How Should We Define Social Media?
While doing some research this week, I did a deep dive on the history of social media. You know, all those sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, etc… While researching, I naturally checked the Wikipedia entry for “social media”, which the entry’s editors defined as:
“Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings.”
I found this definition unsatisfying. Defining social media as a tool set turns the concept into a noun, when it’s really a verb. Social media isn’t a device that lets people share and discuss, it’s a process of content creation and dissemination.
A cell phone lets you discuss and share information among human beings, but companies aren’t running social media campaigns on phones. They’re doing it on blogs, social networks, and wikis.
A more accurate definition captures the process of content creation that defines social media. Social media is the shift from a “read-only” web to a “read/write” web. Websites started accepting user input. They started letting users “reprogram” them through collective actions like voting and user generated content.
Therefore, I propose the following definition:
“Social media is a communications medium that relies on its audience to create, modify, or distribute the medium’s content.”
This definition captures the activities we think of when we talk about social media. - “Hey, did you see all the comments on that blog post?” - “My video went viral from so many people sharing it with their friends”.
So, what’s the point? A proper definition of social media brings attention to how it works and is drastically different from traditional media. Newspaper columns never “went viral”. Advertisers never knew if a viewers’ eyes glazed over during a television commercial. Ten years ago, users never knew if they were the only ones frustrated by a defective product.
If you don’t know what social media is, you can’t market in it.
Tags: advertisers, publishers
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