After CaseCamp last night (which, FYI, rocked socks off around the room), I was feeling idea-vitalized. We saw some cool presentations, started asking some interesting questions, and met some smart cookies from around the city. But it got me thinking about the big question: what exactly comprises social media?
Now, I’ve heard it said time and again that YouTube and Flikr are considered to be part of the social media landscape. A team member today suggested that he indeed considers even RSS to be a part of SM. Me? I’m not buying it.
In my experience, anything that isn’t directly interacting with a community is purely content – information sharing is one thing, but is that really social?
According to Wikipedia, social media “is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.” Okay, I get that people can share information with pure content, but, to me, this doesn’t really say social interaction. If your video is a vlog? Fine, yes, completely agreed – you’re creating an environment through which people can converse. But just video posted online for people to watch and send to each other? I don’t see it. It’s a passive medium at that point, closer to television than an online experience.
In short: If you’re not engaging a person in a two-way conversation, you’re not engaging in what I’d consider to be social media.
What does social media mean to you? Tell me why I’m wrong!
Entries
April 30th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Flickr and Youtube are very much social media. Flicker groups and Channel following are huge communities of people interacting.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I guess I feel like that form of interaction is so very different from standard community forums that I have a hard time putting them in the same category – though you’re right that the group oriented area is clearly more of a fit. Does this even classify as different types of social media, or am I looking more at different usage patterns that will converge over time?
ETA: Okay, wait, I post that then I see this.
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:21 am
I see RSS as more of the infrastructure or the glue making it all work behind the scenes. It is not the social media itself. The RSS is what allows us to find it all in different places and be drawn to it. Some of us, indeed, just jump straight to YouTube or Flickr, but others might see content from an RSS feed someone has posted to their intranet or blog, and still others might see it in their RSS feed aggregators.
It is quite interesting to see how different people are working with and interacting with the social media, and how these intersect.
Cheers!
Connie