Social Media is a series of platforms that allows you to communicate online with a group of people that have particular interest in your subject, issue, service or product.

We asked Andrew Peters, Singapore’s “go to” Social Media Evangelist, and a director of the Pacific West Communications Company, to share his thoughts about what Social Media entails.

EDITOR: So I think your job is more akin to the gossip columnists of the past, what’s your take on that?

ANDREW PETERS: I would say that anything that comes across my eyeballs and I have an interest, I want to let other people know. And it’s usually related to the projects I am working on.

ED: What are your most used social media platforms?

AP: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ning and I am starting to use posturous, tagfoot, Digg, StumbleUpon.

ED: What do you think about people on Twitter who randomly send out a bunch of links?

AP: There’s a place for them. If you don’t want them, then you just unfollow. It’s the most freeing social media platform because if you don’t want to see it on your stream you just unfollow them. I think what they are trying to do is push themselves or their business so they are just using what’s available to them to do so.

I’ve followed one of those people who said “do you want to dominate Twitter” and I downloaded a free e-book on Twitter, and it contained content I knew, but it contained gems I didn’t know. He’s not bombarded my email since, and he’s done the right thing by me, so I respect that.

I also think that social media is self correcting.

ED: Like the massive Perez Hilton’s unfollow campaign?

(ED: Perez Hilton lost 1 million followers on Twitter after he blogged that he thought that Michael Jackson’s rushed ambulance ride to hospital was a hoax, the day that Micheal Jackson died).
AP: People are quick to correct you if you put the wrong thing on a blog or Facebook. They unfollow or unfriend you. It’s up to you if you change the way your messages go out.

The situation has happened to me, people whisper this is wrong or that’s wrong, so you tweak it so that you can correct things.  There’s a lot of auto correction in social media, whether its people correcting what you are saying or getting rid of you.

ED: So what do you see are the differences between Facebook and LinkedIn?

AP: With Facebook you can have fun, enjoy seeing what other people are doing and have fun. The applications are designed for enjoyment. Along the way, because of the integration of Twitter, there will be serious things that come along. Just as a news item or a promotion. The main thing about Facebook is having fun. Because your business might be related to having fun, you can use it for business.

LinkedIn is for serious minded people. If I go into Linked In, it’s like putting on a tie. I have to be serious.

Interestingly though, I have a tattoo artistry group set up on LinkedIn, interestingly its growing members, but it is not something that you would expect. Someone commented to me that he believes that tattoo artistry is becoming an industry. He’s a lawyer with tattoos but he joined the LinkedIn group to promote his professional skills to the group, whereas on a Facebook group he would show off his tattoos.

LinkedIn you can use for research. If you ask a question on LinkedIn, you will get some reasonable replies.  If you do the same thing in Facebook, people will just give you the thumbs up, or click the “like” button.

ED: Comment on sites like Ning, BriteKite.

AP: BriteKite I joined a few weeks ago. No reason for me to go back. Nothing has been engaging for me to go back. Recently I saw something on Twitter, that commented “Facebook killer called BriteKite”, so I got curious about BriteKite and took a look.

Ning has 100 million private social networks. Whether you want to set it up for 10 people, your employees or however many people, you can use the Ning platform, transformed for your group of people, use it like a FACEBOOK or LinkedIn and use it for your specific content. Wetpaint is another site.  You need your own database and membership to get it off the ground, as such, an established group of users. Then you can build the community from what you already have.

I’m active on Ning on the Association of Virtual Worlds, I’m on the advisory board and the group has 3,500 members. A while ago I started a special events committee to look at virtual world events from Live to Machinima (machine cinema), War Of Worlds (WOW), Maple story, Second Life, Twinity, for people who are creating virtual films in these platforms.

Another group on Ning is called iseecolor. It has its main base of people in the USA and is set up for colored Americans.  Their membership exceeds 250,000 on the Ning platform. They are extremely active, with any range of topics covered, the key ingredient being color. It’s niche.

ED: Give us some of your thoughts about how Social Media will evolve. I’ll throw some formats to you to comment on.

Video

AP: The most annoying thing for me is the stop start of the videos on YouTube. The technology is not there to support it yet. Like video’s embedded in emails. People will obviously support it. Maybe I’m being a bit hard on YouTube because since they’ve added the HD functionality, the videos seem to play better. If you want to get a message across, it’s a lot more convincing on a video than on a blog post.

Podcasts

ED: I never really hear you talk about podcasts, where do you stand with those?

AP: The thing is with iPods with a screen, you can download news items etc on video.  I don’t have a car so the chances of listening to it on a car aren’t there. I don’t listen to a radios I have listened to audio files on the web.

The problem for me is that its easy to get distracted with an audio file. I am more likely to be completely engaged with video. For example, I used to do Skype without video, and I would get distracted, but now we do video and I get much more engaged.

There’s a market for podcasts, but I don’t subscribe to it. If a client was able to identify a community that had use for podcasts, then I would engage it.

ED: Any final thoughts?

AP: Generally speaking, I think Social Media is geographic and niche based. And I do like the comment about old style gossip columnist.