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THE SOCIAL MEDIA REVOLUTION 517

Table 15.2 Classification of social media by social presence/media richness and self-presentation/self-disclosure

Social presence/Media richness

Low Medium High

Self-presentation/

self-disclosure

High Blogs Social networking sites

(e.g. Facebook)

Virtual social worlds

(e.g. Second Life)

Low Collaborative projects

(e.g. Wikipedia)

Content communities

(e.g. YouTube)

Virtual game worlds

(e.g. ‘World of Warcraft’)

Source : Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media, Business Horizons , Vol. 53 (1), pp. 59–68 (Kaplan, A.M. and Haenlein, M.

2010), p. 62, Copyright © 2010, with permission from Elsevier.

The social media revolution

With technology-fuelled changes in recent years, marketing is increasingly about two-way

mass conversations between Internet users. As Web 1.0 was the web-as-information-source

with static websites, Web 2.0 (aka social media (networks) ) is a concept of web-as-participation-

platform in which users participate and connect to each other using services as opposed to

sites.^139 It can be seen as a collection of emerging technologies enabling social networking by

off ering Internet users the ability to collaborate, add, edit, share and tag content of diff erent

kinds (text, sound, video, images). Th is so-called ‘consumer-generated content’ includes

weblogs (or blogs ), video blogs (vlogs), podcasts, wikis, mobile phone photography and RSS

feeds. One of the earliest Web 2.0 applications was Napster, a peer-to-peer fi le-swapping tool

that leveraged personal music catalogues across its user base and facilitated music sharing.

According to Kaplan and Haenlein^140 (who applied a set of theories in the fi eld of media

research), there are six diff erent types of social media ( Table 15.2 ).

Collaborative projects

Th e main idea underlying collaborative projects is that the joint eff ort of many actors leads to

a better outcome than any actor could achieve individually, also referred to as ‘the wisdom of

crowds’. Examples within this category include the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and the

social bookmarking web service Delicious, which allows the storage and sharing of web book-

marks. Companies must be aware that collaborative projects are becoming a very important

source of information for many consumers. Although not everything written on Wikipedia

may actually be true, it is believed to be true by more and more surfers. Adobe Systems main-

tains a list of bookmarks to company-related websites and conversations on Delicious.

Blogs and microblogs

Weblogs, or contracted ‘blogs’, are frequently updated personal web journals that allow

owners to publish ideas and information. Blogs are usually managed by one person only, but

provide the possibility of interaction with others through the addition of comments. Some

blogs are just expressions of individual opinions and analysis, while others aggregate infor-

mation or serve mainly to direct readers to other blogs, websites or other sources. Some

are company-internal and only accessible to employees or departments within a company.

Others are posted on public websites and available for anyone to see and react. Th e earliest

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