Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web

Chapter 5. The New Media University: Social Media 202

In the last chapter we reviewed the online provinces of blogs, podcasts, wikis, and virtual worlds. In this chapter, we examine the nuances, risks, applications, and also the merits associated with content communities, social bookmarking, and livecasting.

CROWD-SOURCED CONTENT COMMUNITIES

Online content communities exist to promote the filtering of online information (or manipulation of it, depending on how you look at it). These unique communities are basically social networks that foster connectivity and interactivity around compelling content. The mechanisms and platforms to do so effectively tap the wisdom of the crowds to source, share, and showcase news, videos, pictures, music/audio, and events, powered by the crowd-sourcing of votes to determine popularity and visibility of entries as organized by the specific categories within the network.

These communities serve as a lens into what's hot, interesting, or promising, as dictated by the psychographics that connect demographics. We'll open the curtains to reveal the groups of people powering these networks later in the book.

Leading sites include Reddit, Digg, Mixx, Fark, Yahoo! Buzz, among others. Combined, these networks receive on average 55 million unique visitors. In comparison, CNN.com receives, on average, roughly 30 million unique visitors. Niche content communities exist for almost every vertical industry as well, and here may be more than one resource for you to learn ...