Social Media Exactly
Last night, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, from Mashable wrote the blog entry, “Just What is Social Media, Exactly?” As an owner of an interactive agency, this is a topic that’s of great interest to me and I am always interested to learn other points of view on social media.
Marks start’s out by referencing Brian Eisenberg’s post from FutureNow:
“The biggest problem I have with the term “social media” is that it isn’t media in the traditional sense. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the others I don’t have the word count to mention aren’t media; they are platforms for interaction and networking. All the traditional media — print, broadcast, search, and so on — provide platforms for delivery of ads near and around relevant content. Social media are platforms for interaction and relationships, not content and ads”
I think that Brian is trying to deconstruct the meaning of the word “media” too much and should be focusing on the broader picture. To that extent, I do agree that social media is a platform and the term “social media” applies, as does the term “new media”. I don’t think there is much confusion between new media and the traditional sense of media either. Why can’t social media simply be defined as the interaction and relationships formed on new medias? We’ve just barely seen the tip of the iceberg. Social media is about to entrench us in every type of way we know, including mobile and eventually TV.Mark also refers to Jeffrey Eisenberg’s post where he quoted Ted McConnell from Procter & Gamble Co marketing in Ad Age: “I think when we call it ‘consumer-generated media,’ we’re being predatory”. I think it’s definitely being predatory when you use it in that context and maybe we should just call it user-generated content.
This article really hit home to me because there are so many different points of view on social media and what it is exactly. I’m a social media junkie and I love technology. I can speak to anybody in the industry about social media till the sun rises but trying to sell Joe the plumber on why a social media strategy will help his business is a different story.
I think the benefits of social media are still staggered. The success is definitely there but it carries just as many good stories along with the bad. To date, my definition is that, “social media are social interactions across different new media platforms.”
