The idea behind Social Media is
far from groundbreaking. Nevertheless, there seems to be confusion among managers
and academic researchers alike as to what exactly should be included under this
term, and how Social Media differ from the seemingly-interchangeable related
concepts of Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. It therefore makes sense to
take a step back and provide insight regarding where Social Media come from and
what they include.
By 1979, a worldwide discussion
system Usenet allowed Internet users to post public messages. Yet, the era of
Social Media as we understand it today probably started about 20 years earlier,
when ‘‘Open Diary,’’ an early social networking site that brought together
online diary writers into one community. The term ‘‘weblog’’ was first used at
the same time, and truncated as ‘‘blog’’ a year later when one blogger jokingly
transformed the noun ‘‘weblog’’ into the sentence ‘‘we blog.’’ The growing
availability of high-speed Internet access further added to the popularity of
the concept, leading to the creation of social networking sites such as MySpace
in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. This, in turn, coined the term ‘‘Social Media’’
and contributed to the prominence it has today.
Although this may give some
idea about what is meant by Social Media, a formal definition of the term first
requires drawing a line to two related concepts that are frequently named in
conjunction with it: Web 2.0 and User Generated Content.
Web 2.0 is a term that
was first used in 2004 to describe a new way in which software developers and
end-users started to utilize the World Wide Web; that is, as a platform whereby content and
applications are no longer created and published by individuals, but instead are continuously modified by
all users in a participatory and collaborative fashion. While applications such as personal web pages,
Encyclopedia Britannica Online, and the idea of content publishing belong to the era of Web 1.0, they are
replaced by blogs, wikis, and collaborative projects in Web 2.0. Although Web 2.0 does not refer to any
specific technical update of the World Wide Web, there is a set of basic functionalities that are necessary for its
functioning. Among them are Adobe Flash (a popular method for adding animation, interactivity, and
audio/video streams to web pages), RSS (Really Simple Syndication, a family of
web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content, such as blog
entries or news headlines, in a standardized format), and AJAX (Asynchronous Java
Script, a technique to retrieve data from web servers asynchronously, allowing
the update of web content without interfering with the display and behavior of
the whole page). Thus Web 2.0 is the platform for the evolution of Social
Media.
When Web 2.0 represents the
ideological and technological foundation, User Generated Content (UGC) can be
seen as the sum of all ways in which people make use of Social Media. The term,
which achieved broad popularity in 2005, is usually applied to describe the
various forms of media content that are publicly available and created by
end-users.
According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development, UGC needs to fulfill three basic requirements in order to be
considered as such: first, it needs to be published either on a publicly
accessible website or on a social networking site accessible to a selected group
of people; second, it needs to show a certain amount of creative effort; and
finally, it needs to have been created outside of professional routines and practices.
The first condition excludes content exchanged in e-mails or instant messages; the
second, mere replications of already existing content (e.g., posting a copy of
an existing newspaper article on a personal blog without any modifications or
commenting); and the third, all content that has been created with a commercial
market context in mind.
While UGC has already been available prior to Web 2.0,
as discussed above, the combination of technological drivers (e.g., increased
broadband availability and hardware capacity), economic drivers (e.g.,
increased availability of tools for the creation of UGC), and social drivers
(e.g., rise of a generation of ‘‘digital natives’’: younger
age groups with substantial technical knowledge and willingness to engage
online) make UGC nowadays fundamentally different from what was observed in the
early 1980s. Based on these clarifications of Web 2.0 and UGC, it is now
straightforward to give a more detailed definition of what we mean by Social
Media.
In our view Social Media is a
group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of
User Generated Content. Within this general definition, there are various types
of Social Media that need to be distinguished further. However, although most
people would probably agree that Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and Second Life
are all part of this large group, there is no systematic way in which different
Social Media applications can be categorized. Also, new sites appear in
cyberspace every day, so it is important that any classification scheme takes
into account applications which may be forthcoming.
Further Reading: Facts About Social Media and marketing
Further Reading: Facts About Social Media and marketing
