Tapping Into the Wisdom of Crowds With a Twitter Contest

Twitter is a great place to listen to what your audience is saying. You can do this to identify:

• Who's talking about you
• What they're saying
  
• Key questions that may come up repeatedly
• Problems with your product or service
• Praises for your product or service
• New ideas to drive product development

Twitter has many uses, but listening is probably the most important. If you're not listening, you shouldn't participate. We try our best to listen to what's important to our audience and then participate when we think we have something to add to the conversation.

We launched our Elevator Pitch Contest yesterday to tap into the wisdom of crowds on Twitter and get help with our elevator pitch. We really want to listen to what you think about us and have your ideas drive us. And hopefully, you will learn a little bit about us in the process.

We wanted to reward you for your thoughts and participation, so we're giving away a Flip UltraHD video camera every day to a random participant. At the end of the week, we'll choose the 10 best pitches and put them in a poll, so YOU can vote on them and determine the winner, who will receive a MacBook Pro.

We'd love to hear what you think about this contest. Feel free to leave a comment here, follow us on Twitter, or email me (jason at ewaydirect dot com).

For more details please visit the official contest page. THANKS for your participation! We can't wait to see what you come up with!

What Is Social Media?

Maybe this is the first blog you’ve ever read. Or maybe you read 25 blogs a day. Or maybe you don’t know what exactly a blog is.

For whatever reason, you’ve stumbled upon a blog about social media. Thanks for stopping by. You’ve probably heard a lot of buzz about social media and maybe have seen how some companies are taking advantage of it. But what the heck is social media, anyway?

As you may know, I’m Jason Peck, social media manager here at eWayDirect. And I cover social media, online communities, content, strategy, measurement and more on this blog. I've written a few posts on this blog since it launched last month. But now I'd like to take a step back and share my thoughts on what exactly the term “social media” means to me.

Wikipedia defines social media as “content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies.”

What is it really? Social media is the tools and content that enable people to have conversations online. Social media enables us to easily connect, communicate and collaborate with other people. In the past, communication was expensive and hard to scale. Today, social media tools and technology have reduced the time and cost of communicating with relevant audiences. The underlying principles haven’t changed much (people have been communicating in one form or another for thousands of years), but these new tools have opened up new possibilities for communication and collaboration.

If we break things down, we can see that there are three main buckets or types of technology and content that power social media. These areas definitely overlap, but these classifications may help you understand social media better. The most important part to remember is that while the tools are great, people are what make things work.

Communication

Blogs

• Websites for personal or business use that has regular entries consisting of opinions, analysis, news, pictures and/or video. The content is usually displayed in reverse-chronological order

Forums

• Online discussion websites or message boards

Social networking websites and communities

• Websites where people who share similar interests can interact and share information

Microblogs

• Platform for real-time, brief updates such as text, pictures, video or audio

Collaboration

Wikis

• Websites that use software that enables pages to be easily created and edited

Social news

• Websites where people submit and vote on news stories, determining which stories are popular and displayed more prominently than others

Social bookmarking

• Websites whose main function is allowing people to bookmark/save websites, categorize them with tags and share them with friends

Opinion websites

• Websites that enable people to rate and discuss various products or services

Multimedia

Video-sharing

• Websites that enable people to upload and share video

Photo-sharing

• Websites that enable people to upload and share pictures

Audio-sharing

• Websites that enable people to upload and share audio

Live-streaming

• Websites that are focused on giving people the ability to stream video and/or audio live

So why should you care about all of this? Here’s one reason. According to eMarketer, online communities and blogs are now more popular than email. Between December 2007 and December 2008, online communities and blogs reached a larger audience than email.

No matter how much the tools and technology change, social media is ultimately about conversations and people. I will be sharing more social media thoughts and tips on this blog in the future, but I want to hear what YOU think. What would you add to this explanation of social media?