Social Media - Beginnings and Characteristics

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is still a very fresh, exciting and risky medium for marketers. It continues to be developed everyday by the internet audience, social media sites and the few brave marketers who have taken the plunge into this promising ocean. At Apollo Media, we thought we’d take a step back for a moment and look into the not-so-distant past, to the origins of Social Media.

Although it appears websites like MySpace and Facebook suddenly cropped up, the Social Media explosion didn’t happen overnight. You might be surprised to know that major networking sites as we know them have been evolving for over a decade.

It all started in 1997 with a social networking site by the name of Six Degrees. This innovative website sought to bring people together online and followed the general principles that have shaped social media:
Read the rest of this entry »