What in the world is all of this social media stuff we keep hearing about?

Social Media is defined as “A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content.”

Well, that by itself doesn’t really help one understand what social media is, or why its important.  To me, social media is using any user based site (such as facebook, or twitter) to promote yourself and your ideas.

What does it do for us?  This is harder to determine what it really does for the world.  Yes, we have people that send twitter updates about their trips to the bathroom or their lunch menu, but there are also people that use twitter to communicate and spread ideas and have quite the following.   Most of the people that have mastered social media use  a combination of services to bring together a community of followers.

One of the first masters of social media that I can think of is Chris Pirillo. Since the late 1990′s, Chris has been working on a web site called “LockerGnome”.  His site has newsletters and blogs from people ranging from nobody’s to higher up people in the technology world.   In early 2007, Chris went from former TV host (TechTV) to social media master.  He created his live streaming site, Live.Pirillo.com.  He took a few different types of new and old technology to help promote himself in ways that were very new and still are somewhat strange even 3 years later.

Pirillo took live streaming video from Ustream.tv, incorporated irc from GeekShed.net, and twitter into one medium to create a real time social following, somewhat the birth of social media.

While Chris Pirillo is an extreme example of social media, most people do find themselves using social media daily. From Facebook, MySpace, Ustream, twitte,r and even IRC, many users are finding more creative ways to make their online image different and more appealing.  Technology new and old is brought together in different ways to help bridge everything together.  Is this Web2.0? Perhaps; to me, it’s more about finding ways to share ideas with friends.  After all, how many of us have clicked on a link on Facebook of a random web page that someone has found and thought it was the best in the world and shared with it others?  This is social media after all