Content
communities look a bit like social networks – you have to register, you get a
home page and you can make connections with friends. However, they are focussed
on sharing a particular type of content.
For example, Flickr is based around sharing
photography and is the most popular service of its kind in the UK. Members
upload their photos to the site and choose whether to make them public or just
share with family and friends in their network.
Thousands of
groups have formed on Flickr around areas of common interest. There are groups
dedicated to particular graffiti artists, towns, sports and animals. If you
work for a reasonably well-known brand it is worth taking a look to see if
there is a Flickr group about you – there are groups for motorbike brands,
consumer electronics brands and even the cult notebook brand Moleskine. As
testament to its enormous success, Flickr was bought by Yahoo! in 2005 for an
estimated US $30 million.
YouTube is the world’s largest video
sharing service, with over 100 million videos viewed every day. Members of
YouTube can upload videos or create their own “channels” of favourite videos.
The viral nature of YouTube videos is enhanced by a feature that makes it easy
for people to cut and paste videos hosted by YouTube directly into their blogs.
As well as thousands of short films from people’s own
video cameras, webcams
and camera phones, there are many clips from TV shows and
movies hosted on the service. Some people also use the service to record video blogs.
YouTube started as a small private company, but was
bought by Google for $1.65 billion in October 2006.
Digg is a news and content community.
Members submit links to news stories that they think will be of interest and
these are voted on by other members. Once a story has garnered about a critical
number of votes (the number varies according to how busy the site is) it will
be moved to the front page where it will receive wider attention from members
as well as more casual visitors to the site.
Digg claims to
receive 20 million unique visitors every month, and certainly the volume of
traffic via popular links from the service is so great that it can cause
smaller companies’ servers to crash.
As with other
social media platforms, rumours of acquisition deals and massive valuations for
the service are flying around, but it remains independent and relatively small
in terms of the number of employees (around 40).
Source: What is Social Media? (Antony Mayfield, iCrossing) e-book
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