Do you know your social media?!

Take a look at the image to the right. How many of these social media buttons can you name?

At best I can say that I know 13 of the 30. That's definitely terrible for a someone looking to go specifically into managing social media as a public relations function, but honestly not that bad seeing as though social media has recently gained mainstream popularity within businesses.


So what social networks do these buttons belong to? Looking at them from the top left-to-right, we have:

• Blogger
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• RSS
• Flickr
• Friend Feed
• Friendster
• (I actually couldn't even find the name of this one, so if you know the social media network please comment below.)
• Google
• Last.fm
• Linkedin
• Livejournal
• Ma.gnolia
• Mixx
• Myspace
• Netvibes
• Newsvine
• Picasa
• (Please comment if you know this one too!)
• Reddit
• Stumble Upon
• Technorati
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• (I know this girl, but of course I'm drawing a blank. Please comment if you know her name.)
• Wordpress
• Yahoo!
• Yelp!
• Youtube

So why is this important? Hop in and come for a ride with me across the break and I'll be sure to give you the details of why this applies to us all...

In Advanced PR Writing for a Digital World we had a speaker, Philip Ryan Johnson, come in and talk to us about methods to use social media strategically within business. He spoke of thinking strategically, understanding users, crafting mesages, user-organization enagagement, and search engine optimization as it applies specifically to social media.


The most important thing I got from it all however, was that we the incoming class of PR professionals need to know our social networks and by doing so we can come up with strategic ways to utilize them in a way that directly benefits the businesses we represent. Basically, if you don't know twitter (or any other social media platform for that matter) how can you use it effectively to conduct business?

Going even further into that, you need to know the sites so you can know what they can do for you. As Mr. Johnson stated, we need to "Focus on [the] relationships, not [just] the technologies". However, you have to remember that the goal is to communicate to your public therefore influencing user-organization engagement and understanding the capabilities of the various social media sites will help you achieve such. Below is a chart that pinpoints some of the more popular social media sites and breaks down what they are most useful for.

Keep that in mind as you speed through the highway of social media planning and implementation. Drive safely my friends!