Buttoned-up types sometime refer to this as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM) or conversational media. Or in plain English for us regular folks, media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Ning, MySpace, Linked-In or whatever is new next week. It also includes blogs, online forums, and social network aggregation. Social Media is redefining how people discover, read and share news, information and content. If you are running a business and are not utilizing social media to your advantage, you are losing. Losing the fusion of science and technology, you are losing the monologue of one to many communication, the resulting dialog found in many to many communications, and missing out on the democratization of information that transforms people from content readers into publishers. Your social capital is important, crowdsourcing makes sense, and social distribution is essential to keeping your head above the water.
