In November 2011, it was reported Indians spend more time on social media than on any other activity on the Internet.

is a key example of a social media site, with over one billion active users in October 2012.Social media technologies take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, social networks, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme in their Business Horizons (2010) article, with six different types of social media: collaborative projects (for example, Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (for example, Twitter), content communities (for example, YouTube and DailyMotion), social networking sites (for example, Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms. Social media network websites include sites like Facebook,twitter, Viadeo, Vkontakte, Hyves, Tuenti, Dreamsvillage, Twitter, Bebo and MySpace.

Accessibility the means of production for industrial media are typically government and/or corporate (privately-owned); social media tools are generally available to the public at little or no cost.

Social media provides an environment where users and PR professionals can converse, where PR professionals can promote their brand and improve their companys image, by listening and responding to what the public is saying about their product.

There is an increasing trend towards using social media monitoring tools that allow marketers to search, track and analyse conversation on the web about their brand or about topics of interest. This can be useful in PR management and campaign tracking, allowing the user to measure return on investment, competitor-auditing and general public engagement. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, more in-depth tools.

he says, Twitter only adds to the noise: its simply impossible to pack much context into its 140 characters. All other biases are present as well: in a country like Iran its mostly pro-Western, technology-friendly and iPod-carrying young people who are the natural and most frequent users of Twitter. They are a tiny and, most important, extremely untypical segment of the Iranian population (the number of Twitter users in Iran a country of more than seventy million people.)

Since large-scale collaborative co-creation is one of the main way forming information in the social network, Aniket Kittur and BoSocial Mediangowon Suh took Wiki under examination and indicated that, One possibility is that distrust of wiki Content is not due to the inherently mutable nature of the system but instead to the lack of available information for judging trustworthiness.

Furthermore, social media employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, cocreate, discuss, and modify user-generated content. It introduces substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities and individuals

Indeed, since the United States colonial era, public images and news media influenced collective memory and discourse about national development and national trauma. Journalistic influence is growing less important however, as social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter provide a constant source of alternative news sources for users. In many ways, mainstream journalists have maintained an authoritative voice as the storytellers of the American past. Their documentary style narratives, detailed exposes, and their positions in the present make them prime sources for public memory. Specifically, news media journalists have shaped collective memory on nearly every major national event from the deaths of social and political figures, to the progression of political hopefuls. Journalists provide elaborate descriptions of commemorative events in U.S. history and contemporary popular cultural sensations. Many Americans learn the significance of historical events and political issues through news media, as they are presented on popular news stations.

; Williams, Anthony D. (2006). Wikinomics. New York: Portfolio. ISBN1--138-0. OCLC.

People continue to spend more time on social networks than any other category of sites20% of their time spent on PCs and 30% of their mobile time.

The number of social media users age 65 and older grew 100 percent throughout 2010, so that one in four people in that age group are now part of a social networking site.

and professor Matthew Auer casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that social media are open and participatory. He also speculates on the emergence of anti-social media used as instruments of pure control.

Much of the criticism of social media are about its exclusiveness as most sites do not allow the transfer of information from one to another, disparity of information available, issues with trustworthiness and reliability of information presented, concentration, ownership of media content, and the meaning of interactions created by social media. However, it is also argued that social media has positive effects such as allowing the democratization of the internet

Eric Ehrmann contends that social media in the form of public diplomacy creates a patina of inclusiveness that covers traditional economic interests that are structured to ensure that wealth is pumped up to the top of the economic pyramid, perpetuating the digital divide and post Marxian class conflict. He also voices concern over the trend that finds social utilities operating in a quasi-libertarian global environment of oligopoly that requires users in economically challenged nations to spend high percentages of annual income to pay for devices and services to participate in the social media lifestyle.

Australia has some of the highest social media usage in the world. In usage of Facebook, Australia ranks highest, with over nine million users spending almost nine hours per month on the site.

Reach both industrial and social media technologies provide scale and are capable of reaching a global audience. Industrial media, however, typically use a centralized framework for organization, Social Media production, and dissemination, whereas social media are by their very nature more decentralized, less hierarchical, and distinguished by multiple points of production and utility.

is that more consumers are accessing social media content today via mobile platforms, especially apps.

Groups:The groups functional block represents the extent to which users can form communities and subcommunities. The more social a network becomes, the bigger the group of friends, followers, and contacts.

Over 25% of U.S. Internet page views occurred at one of the top social networking sites in December 2009, up from 13.8% a year before.

According to Jan H. Kietzmann, the honeycomb framework of social media is based on the following functional building blocks

Presence: The framework building block presence represents the extent to which users can know if other users are accessible. It includes knowing where others are, in the virtual world and/or in the real world, and whether they are available.

It is through this process of building social authority that social media becomes effective: One of the foundational concepts in social media has become that you cannot completely control your message through social media but rather you can simply begin to participate in the conversation expecting that you can achieve a significant influence in that conversation.

One out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media according to statistics released June 2011.

As of 2012, Facebook has 152,226,000 unique PC visitors and 78,388,000 unique mobile app visitors. Twitter reported 37,033,000 unique PC visitors and 22,620,000 unique mobile app visitors. Pinterest reported 27,223,000 unique PC visitors and 14,316,000 unique mobile web visitors. Google+ reported 26,201,000 unique PC visitors and 9,718,000 unique mobile app visitors.

British-American entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen criticizes social media in his book The Cult of the Amateur, writing, Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.

Reputation:Reputation is the extent to which users can identify the standing of others, including themselves, in a social media setting. Reputation can have different meanings on social media platforms. In most cases, reputation is a matter of trust, but since information technologies are not yet good at determining such highly qualitative criteria, social media sites rely on mechanical Turks: tools that automatically aggregate user-generated information to determine trustworthiness.

This is also relative to the issue justice in the social network. For example, the phenomenon Human flesh search engine in Asia raised the discussion of private-law brought by social network platform.

(2006). The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN0-300--1. OCLC.

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Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Social media has also been recognized for the way in which it has changed how public relations professionals conduct their jobs. It has provided an open arena where people are free to exchange ideas on companies, brands and products. As stated by Doc Searls and David Wagner, two authorities on the effects of Internet on marketing, advertising, and PR, the best of the people in PR are not PR Types at all. They understand that there arent s, theyre the companys best conversationalists.

One example of this is the public explosion of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida. News media coverage of the incident was minimal until social media users made the story recognizable through their constant discussion of the case. In some ways, the spread of this tragic event through alternative news sources parallels that of the Emmitt Till - whose murder became a national story after it circulated African American and Communists newss. Approximately one month after the tal shooting of Trayvon Martin, its online coverage by everyday Americans garnered national attention from mainstream media journalists. Social media was also influential in the widespread attention given to the revolutionary outbreaks in the Middle East and North Africa during 2011.

There are various statistics that account for social media usage and effectiveness for individuals worldwide. Some of the most recent statistics are as follows:

Consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sitesroughly 20 percent of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30 percent of total time online via mobile.

Marketing research:Mobile social media applications offer data about offline consumer movements at a level of detail heretofore limited to online companies. Any firm can now know the exact time at which a customer entered one of its outlets, as well as comments made during the visit.

Space-timers (location and time sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for one specific location at one specific point-in time (e.g., Facebook Places; Foursquare)

Business Marketing Analysts have stated that one of the key take aways of the Nielsen Companys State of the media: The social media report 2012

Identity: The identity functional block represents the extent to which users reveal their identities in a social media setting. This can include disclosing information such as name, age, gender, profession, location, and also information that portrays users in certain ways.

News media and television journalism have been instrumental in the shaping of American collective memory for much of the twentieth century.

There has been much speculation, on and off the Internet, about the meaningfulness of human interactions created by social media. Some of these views are summed up in an Atlantic article by Stephen Marche titled Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.

The internet usage effects of social media as of 2012 are, according to Nielsen, that internet users continue to spend more time in social media than any other site. At the same time, the total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PC and mobile devices increased by 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012 compared to 88 billion minutes in July 2011.

Yet another example of this shift is in the on-going Kony 2012 campaign, which suced first on YouTube and later garnered a great amount of attention from mainstream news media journalists, who now monitor social media sites to inform their reports on the movement. In short, the growing social media trend is allowing greater participation in telling the stories of Americas past and present, and certainly,new york asian escort model shaping its future. And although social media networking sites may be short-lived, they prove highly effective in helping the American public remember historic events and in shaping the meanings inscribed in those events.

Tim Berners-Lee contends that the danger of social networking sites is that most are silos and do not allow users to port data from one site to another. He also cautions against social networks that grow too big and become a monopoly as this tends to limit innovation.

Slow-timers (neither location, nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (for example, watching a YouTube video or reading a Wikipedia entry)

Quality - In industrial(traditional) publishingmediated by a publisherthe typical range of quality is substantially narrower than in niche, unmediated markets. The main challenge posed by content in social media sites is the ct that the distribution of quality has high variance: from very high-quality items to low-quality, sometimes abusive content.

Evgeny Morozov, 2009-2010 Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University contends that the contents uploaded to Twitter may have little relevance to the rest of the people who do not use Twitter. On the article Iran: Downside to the Twitter Revolution in the magazine Dissent ll 2009,

In the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer Study, people like me re-emerged as one of the three most credible and trustworthy spokespeople to informed members of the public ages 25 to 64 in 20 different countries; when asked the question, If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible would that information be? 68% said they found academics or experts either extremely credible or very credible, with 66% saying the same for technical experts in a company and 65% saying a person like yourself. Only 29% said government officials were credible, them the least credible spokespeople in the world.

1 in 5 divorces are blamed on Facebook. Tony Cooper, One in Five U.S. Divorces Fueled by Facebook, Social Media, Recent survey by AAML shows Facebook-related antics, extramarital activity burgeoning, San Diego News,

One characteristic shared by both social and industrial media is the capability to reach small or large audiences; for example, either a blog post or a television show may reach no people or millions of people. Some of the properties that help describe the differences between social and industrial media are:

Usability industrial media production typically requires specialized skills and training. Conversely, most social media production requires only modest reinterpretation of existing skills; in theory, anyone with access can operate the means of social media production.

Sharing: Sharing represents the extent to which users exchange, distribute, and receive content. The term social often implies that exchanges between people are crucial. In many cases, however, sociality is about the objects that mediate these ties between people; the reasons why they meet online and associate with each other.

From Malcolm Gladwell, The role of social media in protests and revolutions is grossly overstated. It(social media) makes it easier for activists to express themselves ,and harder for that expression to have any impact. Because social networks are effective at increasing participation - by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. In other words, it succeeds not by motivating people to make real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.

In the U.S. alone, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year. In ct, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, it the No. 1 social networking site for the month.

While traditional social media offer a variety of opportunities for companies in a wide range of business sectors, mobile social media makes use of the location- and time-sensitivity aspects of it in order to engage into marketing research, communication, sales promotions/discounts, and relationship development/loyalty programs.

Nonetheless, as social networking becomes more popular among older and younger generations, sites like Facebook and YouTube gradually undermine the traditionally authoritative voices of news media. American citizens, for example, contest media coverage of various social and political events as they see fit, inserting their voices into the narratives about Americas past and present, and shaping their own collective memories.

From Nicholas Carr, st (Internet/social) media and deep slow thought dont mix well. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in 1960s, Medias aSocial media Social Mediare not just passive channel of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. However, there are several benefits brought from deep reading. For example, our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connection that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. But under need of convenience, we would not choose this non-rapid way.

According to Nielsen, global consumers spend more than six hours on social networking sites. Social Media Revolution produced by Socialnomics author Erik Qualman contains numerous statistics on social media including the ct that 93% of businesses use it for marketing and that if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest.

Relationships: The relationships block represents the extent to which users can be related to other users. By relate, we mean that two or more users have some form of association that leads them to converse, share objects of sociality, meet up, or simply just list each other as a friend or n.

It has been observed that Facebook is now the primary method for communication by college students in the U.S.

(2005). Everything Bad Is Good for You. New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN1--307-7. OCLC.

Even in the United States, the birth-country of Twitter, has only 107.7 million accounts(Media Bistro, 2012) in Twitter. Since there can be many multi-account users and there are more than 314.7 million population in U.S.(U.S. POPClock Projection. U.S. Census Bureau., 2012), only limited groups of people use Twitter in U.S..

People obtain information, education, news and other data from electronic and print media. Social media are distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newss, television, and film as they are comparatively inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information. Industrial media generally require significant resources to publish information as in most cases the articles goes through many revisions before being published.

Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, exchange contents among themselves in virtual communities and networks.

Social media content is generated through social media interactions done by the users through the site. There has always been a huge debate on the ownership of the content on social media platforms since it is generated by the users and hosted by the company. Added to this is the danger to security of information, which can be leaked to third parties with economic interests in the platform, or parasites who comb the data for their own databases.

Space-locators (only location sensitive): Exchange of messages, with relevance for one specific location, which are tagged to a certain place and read later by others (e.g., Yelp; Qype)

As many as 7000 applications may be currently on file including those that havent been published yet. Only slightly over 100 of these applications have issued as patents, however, largely due to the multi-year backlog in examination of business method patents, patents which outline and claim new methods of doing business.

and that using social media services may lead to a fear of missing out, also known as the phrase FOMO by many students.

The study furthermore suggests that this heightened sense of skepticism is related to the surge of trust in social media--consisting of social networking sites, content-sharing sites, blogs and microblogging sites--which saw the biggest percentage increase to 75%.

Total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011.

Due to the ct that mobile social media runs on mobile devices, it differentiates from traditional social media as it incorporates new ctors such as the current location of the user (location-sensitivity) or the time delay between sending and receiving messages(time-sensitivity). According to Andreas M. Kaplan, mobile social media applications can be differentiated among four types

Several colleges and universities such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Stanford among others have even introduced classes on best social media practices, preparing students for potential careers as digital strategists.

The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks.

When social media is used in combination with mobile devices it is called mobile social media. Social media is a group of mobile marketing applications that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.

Facebook remains the most-visited social network in the U.S. via PC (152.2 million visitors), mobile apps (78.4 million users) and mobile web (74.3 million visitors), and is multiple times the size of the next largest social site across each platform.

Community media constitute a hybrid of industrial and social media. Though community-owned, some community radio, TV and newss are run by professionals and some by amateurs. They use both social and industrial media frameworks.

These building blocks help understand the engagement needs of the social media audience. For instance, LinkedIn users are thought to care mostly about identity, reputation and relationships, whereas YouTubes primary features are sharing, conversations, groups and reputation. Many companies build their own social containers that attempt to link the seven functional building blocks around their brands. These are private communities that engage people around a more narrow theme, as in around a particular brand, vocation or hobby, than social media containers such as Google+ or Facebook and also Twitter. PR departments ce significant challenges in dealing with viral negative sentiment directed at organizations or individuals on social media platforms (dubbed sentimentitis), which may be a reaction to an announcement or event.

Sales promotions and discounts: While in the past customers had to use printed coupons, mobile social media allows companies to tailor promotions to specific users at specific times. For example, when launching its California-Cancun service, Virgin America offered users who checked in through Loopt at one of three designated Border Grill taco trucks in San Francisco and Los Angeles between 11 am and 3 pm on August 31, 2010, two tacos for $1 and two flights to Mexico for the price of one.

In the book Networked - The new social operating system by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, the two authors reflect on, mainly positive, effects of social media and other internet based social networks. According to the authors, social media is used to document memories, learn about and explore things, advertise oneself and form friendships. For instance, they claim that the communication through internet based services can be done more privately than in real life. As a concrete example of the positive effects of social media, they use the Egyptian revolution in 2011, where people used Facebook to gather meetings, protest actions, etc.

Communication:Mobile social media communication takes two forms, the first of which is company-to-consumer in which a company may establish a connection to a costumer based on its location and provide reviews about locations nearby. The second type of communication is user-generated content. For example, McDonalds offered $5 and $10 gift cards to 100 users randomly selected among those checking in at one of the restaurants. This promotion increased check-ins by 33% (from 2,146 to 2,865), resulted in over 50 articles and blog posts, and prompted several hundred thousand news feeds and Twitter messages.

In June 2011, it was also reported that U.S. Department of Education study revealed that online students out-performed those receiving ce-to-ce instruction.

In June 2011, it was reported that iPhone applications hit one billion in nine months, and Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months.

Conversations: The conversations block of the framework represents the extent to which users communicate with other users in a social media setting. Many social media sites are designed primarily to cilitate conversations among individuals and groups. These conversations happen for all sorts of reasons. People tweet, blog, et cetera to meet new like-minded people, to find true love, to build their self-esteem, or to be on the cutting edge of new ideas or trending topics. Yet others see social media as a way of their message heard and positively impacting humanitarian causes, environmental problems, economic issues, or political debates.

However, there is some debate about the extent to which social media cilitated this kind of change.

Immediacy the time lag between communications produced by industrial media can be long (days, weeks, or even months) compared to social media (which can be capable of virtually instantaneous responses).

However, this conversation participation must be cleverly executed because while people are resistant to marketing in general, they are even more resistant to direct or overt marketing through social media platforms. This may seem counterintuitive but is the main reason building social authority with credibility is so important. A marketer can generally not expect people to be receptive to a marketing message in and of itself. In the Edelman Trust Barometer report in 2008, the majority (58%) of the respondents reported they most trusted company or product information coming from people like me inferred to be information from someone they trusted. In the 2010 Trust Report, the majority switched to 64% preferring their information from industry experts and academics. According to Inc. Technologys Brent Leary, This loss of trust, and the accompanying turn towards experts and authorities, seems to be coinciding with the rise of social media and networks.

Twitter processed more than one billion tweets in December 2009 and averages almost 40 million tweets per day.

(2008). Here Comes Everybody. New York: Penguin Press. ISBN978-1--153-0. OCLC.

While the computer is still the primary device used to access social media despite dropping 4% in usage in 2012, the last year saw a significant increase in usage, most notably through tablets from 3% to 16%, internet enabled TVs from 2% to 4%.

Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices to increase immediacy (e.g., posting Twitter messages or Facebook status updates)

Neil Postman also contends that social media will increase an information disparity between winners - who are able to use the social media actively - and losers - who are not miliar with modern technologies.

; Israel, Shel (2006). Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley. ISBN0-471--X. OCLC.

Relationship development and loyalty programs:In order to increase long term relationships with customers, companies are able to create loyalty programs that allow customers who check-in regularly at a location to earn discounts or perks such as American Eagle Outfitters that remunerates such customers with a tiered 10%, 15%, or 20% discount on their total purchase.

An increasing number of scholars have sought to study and measure the impact of social media (such as the Museum of Social Media). A 2010 study by the University of Maryland suggested that social media services may be addictive,

There has been rapid growth in the number of US patent applications that cover new technologies related to social media, and the number of them that are published has been growing rapidly over the past five years. There are now over 2000 published patent applications.

E-commerce businesses may refer to social media as consumer-generated media (CGM). A common thread running through all definitions of social media is a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.

Permanence industrial media, once created, cannot be altered (once a magazine article is printed and distributed changes cannot be made to that same article) whereas social media can be altered almost instantaneously by comments or editing.