Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 millions tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

Are you using the social media?

This past weekend, I had the privilege of going to a social media conference inChicago. I found was very interesting.

But I will let you in on a secret the best part of the trip was visiting with my family there.

Thanks to my cousin George and his wife Erma for putting out a big spread of food fit for me (Laughing).

Learning something new, and most of all how social media has taken over the news network, is always exciting.

Blogging can be a great way to draw new customers to your business website. But, if your blog hasn’t been updated in months or all your posts are thinly disguised sales pitches, your blog marketing plan could backfire.

A great business blog doesn’t sell. Instead, it shows customers why they should do business with you and not your competitors. Social mediaincludes web-based and mobile technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue between organizations, communities, and individuals.

With a business, my concern is how you draw traffic to the website for more people to view what you are trying to accomplish. I often hear radio stations use their websites to give away tickets and prizes everyday all day.

If you work for a company, do you tell your friends to visit the organization’s website or facebook? It is easy to confuse social media with social news because we often refer to members of the news as “the media.”

Adding to the confusion is the fact that a social news site is also a social media site because it falls into that broader category.

But social news is not the same thing as social media anymore than a banana is the same thing as fruit. A banana is a type of fruit but fruit can also be grapes, strawberries, or lemons. And while social news is social media, social networking and wikis are also social media.

While many people may think social media got its start with Twitter and Facebook, it actually has roots that go back much further. The first computerized bulletin board system was created in 1978, long before the internet became a household term.

Even before there was Facebook and Twitter there was GeoCities, AOL Instant Messenger and, of course, MySpace to keep track of your friends and what they were up to on the web.

Looking back over the decades, we can see what has led up to this social revolution that is taking over the Internet and entering into our real lives. It seems that, as a society, we share almost everything. What we eat, where we shop, and what we’re watching on television. Slowly but surely, everything is losing its status as sacred with sharing becoming the norm. The one thing I always advise my friends not to share is when they are going out of town.

At these websites, individuals and groups create and exchange content and engage in person-to-person conversations. They appear in many forms including blogs and microblogs, forums and message boards, social networks, wikis, virtual worlds, social bookmarking, tagging and news, writing communities, digital storytelling and scrapbooking, data, content, image and video sharing, podcast portals, and collective intelligence.

There are lots of well-known sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Wetpaint, Wikidot, Second Life, Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Lulu and many others.

In my research, I found the first email was delivered in 1971. And in 1978, twoChicago computer hobbyists invented the bulletin board system (BBS) to inform friends of meetings, make announcements and share information through postings. It was the rudimentary beginning of a small virtual community. Trolling and flame wars began.

Now in 1985, my life was changed with the opening of America On Line (AOL). I used to rush home from work everyday to get on the internet and spend the whole evening online in chat rooms and meeting people all over theUnited States.

As the 1990s progressed, the company lived up to the promise of its new moniker, doing more than any other to introduce the country to the online world. As the internet took off, it served as the most important on-ramp to what was often called the Information Highway. And although today’s AOL is no longer the country’s dominant ISP, its services and sites add up to the fourth most popular property on the web, from instant-messaging kingpin AIM to muckraker TMZ.com to video engine Truveo.

Over the years, it’s also found a remarkable number of ways to drive both loyal customers and random bystanders bonkers, shooting itself in its corporate foot again and again through everything from monumental technical glitches to willful strategic decisions.

Facebook, originally called The Facebook with the domain thefacebook.com, was officially launched on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. Membership was originally restricted to those who attended Harvard College.

In less than a month, over half of the students signed up. Over time, more universities and high schools were added. On September 26, 2006, Facebook was officially opened for everyone over the age of 13 to join.

One the most used mediums today is Twitter. Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets.”

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 millions tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

Mail comments to James W. Wade III at jwade@call-post.com and visit Mind Your Business on our website at www.callandpost.com. You can also follow James on twitter @JimmyWadeIII.