Understanding Social Media

Social networking and online forums, blogs, social spaces and business tools abound on the net. Here is a brief description of the most “buzz-worthy” with links to all. Happy surfing!

The ActiveRain Real Estate Network is a social network and marketing platform for real estate professionals. This network helps agents to create business relationships both within the industry and with the consumer. There is also a blog / google componet that can advance placement of your real estate blog entries all over the internet for maximum exposure.

LinkedIn is an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world, representing 170 industries and 200 countries. You can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with qualified professionals that you need to work with to accomplish your goals.

Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? On the receiving end, Twitter sends updates about your people to your phone, IM, or web site and you are only expected to pay as much or as little attention to them as you see fit. Answering the question, “what are you doing?” is called a tweet and can only be about 100 characters long.

Eons.com is the online community for “BOOMers,” those born between 1946 and 1964 and beyond, who want to learn and do more to make the most of every stage of life. A community place for you to explore your passions and interests, keep in touch with friends and family, connect with interesting people to share life experiences, and most of all—have fun!

Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet. You must agree to be someones friend before they can see private information, but my how quickly the friend lists grow!

Blogger allows you to create a blog for free. Developers of blogging software have been finding user-friendly ways to help readers of weblogs and other information find and collect material from a variety of sites and now partnered (bought out) by google, there is a great deal of synergy in getting the blog posts intergrated into web searches.

Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application. They allow you to make your photos and videos available to the people who matter to you and also to share them with the world if you’d like. It also offers new ways of organizing photos and video on line, without trapping you into print processing from a branded website.

YouTube has many ways to help you find, watch or post videos on the interent. You can also interact with other YouTube users and around shared interests. If you make videos, you can broadcast them to the whole world, and maybe even develop an audience for your creations. Don’t limit your viewing to the dog on waterskis – search on real estate trends or listings and see how others are using this service in their business.

The term “RSS” (Really Simple Syndication) is a method used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news entries, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS feed includes full or summarized text and allows you to add constantly changin content to your websites. You basically syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. The Board uses RSS feeds on our web page to pull content from other sources. We are looking into an RSS feed of our news info for members and a public RSS for consumers.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world… anyone can edit it. If it didn’t work so well, you would have thought it a crazy idea that was bound for failure! Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. As of today, there are 2,747,240 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

Real Estate Wiki is the largest, free online content encyclopedia in the real estate industry for home buyers and sellers, home owners and the millions of people that work in the real estate and related industries. Real Estate Wiki was originally written by a group of dedicated real estate professionals to create a comprehensive resource for the real estate industry. This comprehensive resource was created because no other wiki covers delve deeply enough into the real estate industry.