We think it’s a nice term that basically just sums up the change over the last few years in the way people, companies, organisations, Everyone are using the web now.

Social media is empowered by the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner, stimulating a bottom-up democratic approaches to influence.

This is a big change in the way that the media has been produced and consumed in comparison to the past. Old Media influence was limited to the few and or wealthy, and there were much fewer channels for feedback, discussion, error correction and criticism on a broad scale.

Why engage Social Media?

Almost all of us have heard of Digg, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, del.icio.us or Facebook.

While we all have our favourites, its important to realise that there are thousands if not millions of unique, niche, long tail communities across these hundreds of social media sites.

If your company has a Blog and your staff are using LinkedIn that is a great first step.

However to leverage the full power of social media its reccommended to jump in the deep end and gauge the influence of these niche communities across these hundreds of social media sites.

Finding your Influencers within Social Media and engaging with them in conversation on their terms offers your business a sea of new opportunity.

So what are the major social media sites?

What you mightn’t know is that according to Favourite Blog, there are more than 237 Social Media Websites out there as of Feb 2008.

To sum up there are at least:

• 30 Social Networking sites including Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, LinkedIN, Spock
• 16 Social Aggregation sites including Friendfeed, mEgo, Multiply, Socialurl, Socialmarker, Second Brain (beta)
• 68 Social Bookmarking sites including BlinkList, del.icio.us, Furl, Google Bookmarks, Linktopia, Rawsugar, StumbleUpon
• 15 Social Events and Opinion Sites including 43Places, Evite, Socializr, TripAdvisor, Upcoming, Yelp
• 8 Social Gaming sites including Habbo GameSpot Kongregate Xfire Hello Kitty Online
• 8 Social Micro Blogging sites including Jaiku, Tumblr, Twitter

Shameless Plug

At Shifted Pixels we work with some of Australia’s largest corporates and most rad startups delivering strategy and implementation for social media optimisation, web 2.0 marketing, community engagement, consumer insights, web reputation management and other online PR and marketing services.

If you would be interested in discussing the opportunities that these may offer you business, we would love to talk to you! Contact Us