In my previous article I wrote about a question that I wanted to get answered. To be honest I already did some research, but I started at the beginning... The start of the Internet, the beginning of the use of online advertising... Keeping in mind that I wanted to find out more about corporate blogs I bumped into an interesting book, which helped me to get a better view on the internet atmosphere of today. The book was given to me at the Cannes Lions Awards with the title "the social metropolis" by Jimmy Maymann.
The book is about the following: One of the key advantages of the Internet is the possibility to share knowledge; exactly this is what many internet users are starting to realize, by adding their own contributions and creativity to the media landscape. This has also become one of today's struggles for marketing; the rather passive consumer has become an active consumer. The buzz word for this phenomenon is "Social Media", a new era of the Internet has started and blogging is part of it (which is therefore part of my research)!
To make the social network even more clear Microsoft's Robert Scoble designed together with Daren barefoot "The social media starfish". All the different aspects of social media are being represented in this synopsis, which you can find by going to this link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/1814873464/
The funny thing is that to find this nice overview I already used several of these aspects. First I used Google to look for the social media starfish, because I read about it in the book. The first hit I got was Robert Scoble's blog; http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/02/social-media-starfish/. The next thing I did was clicking on a link in Robert`s blog to Darren Barefoot`s blog. There I watched the original video from Kyte that showed Robert's presentation about the starfish and there was also a smaller version of the starfish, so I clicked on the picture and got redirected to flickr to get the original picture. So just to get the information I needed to use 4 of the 12 aspects. Imagine I got the article that I could not remember in my mailbox and since I think it is very useful I send the link to a friend in a text message plus I put it on our company's wiki and a link on the social network that I use. That would be 8 out of twelve! This simply shows how important these kinds of media have become.
