What is Social Media, anyway?

Welcome to our blog!

Just for kicks (and for what I thought might be a nice start to our blog), I Googled "What is social media?"
  
And here's what ranked first:

"Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques." 
                                                         –Wikipedia social media page
Can I get a HUH?

No wonder so many people are overwhelmed or even downright frightened by the term Social Media. It seems so big, so complex, so challenging. I'll be honest. We did, too. Until we jumped in and decided to give it a go.

If there's anything I've learned about social media in the past four months, it's this: You'll never understand its uses, its benefits or even the fun of it until you try it out for yourself.

So that's what our blog is about. We're trying new things – by conducting "Social Media Research Projects" and seeing what happens. We'll be posting our success stories, and probably some failure stories, too. We're mining the web, looking for good resources that we think we can all benefit from, and collecting them here as a one-stop shop for good social media info. And we're creating some of our own resources to help you get started – some videos, slideshows and even white papers. 

I like to believe that social media is a conversation. And in the spirit of conversation, we hope our blog will be as well. We will be posting information here that all of us can apply in some way – to our businesses, organizations or even our personal lives. 
And if there's something specific to social media you want to know more about, let's talk. E-mail us at social@jnlcom.com and we'll cover your question in an upcoming blog post.