A very basic level introduction to social media tools. Examples are taken from the health arena.

1. Social Media Tools
Derek Hansen

2. A Look Ahead
Considerations
Mixing It Up
Sharing tools
Social Networks
Wikis
Blogs
Threaded
Conversation
Background

3. Historical Note

4. Reuse is Most Common Use

5. Social Media as Infrastructure

6. Threaded Conversation
 Email Lists
 Discussion Forums
 Usenet
Key Features
 Goal: Support communities of practice by enabling group
conversations that can be easily overheard
 Basic unit: short, permanent text message authored by a
single person
 Organized by: threads

8. Blogs
 Individual blog
 Organization blog
 Group blog (i.e., aggregated blog)
 Microblog (i.e., twitter)
Key Features
 Goal: Support posting of time-sensitive content and
solicit reactions by readers
 Basic unit: (1) permanent post with some basic
formatting, (2) brief comments by readers
 Organized by: time (show most recent posts first)

13. Wikis
 Wikipedia (a particularly popular wiki)
 Community wiki repositories
Key Features
 Goal: Support the creation of community-authored
content that can be constantly edited by many people
 Basic unit: An article (or single web page) that supports
rich formatting of content
 Organized by: articles (hyperlinks and categories)
 Note: Stores every edit and prior version of an article

16. Social Networking Sites
 Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn
 Specialized communities - e.g.,
tudiabetes
Key Features
 Goal: Help people find, maintain, and benefit from their
social relationships
 Basic unit: Profile page and “friends”
 Organized by: people & groups
 Note: Typically include many ways of communicating
with others

19. Social Sharing Tools
 Flickr (images)
 Del.icio.us, Digg (websites)
 YouTube (videos)
 CiteUlike, Connotea (journal articles)
Key Features
 Goal: Share items or information of interest
 Basic unit: Items or links to items
 Organized by: tags and votes

22. Mixing it up
 RSS Feeds
 Widgets, Gadgets, and Apps
 APIs and Interoperability
 Mashups

23. Rss Feed
Custom
Search
YouTube
video
Content from RSS feed

26. Considerations
 Understand your audience & their
needs
 Social challenges (e.g., motivating
people) trump technical challenges
 Build vs modify vs off-the-shelf?
 Host yourself or use third party hosting
solution?

27. A look ahead
 Continued rapid pace of innovation
 More than just conversations (e.g., health
information)
 Use of smart mobile devices for new forms of
social interaction
 More “off the shelf” tools

28. Credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oneeighteen/1690769913/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zhurnaly/87396143/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cupcakequeen/2447557364/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chasing_imperfection/269997777/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/02/social-media-starfish/

29. Derek L. Hansen
Assistant Professor
dlhansen@umd.edu