Article Report- Social Media
This article is based around the concept of social media. It provides the reader with a description of how many active users there were within different social media sites. It also provides information to the reader about the broad age of users of social media. It provides information on how social media has minimised the control companies have on information available about them and their products online. It displays how social media has revolutionised the way in which consumers can research information on products through blogs, reviews etc.

The article provides a broad definition of social media by first looking at the history of social media from looking at the first social media sites such as unset the first worldwide discussion system right up the evolution of modern social media sites such as Facebook and virtual worlds such as Second Life. It also draws a line between two related concepts that are both knows and social media sites: Web 2.0 (multi author webpages e.g. Wikipedia) and User generated content (e.g. reviews created and posted online). It also indicates basic functionalities involved with social media sites such as Adobe Flash Player and Java Script. The article also shows how social media sites are classified through social presence/media richness and self-presentation and/ self-disclosure.

The article reviews the challenges and opportunities of social media by breaking up social media into six distinct groups: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds. Within this section the article provides examples of how companies have used social media as a marketing tool. For example: To promote the movie “Fred Clause”, Warner Brothers created a Facebook profile where visitors could watch trailers, download graphics and play games.

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