This is the first post in a series about social media.

Apogee launched our very first social media client in September and it has been quite an adventure bringing their corporate presence to the masses through Twitter, Facebook and the like. It’s been exciting to set up new channels of contact between our client and their constituents, and we’ve learned a lot already.

Why social media? What’s the difference between social media and the rest of the web?

Without Social Media: You bookmark a link to a muffin recipe.
With Social Media: When you bookmark a link to a muffin recipe on delicious.com, not only can you access the bookmark from any computer, but people looking for muffin recipes on delicious.com will find the one you bookmarked, as well as many other bookmarked recipes and other links. You may also find out that someone else has made the recipe and it gave them hives, thereby avoiding the dire consequences of said muffins before even cracking an egg.

Without Social Media: You can read about spaceships on a website from one source.
With Social Media: You can read about spaceships on a Wikipedia page, which links to user-created informational spaceship videos on YouTube, which leads you to a Facebook group for like-minded spaceship enthusiasts.

Web 2.0/Social Media is information by committee. It’s the internet equivalent of the town crier, oral histories of old learned men, beauty shop gossip queens, and the local paper all in one medium. And it is remarkably efficient in connecting like-minded peoples to desired resources.

What’s in it for you?
All social media are not created equal, and not all outlets are appropriate for any given entity. A creative mind can think of appropriate content for video, text, and image sharing. But content generation can be very time consuming and in social media quality is often more important than quantity. Just because you can split all your time evenly between Facebook, Myspace and Twitter doesn’t mean you should.

In the next parts of this series, we’ll examine the pros and cons of various social media outlets, and which would be right for your business.

From the Search Sultan who brought you Search Engine Land comes: Sphinn (pronounced ’spin’), the newest social site for search and interactive marketers. Think of it as the area underneath the Facebook bleachers where all the geeks and misfits congregate to talk about what’s really going on throughout the web while looking generally standoffish.

The site itself serves as a great playground for random information, news and tips from a variety of SEM bloggers that you might not find on your RSS feed. Unlike other professional posting sites I’ve seen, this site is definitely of help to the optimization linking process. Instead of simply posting random nuggets of info, the site links to the users’ blog. Not that a single or twenty links is guaranteed to boost your site’s rank in Google, it’s still nice to know Sphinn is thinking like their target audience.

One of Sphinn’s features that I love, and initially works great for social sites, is the lack of censorship. However with professional sites such as this, lack of censorship inevitably leads to some users piloting the site as their own personal promotional vehicle. For example, while I’m confident that the user “Ms. Latina” can introduce me to a new level of SEO, I’d rather her enlighten me with something new and thought provoking from the SEM world. However the creator of Sphinn, Danny Sullivan, stated on Searchcast.com that there could be a possibility of a voting system that can be overridden if someone manipulates the site too hard.

Speaking of Danny, kudos to Sphinn’s tech support. I ran into a minor SNAFU while sphinning my first post, and after a few short hours Danny was nice enough to email me back saying he had corrected my mistake. What a guy, what a site. Finally, a place of solitude away from all the Myspace jocks.