I defined it this way:

“Social Media is a strange brew of Technology + People + Organization + Freedom. Miss an ingredient, and you’re cooking something different.”

I think that’s quite a good definition, Joe. Let me pose some questions, though, for the sake of discussion:

Are social media truly limited to the online realm? And if we’re shooting for the clearest possible wording, what does “mash up” mean?

More significantly, I think it’s less an issue of shifting between roles of author and audience and more about the flattening of the hierarchy that elevates author above audience. Just a thought. Might not be accurate.

Thanks for the post.

Great definition! I’m going to direct folks to this from now on when they ask me what it means.

Sounds like blogging and items like twitter to me… So is social media really an out of date term? When we should just refer to it as media.

Finally, an explanation I can pass along! However, I am seconding Mike Keliher, in requesting either a better definition of mash-up or replacing it…definitions that require defining.

I agree with you, Joe. I disagree with most, if not all, of the over-complicated comments that followed. Actually, the more I read the comments, the more I think they are all wrong, except maybe Terry.

He has a point that the fluidity btw audience and author has to take into account the key fact that the audience now talks amongst themselves. (i.e. conversation)

As you drill down, the loss of publisher’s and editors’ privilege comes into it, but those are the advanced concepts that flow out of a nice, tight definition.

Simple = good.

Social media could also be framed as post-mass media.

This is a great thread, and a useful discussion to be having.

You’re absolutely right to criticise the Wikipedia entry – it’s a mess. I think it suffers from the fact that Social Media has become one of the most over-defined concepts since “knowledge management”. The simple and evident advantages have been rendered nebulous and impenetrable by the well-meaning dilution of “NPOV”.

This is problematic because there are so many different facets one wants to try to cram into the One Right & True Definition – which is why your effort here to arrive at a simplified, plain language, generic definition is a valid and valuable exercise. Not everyone will agree on whatever definition you offer – but at least you’ll have one that makes sense to the audiences you’re addressing – and that’s a good thing.

Defining things from the perspective of one’s audience seems like a good place to start, in fact. For me, the way I define or talk about social media tends to shift dependant on the context of the conversation (pardon the pun).

For example, I had lunch at the weekend with a guy who runs a very successful Toronto business that currently has next-to-no online presence. Talking to him about the nature and uses of social media was a very different experience from talking to my team mates around the Toronto office, or talking to an audience of Third Tuesday acolytes. The common ground of understanding just wasn’t there, so I found myself using a lot of analogies to traditional media approaches; talking about what’s changed.

One of the concepts that seemed to resonate with this chap was an idea I’ve used in the past: that the Internet has democratized communications such that we’ve shifted from the old one-to-many form of communications (broadcast) to many-to-many (participatory) forms.

That’s what we mean by the “social” part, I believe. The media – however you want to categorize them – all now have the potential to be social, literally “interactive”, and two-way. We read newspapers, we watch television, we listen to the radio – but these are all passive forms. OK, so maybe we write a letter to the editor once in a while, or chuck a brick at the TV screen – but we’re not really participating. We’re being talked at and broadcast as opposed to engaging in.

Social media is something we engage in rather than consume. Yes, we still read blogs, watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts – but we can also create them ourselves, and respond to them directly with (the potential for) equal status and presence of voice as the original blog post or podcast.

You’ve seen the slides I use quoting David Weinberger and highlighting the shift from a unidirectional, hierarchical communications flow to a world where “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy”, in David’s splendid phrase. I guess that’s a similar point to the one Mike Keliher makes, above. The Internet effect on the author-audience dynamic is precisely what McLuhan predicted: “the consumer becomes producer as the public become participant role player”.

In old media, big mattered. You needed to be big to own the broadcast tower. There was a core of ownership in the hands of the few (the Hearsts, Ochs-Suzlbergers, Murdochs, Astors, et al). Now, big is increasingly irrelevant – as Engadget or The Huffington Post have ably demonstrated.

When I talk about the democratization of media, this is precisely what I mean – the means of production are now no longer in the hands of the few. I particularly like the way you’ve expressed this in the first sentence of your definition – the “shifting between roles” thought works for me.

One other point that needs to be made, I think, is that the shift has also been catalyzed by a fundamental change in attitude brought about by the Web – or, at least, enabled by the Web. Some of the key points of this attitude shift are worth noting as candidates for inclusion in your definition, IMHO. For example, I don’t think you can successfully define social media without at least some reference to the underlying values of authenticity, transparency, and openness. Precisely how you work those into the definition without it becoming too long, I don’t quite know at this stage – I admire the succinct elegance of a two-sentence definition, but think it may need a third line to address these attitude points.

As an aside (and since I’ve already quoted McLuhan, I might as well go for pseud bingo): discussing all this makes me wonder whether there are grad students out there somewhere working on an update to Harold Innis’ notions of time-biased and space-biased media (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-_and_space-bias). What would Innis have made of the social media world, I wonder?

I think this is a pretty darn good definition. I am currently reading Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s book “Groundswell,” and they define the groundswell (their coined term for Web 2.0) as “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” They say it’s the coming together of people, technology and economics. No matter how you define it, in all the above definitions one thing is key – people have the power.

Looking forward to hearing more of your insights!

Thanks for this definition. These guys cited your definition, but expanded upon yours, nice makes it very clear, check it out.

http://commetrics.com/?p=97

I personally find the name ‘social media’ misleading.
‘Social media’ carries the connotation that it may, it may
be pro-social justice but in fact, it widens the digital divide
— this is what’s misleading abt the term.

This is a very good definition! It is a simple, clear breaks down of the application vs. technology. It helped me better frame these impacts and applications as I try to write my company’s Social Media / Social Networking policy. Thank you.