Social Media: Concepts and Marketing Applications

Besides email and search, social media has been one of Internet’s boons for people all over the world. Web technology has advanced significantly to enable people to share not only text, but also images, streaming video and music files over the net. Due to democratization of Internet technologies and growing bandwidth availability, several online communities have cropped up, wherein people spread across different countries share common interests. Such communities have gained immense popularity and grown in size within a very short time. As a result, many big software companies such as Yahoo and Google have spent millions of dollars to acquire such properties. Their increasing popularity can be gauged from the fact that specialized social media search engines have also sprung up to help people navigate within the online social media. Technorati website claims that it is "currently tracking 110 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media". The collection of seventeen articles in this book captures the developments with respect to marketers’ attempts to leverage social media. Divided into four sections, the content covers the following aspects: Creating brand associations using social media Use of podcasts, blogs, wikis and social community sites Impact of social media on brands and companies Application of social media for product development, advertising, creation of buzz Top brand mentions in social media Profiles of YouTube, SecondLife and Cyworld