SOCIAL MEDIA

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA ?
Social media is another term for the tools that have been described as being part of Web 2.0. Tools are useful, but if people don’t care about what they are being used for, or don’t understand how to use them, then the social media tool will not be used. While traditional media provided one-way information to the public, new media allows people to communicate amongst themselves and produce their own message.
Social media makes it easy for us to work across four broad areas:

• connecting with other people via social networks;

• collaborating and doing things with other people;

• creating and sharing content; and

• finding, using, organizing and reusing content.

Social media allow organizations and communities to maintain small group communications even when they are geographically distributed.

They can also give you potential access to a massive, international audience. Social media can be used when we are looking for interaction and knowledge sharing. But you have to be careful: in fact social media are useful tools for information that should be shared publicly, but are not good for sharing private or sensitive materials.