Aide - Memoire: Social Media Tools

During semester in the “Social Media in Public Sector” class, a large number of social media tools available for different purposes were discussed. The tools discussed are for the purposes like social networking, social news, content curation, social podcasting, content co-production, measuring tools etc. A brief information about the different social media tools discussed and as obtained from the respective wiki pages has been summarized below:  

1. Facebook is an online social networking service. Its name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students. After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends".

2. Reditt is an entertainment,  social networking, and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially an online bulletin board system. Registered users can then vote submissions up or down to organize the posts and determine their position on the site's pages. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called "subreddits". The subreddit topics include news, gaming, movies, music, books, fitness, food, and photo sharing, among many others.

3.   Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website's features are accessed from the "dashboard" interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear.

4.     Storify is a social network service that lets the user create stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram etc.

5.   Periscope is a live video streaming app for iOS and Android. Periscope users have the option to tweet out a link to their Live Stream. They can also choose whether or not to make their video public or viewable to only certain users. Scopes can be LBB (Limited by Broadcaster) which disallows comments.

6.     Yelp is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops, hosts and markets Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses, as well as the online reservation service Seat Me and online food-delivery service Eat24.

7.     Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr etc.

8. Ushahidi is a non-profit software company that develops free and open-source software (LGPL) for information collection, visualisation, and interactive mapping. The organisation uses the concept of crowdsourcing for social activism and public accountability, serving as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping"—the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geospatial information. Ushahidi offers products that enable local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the internet, while simultaneously creating a temporal and geospatial archive of events.

9.  Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. In determining the user score, Klout measures the size of a user's social media network and correlates the content created to measure how other users interact with that content. Klout uses Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia data to create Klout user profiles that are assigned a unique "Klout Score". Klout scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a higher ranking of the breadth and strength of one's online social influence. While all Twitter users are assigned a score, users who register at Klout can link multiple social networks, of which network data is then aggregated to influence the user's Klout Score.

*****