Social Media Strategies and Technologies

There are thousands of presentations on “social media” but there are five absolute must read presentations if you are interested in understanding this space and leveraging the best practices.

1. Why people are called the  “New Medium”? : The new trusted media in the world is - You + Your friends + Their friends.

2. Social Media : Evolution or Revolution? - Why everybody is  talking about it.

3. Introduction to Social Media - understanding the basics of new media platforms.

4. What the F**K  is Social Media : Noise vs Signal? - In social media think about conversations not campaigns.

5. Social Media ROI : Measuring the Essential? - You cannot manage it if you can’t measure.

An interesting TED talk by Clay Shirky on “How Social Media Can Make History?” as it empowers people from consuming information to participation, producing content to enabling new kind of co-operative structures which aid people to create organized groups or networks to help in collaborating against repressive regimes like China to report on real news, bypassing the censorship. He also explains the evolution of media from past 500 years and why social media has great potential to create a history - a must watch for all even if you not a social web enthusiast.

You can find the TED talk video, below:

I completely agree on his perspective that information flow is now many directional  with consumers becoming producers in the new media world and social web empowers people to connect, share & collaborate for digital activism at larger scale as we have already seen during 2005 tsunami, Obama campaign, China 2008 earth quake subsequent protests and recently during Iran election protests.

What is your take?, I would love to hear your thoughts.