Writing Good Content

• Useful and unique:
  contribute to the dialogue with your own ideas, make it current, useful, unique and relevant to our group.
  
  
• Original content and be brief:
  It's about both writing your own and fair use of other people's content (always giving credit for it).
  
  
• Start with good headlines:
  Sometimes it's the only thing your audience will see before making a decision about whether to read the post.
  
  
• Make the post scannable:
  Your reader should be able to quickly glance through the post and pick up the main points without reading too deeply.
  
  
• Write in a plain, concise, common-sense style:
  The key is simplicity, even on a complex topic.

Our discussions are all around the topics that you are the content experts at, so relate to your own experience and be open to different opinions.

What is Social Media?

Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film, they are relatively inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information, compared to industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information.

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" in the hopes that you can become part of that conversation.

The main increase in social media has been Facebook (www.facebook.com). It was ranked as the number one social networking site. The main increase in social media has been Facebook. It was ranked as the number one social networking site. Other examples of social networking websites LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/), MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/), Ning (http://www.ning.com/).

Blogs are usually maintained by an individual or a group on a particular subject with regular entries of commentary, or descriptions of events. Most recent entries are commonly displayed first. Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other websites. Blogger (www.blogger.com) is one of the most popular platforms for blogs. While a blogger's anonymity is often tenuous, a blogger's code of conduct is often developed to justify acceptable behavior and online security can also be enhanced by not making the Blog publicly available.

Some of the social media tools that can help with collaboration or/and authority building are Wikis such as Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org/) and Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com/), social bookmarking sites including Delicious (www.delicious.com) and Google Reader (www.google.com/reader). In addition, Content Management Systems (i.e. Drupal at drupal.org) and Document Managing and Editing Tools (i.e. (Google Docs) are very widely used.

Social media also plays an important part in multimedia and entertainment. People use Youtube (www.youtube.com) for video sharing, Skype (www.skype.com) for livecasting, Flickr (www.flickr.com/) for photography and art sharing, and SecondLife (secondlife.com) to create virtual worlds.

References:

Social Media. Available from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media. Retrieved July 4, 2011.

Rutledge, P. (2010). Research Survey Launched: Social Media and Influence of Photos on Body Image. Retrieved July 4, 2011 from: http://mprcenter.org/blog/2010/08/04/research-survey-launched-social-media-and-influence-of-photos-on-body-image/

"Statistics". Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics. Retrieved July 4, 2011.