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Social Media Confusion

Dare's post about the confusion surrounding any easy to understand definition of social media made me laugh -- he nailed the sweet spot of my blog -- talking about PR, complaining about Wikipedia, discussing the change in how companies communicate to their constituents. Bonus points for noting the generally incomprehensible writing on the techcrunch article.

As I noted in my post about the Edwards campaign, hiring a blogger just for traffic or audience isn't often a good idea. Hiring a blogger for a specific skill set, writing ability, analytical skills, that makes sense. Is it social? Is it media? I'll let Dare decide. ;)

 

Published Thursday, February 15, 2007 9:27 PM by FrankShaw

Comments

 

Tom Coates said:

As someone who was originally very sceptical of the term social software when Clay Shirky reintroduced the term to usurp a previous category of online communities, you can imagine how I felt when social media started to be used. Unfortunately, we sometimes end up having to work out backwards what these coinages mean when people find themselves using them a lot. I started an attempt to make sense of the term last year in a piece called 'What do we do with social media' - http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2006/03/what_do_we_do_with_social_media/ - but I'm thinking around it again now. I think the best way to understand the term is in terms of resonances. Think of media as both a container of information (medium of art, blank media) and as a shorthand for mass media, entertainment and the like. There's something in this territory concerned with the collaborative creation or sharing of data which could be called social, contained within media but also creating something media-like - a browsable, explorable resource of value.

Does that make any sense?

February 24, 2007 2:37 PM
 

FrankShaw said:

Thanks, Tom. Yes, you are making a good distinction here. There is no doubt that there's value to be found, the challenge is keeping the hype and naming from crushing the value before it can be fully explored.

February 25, 2007 1:31 PM

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