What is Social Media and What is it not???

     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