I recently went through an exercise with a team of digital media colleagues to describe social media tools a professional may encounter on the job. This is a part of a broader project to define what skills workers need to stay competitive in the digitally enabled workplace.

We categorized them based on what the tool is used for because with any social media effort, you first have to define goals, map out which activities will help you achieve those goals and select tools accordingly.

We came up with 14 categories coupled with examples of some of the most widely used tools in each category. Many tools cross over multiple categories so we did our best to slot it into its ‘main’ function.

We know social technologies are advancing rapidly along with new business applications. At this point in time, what do you think of our list? What would you add?

1. Social networking (Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Ning)

2. Private social networking/ enterprise social platforms (Microsoft Sharepoint, Yammer, IBM Lotus Connections, Adobe Connect, Basecamp, Jive, SocialCast)

3. Blogging (Blogger, Typepad, WordPress)

4. Microblogging (Twitter, Tumblr)

5. Media sharing:
   Video (YouTube, Vimeo)
   Audio (Soundcloud, Audioboo, iTunes)
   Photos (Flicker, Instragram, DeviantART, Posterous)
   Documents (Google docs, SlideShare, Issu)
   Multimedia (Tumblr, Posterous)

6. News/ Bookmarking/ Content Aggregators/ RSS Feeds (Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Quora, Reddit, Slashdot, Feedburner, Technorati, Google Alerts, Google Reader)

7. Social media productivity tools (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Evernote)

8. Social Q&A/ Customer reviews/ Forums/ Surveys (Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, Quora, Zaga, Yelp, Angies List, Survey Monkey, Doodle)

9. Geo Location (FourSquare, Oink)
10. Social living/ E Commerce (Living Social, Groupon, Meetup.com, EBay, Etsy, Virb, Cafepress)

11. Livecasting/ Online conferencing (WebMeeting, GoToMeeting, Skype, UStream.tv, QIK.com, Livestream.com)

12. Email campaigns/ Marketing (MailChimp, Constant Contact, Vertical Response)
13. Social media monitoring/Analytics (Radian6, Google Analytics, Klout, Grader.com)

14. Wikis (PBWorks, MediaWiki, Wikispaces, SocialText, WetPaint)