For those of you who haven’t heard, social media is the hottest new technology to hit the Internet since e-commerce in the late 1990s. While social media has already made its way into today’s lexicon, there is some disagreement over exactly what it is. However, most experts agree that the primary goal of social media is to build relationships and create communities around ideas or issues through the use of a variety of interactive online tools. These so-called Web 2.0 tools include online bulletin boards and forums; chat rooms; user-oriented authoring platforms like Twitter, podcasts, and web logs (blogs); and social networking and video sharing sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr.
