Terminology Matters: Why 'Social Media' Sucks
Here's a New Lexicon to Help You Think Clearly
Media is something that media companies control, and media is overwhelmingly one-way. The online social world is about as two-way, multi-way, any-way as it can be. Nobody controls it, not even Facebook, which found it can't even change its own terms of service.
Media is something people spend time with. So are online social interactions. That's a pretty tenuous reason to call it media. And while, as in media, you can advertise in social network sites, that is the least interesting use for them.
Here are some words you can use to think more clearly.
If you want to refer to the whole world of people connecting and drawing strength from each other online, you can call it the "social web" or the "social internet" (or you can call it the "groundswell," if you wish). It includes huge sites such as MySpace, communities, YouTube, the blogosphere and so on. (You could call the whole thing "Web 2.0," but people often use that term to refer to a set of technologies -- not the best way for advertisers to focus -- and it doesn't get directly at the people-to-people aspects.)
If you want to build an environment where consumers or other customers connect with you and each other, call it a "social application." It could be a community, a user-generated-content site, or even adding ratings and reviews to your site. By calling these applications, you remind yourself that 1) it's going to take some effort to build it right, and 2) people will interact with it. And you may even remind yourself that 3) it could last a long time, rather than coming and going quickly as advertising campaigns and media do.
If you're going to participate in a big social site (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube), call it a "social-network site" (or just a "social network," for short). And you're often better off with a channel or a profile or an identity than an ad in such an environment.
But no matter what you do, the sooner you stop thinking of the social web as media, the better off you are.
~ ~ ~
Josh Bernoff is the co-author of "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," a comprehensive analysis of corporate strategy for dealing with social technologies like blogs, social networks and wikis, and is a VP-principal analyst at Forrester Research. He blogs at blogs.forrester.com/groundswell.
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I don't re-call signing an IO when I made my last tweet... What is the CPM on my Twitter Profile - LOL...
Why is it "communications professionals" always seem to get these simple language nuances wrong...
Tweet you later...
LJY
Olive LLC
www.olivemedia.com
> never actually speaking to anybody.
and...
> In ten years I see a new industry that
> will teach people how to communicate.
These sentiments are common, but are they true? I've noticed that often with people give examples to support these ideas, they tell me about teenagers. "I was talking to my teenager and she was txting the whole time". I saw a group of teenagers standing together, but instead of talking they were all txting".
I don't think it's anything new that teenagers would rather do anything but pay attention to their parents. And I think that group of teenagers probably were talking to each other, but their conversation includes people who are physically somewhere else. In any case, they are teenagers! They're supposed to be screwball.
I have more time to talk with my friends and family because technology helps me communicate more efficiently at work. I have more long distance friends that I stay in touch with because technology makes it easy. When I was in London last year, I met up with an old friend and had a pint (and yes, talked), and I probably would not have done it if we hadn't reconnected on Facebook a month earlier.
It is completely incorrect to assume that more ways to communicate necessarily results in abandoning other means of communication. And foolish to think that our ability to communicate effectively will suffer because Twitter forces us to be succinct.
So tweet, blog, post, write, paint, touch, learn, dance, keep on growing. Thanks.
-Michael
www.NYCA.com
But I do think of the web as another form of "media", or another medium, to be exact. And I do believe in a tipping point where the social web and its related environs and activities will be so ubiquitous it will be called something else; what and when I am not sure. Let's just make it easy and call it the web.
Not sure if I agree with "social application" but I do not have an alternative to suggest.
Great post!
I propose a new name: "SOCIAL NERDIA". Anyone who cares about which name to use is a big nerd. And being a nerd (whether in tech/adv/mktg/etc.) these days is AWESOME 2.0!
www.socialnerdia.com
What is the perverse attraction of the Internet? Why do advertising and marketing people insist in discussing aspects of the Internet endlessly?
Because it is all totally meaningless!
Not only are we trapped in the worst recession in living memory. But behind all this lurks a horror even more shocking; the entire marketing/advertising-economic model of free enterprise, rugged individualism, creative advertising and marketing is broken beyond all hope of repair.
In 1989 the world, from China and Russia to South Africa, India and Brazil, concluded that there was no serious alternative to market forces as a means of organizing productive activity. In 2009 the whole world seems to have reached the opposite conclusion — that free markets and financial incentives together with marketing & advertising, lead even the richest and most sophisticated societies to disaster.
The question we must ask today is not whether Marketing & Advertising is too big or too small, but whether it works at all.
And that most certainly includes the Internet, which is most definitely NOT an advertising medium.
To reinvent advertising and marketing the first thing we have to do is to fully understand the word "communication". From there comes all else.
Read my book "Television Killed Advertising" and you will discover where we went wrong in the past and we are going wrong now. Already I am drafting my next book titled "Advertising Killed Advertising"!
Certainly the next possible title is "The Internet finally put Advertising to Death"!
Want to discuss this further? paul.ashby@yahoo.com
Your suggested euphemisms - e.g. 'web 2.0' and 'social web' aren't workably apt since, more and more, it isn't just about "the web" but includes mobile (non-web, thnk txtng) & sharing content/experiences etc outside of the web, e.g. email (remember?!) TV, OOH etc which aren't necessarily limited to "the web".
Your primer on the sub species is helpful, but "Social networks" are places. "Social apps" are things.
"Social media", really, is a state. An entire new thread of organic connectivity that we as humans - both marketers and consumers - re-imagine and re-make each day with our individual contributions of our little pieces of "personal media".
The "personal" becomes "social", once shared, contributed or set free.
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/04/be-nice-or-leave-slight-refrain.html
FX
We're witnessing an anti-social sentiment brewing among early adopters which will create a "groundswell" of innovation and support that will carry us into the next phase of the web. The social web will widely be recognized as the web and thus open the doors to a new medium that will invite opportunistic marketers and thought leaders into a naming frenzy. In the meantime, debating social media vs. social web vs. you name it web distracts us from the bigger job, and privilege, to help educate and inspire content creators and consumers to collaborate more effectively online to collectively create a more media literate, informed, and productive society. Otherwise this race to create a meaningless genre of popularity-fueled micro socialites will continue to spotlight the "ME" in social media.
The fine tuning of the web is a work in progress, and will remains so for a good while. "Social media" is probably as good a label as any during this fluid construction phase.
Whatever you want to call it, this "social" thing is part narcissism, part anonymous communication (which is very much anti-social) and part work avoidance.
No wonder why the economy is horrible, so many people are "socializing" at the big internet water-cooler and nobody is working.
In Traditional Media, the means of creating-publishing-broadcasting were, to use your word, "controlled." So the profits streamed to those relatively few "institutions" that "controlled" the means of media.
But now... the means of "media" in the Social Web are diffused across, as Brian Solis has coined, The Conversation Prism.
Is it harder today for a "media professional" in the Social Web to make money than in the days of Traditional Media?
And something that occurred to me (as someone pointed out in a comment to my blog post), the people who are social media "doubters" and are posting comments here to Josh' article are actually participating in a form of social media themselves - leaving digital comments decrying social media.
Prior to the Internet's series of tubes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes), those comments wouldn't have been possible outside of a letter to the editor of Ad Age, or a discussion over beers at the end of a day.
Twitter is just another communication tool - no different than switching from Pony Express to using the telegraph. It's email on steroids - allowing you to share and discuss widely without having to plow through tons of emails in response to an email with 200-300 people cc'ed. Some people will abuse it and use it too much.
But eventually, it will be one of many communication tools in people's digital arsenal. And, yes, smart marketers will figure out a way to utilize the viral nature of Twitter without resorting to spam.
Jeff Rutherford
I'd rather spend our time talking about getting "old school media" up to speed. In posting this comment, for instance, I had to submit way more info to Ad Age than I wanted and worse than that, when I had to pick a description for what type of company I work for I only had "Advertising Agency" to pick from. There was no "Marketing and Outreach" or "Interactive" agency or anything to indicate that Ad Age understands that the advertising is not the end all be all anymore.
Down the road, just as Web 2.0 already feels passe, Social Media will morph into something else and it is already becoming a buzz word that is watering down the severe cultural, economic and business shifts that are occurring right now.
I am much more concerned with the term Social Media Marketing - this implies that SM is tactical and one-way and we all know that this approach is the kiss of death for businesses.
Elenora
real estate