Social Media Landscape

Source: Robert Scoble

The large number of social media types makes their understanding rather challenging. The attempts to structure and categorize social media for a better understanding did not exist until recently. In 2007, the former Microsoft employee and celebrity blogger Rober Scoble was among the first to illustrate and categorize the social media landscape, which he named the Social Media Starfish.

• Blog – short for weblog - is a sequential online diary others can comment on and post images or links to other web sites.
• Collaborative Tools – include for instance open-source software products such as Linux or Firefox. The code of the software is provided on an online platform and contributors can collaboratively build, test, and improve such software products.
• Events – mean event service provider, such as ‘Eventful’. Members can upload their music list from popular listening services, such as iTunes, and the event service provider will send a notification to the user, when his or her favourite artist plays a concert close-by.
• Microblogs – are a form of blogging in short sentences, phrases or thoughts, often limited to 140 characters (e.g. Twitter).
• Personal Social Networks – are applications allowing users to build personal websites and meet like-minded people to express opinions and share information (e.g. Facebook).
• Photo and Video Sharing – are websites that organize and share content in form of photos (e.g. Flickr) and videos (e.g. YouTube).
• Podcast – are audio and video files, which are distributed via an RSS feed to subscribers of the service. The audio and video files can then be played on computers or portable digital audio players.
• White label social networks – can be described as an organization’s or brand’s own social community, including, for instance, support forums. The purposes of such private networks include enhanced customer support, product development, and customer engagement.
• Wiki – is a site multiple contributors develop a collective consensus about a phenomenon or event, often in form of texts and pictures (e.g. Wikipedia).

This division helps to classify social media according to activities, and thus provides a base for marketers to segment potential marketing a communication platforms.