What is Social Media?

Prospects and clients often ask me two related questions:

What is Social Media?

How can I use Social Media to promote my business?

In this article I’m going answer the first question: “What is Social Media?” This article will form a foundation of understanding to build on in future articles where I’ll discuss how you can use social media to promote your business.

The social aspect of social media encompasses concepts like:

  • User-generated content.
  • Sharing, contribution, participation, interaction and collaboration.
  • Authority-generated content and user-generated content existing together and interacting.
  • Relationships.

What I mean by authority-generated content is content generated by an official publisher. For example, the New York Times pays writers to publish information through the New York Times website. I’m calling that information authority-generated content.

User-generated content is content generated by regular, non-official publishers like you and me. We might comment on a New York Times article or write a book review for Amazon.com. In these examples, our user-generated content co-exists with authority-generated content.

Another big part of part of social media is discovering, connecting with and building relationships with other people. These relationships can be centered on things like locations, events, offline relationships, shared interests and shared content.

The media aspect of social media refers to the form through which we apply the concepts from above:

  • Online communities.
  • Video sharing.
  • Picture sharing.
  • Bookmark sharing.
  • Content sharing.
  • Blogging.
  • etc.

If our explicit goal is to create relationships, then the social media could be classified as an online community. An example of a social network that fits this description is Facebook.

If our goal is to share videos, then the social media could be classified as video sharing. An example of a social network that fits this description is YouTube.

I slipped in a new term: social network. You have likely gathered from context that this is used to refer to a particular instance or example of social media. Things are tricky here. Different people use terms like community, social media and social network in slightly different ways. These terms are somewhat flexible and overlap. In addition, the purposes and forms of the different social media themselves overlap and the features used to enable the different forms of media overlap. So don’t get too caught up in the names.

Now that we’ve gotten a feel for social media, let’s take a closer look and match up the concepts above with some concrete examples you are likely familiar with.

Below I have organized social media into 7 different categories. Earlier I said that things were hard to define, flexible, overlapped and were constantly changing. That’s true but we need to start somewhere and this is how I’ve decided to do it.

Communities/Social Networking

Photo Sharing

Video/Audio Sharing

Content Sharing

Social Bookmarking

Social News Aggregation

Blogging/Micro Blogging

(Sites like wikipedia.org and pseudodictionary.com are examples of social reference sites but they are of limited value for promoting your business so I’m not going to cover them here.)

Now we have a foundation for what social media is and some specific examples. I’ll continue to add to the lists above as things change.

Going forward, I’ll build off of this foundation by giving more detailed explanations of each of these types of social media, discussing major social networks in each area and then outlining strategies for using each type to build your audience and extend the reach of your message.

Posted on Feb 02 2008 by Rob under Social Media.


One Response to “What is Social Media?”

  1. By Rob on Feb 10, 2008 | Reply

    Added a few more Content Sharing sites.

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