites (e.g.,Flickr),blogs, and microblogs (e.g., Twitter and Seesmic ). According to the 2009 Digital Readiness Report, "Essential Online Public Relations and Marketing Skills," a majority of organizations are now contemplating hiring social media specialists. In a 2007 study by eMarketer, commissioned by MySpace, it was predicted there would be a $1230 million spend on social network marketing. In a 2008 study by Forrester Research evaluating the social network marketing programs, only one of the 16 major firms it had reviewed had received a passing grade, with half of the programs scoring a zero or lower.

Social Media Marketing in China

Social Media Marketing is particularly effective in Chine where a perceived lack of business ethics have resulted in a consumer tendency to mistrust traditional advertising and depend more on word-of-mouth marketing. Social Media Marketing and Businesses

Social Media has started to become a viable marketing venue for businesses. They have especially become popular for media outlets to use. CNN has a podcast and a facebook. In addition to CNN, as a company using social media, their employees use different social media. For example Anderson Cooper, of Anderson Cooper 360 has a blog, a facebook and a twitter. Facebook seems to be the leading social media outlet for businesses by having pages from different companies such as Dots, New York and Company. Twitter comes in 2nd place and Myspace comes in 3rd place.

“A customer oriented mindset stemming from deep social interaction allows a company to identify and meet customer needs in the marketplace, generating superior profits." - Wetpaint and Altimeter, The Engagement Report

Social Media Potential for Business to Business

Business technology buyers participate socially more than adult US consumers. Forrester surveyed technical and line-of-business decision-makers who buy technology. Socially, this is an extremely active group compared to US adults or many other groups. Almost all (91%) read blogs, view videos, or listen to podcasts online, and just 5% don’t participate in any social activity at least monthly. More than three fourths of respondents say that peers influence their purchase decisions, more so than any other media or information source.

A social network service focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provides means for users to interact over the internet such as e-mail and instant messaging. Although online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service in a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category places (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook, Bebo and Twitter widely used worldwide; MySpace and Linkedln being the most widely used in North America; Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), iWiW (mostly in Hungary), Tuenti (mostly in Spain), Decayenne, Tagged, XING; Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in Suth Amerika and Central Amerika; and Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and Orkut and Facebook in India.

There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.

Although some of the largest social networks were founded on the notion of digitizing real world connections, many other networks as seen in the List of social networking websites focus on categories from books and music to non-profit business to motherhood as ways to provide both services and community to individuals with shared interests.

Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services, such as MySpace or Facebook. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator, which pulls together information into a single location, or helps a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into one profile. Various aggregation services provide tools or widgest to allow users to consolidate messages, track friends, combine bookmarks, search across multiple social networking sites, read rss feeds for multiple social networks, see when their name is mentioned on various sites, access their profiles from a single interface, provide "lifestreams", etc.

Social network aggregation services attempt to organize or simplify a user's social networking experience, although the idea has been satirized by the concept of a "social network aggregator aggregator.