Here is my take on what we should all be doing… The umbrella term needs to be Social Technologies. This is a general enough term that it covers the various branches of the discipline. To use the term social networking or social media as the umbrella is a misnomer because these are simply branches that I will discuss in a minute. Since Social Technologies (or technology) is a little long, we could shorten it in most cases to Social Tech. With this as an general term, let’s look at what falls underneath it and why…

Social Networking is clearly the right name for the branch of this field that speaks to any application or platform that is used to connect people through live, or delayed written communication. This includes eCommunities, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc. Any service that seeks to connect people one to one, many to many, or one to many for the purposes of communication or community falls within this branch.

Social Media is the branch that refers to any application or platform that uses a form a media to allow people to share information one to many. Media in this case means video, documents, presentations, or pictures. Or said another way, YouTube, Scribd, SlideShare, and Flickr. The word media is a specific term that refers to a specific method for leveraging social communications or information sharing and the key thought here is that it is done through a media file.

Social Relevancy is the branch that speaks to online reputation, or online credentials. This includes all of the concepts and applications that help build, monitor and measure what your visibility is on the Internet. This includes all of the social networking and social media sites. Whether we are talking about an organization, a person, or a product, all are starting to have online reputations, and a measurable amount of social relevancy.

There is now a fourth branch I will call the catch all branch. This is for any activity that now has the word “social” pasted in front of it to denote the fact the social tools are now being used to improve performance. For example, Social CRM, and Social Recruiting. I suspect we will see many more examples of nomenclature like this over the next five years, then we will drop putting social in front of terms when everything has a social tech element within it.

If people cannot discern the difference between these terms, they will never be able to actually be good at using them. Vocabulary can be powerful in that way. So please help me get the popular press, and the various commenters to start using this paradigm. It makes much more sense to delineate these terms into branches that make sense, and to use an umbrella term that is intuitive. By the way, it starts with you using these terms correctly… My next stop is Webster’s Dictionary. I intend to put the full court press on for them to define things this way!!!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

1 – The Platform Providers – Nothing happens in SocMed land until someone builds a platform that we can use to communicate. Examples are MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, etc. All of these sites are essentially platforms that not only allow us to communicate with each other; they let us extend their platforms functionality in some ways. They love getting millions of people to use their platforms. That is the single thing that gives them leverage and the ability to monetize what they have built. Of course they want users to love them, but at the end of the day, you can even be as basic as Craigslist and as long as people use your platform by the millions, you have won. What they hate? When competitors take users away and their growth reverses into a free fall of active users. They also hate any bad publicity that might stop user growth.

2 – The Sponsors – In order to offer these wonderful platforms for free, The Sponsors have jumped in to pay the Platform Providers a pretty penny to get access to our eyeballs (and wallets.) The Sponsors can range from a large advertiser like Nike, to the smallest company doing a pay per click campaign. What do they love? Behavioral targeting is the key. In no other form of marketing/advertising can an organization specifically target users like on the Web. Social media just provides an even deeper level of behavioral targeting. Want to sell something to females with an age of 25 to 30, who buy Madonna tickets online, and shoes from Zappos? We have an app for that. And, they can control the money they invest to a more finite degree and vary it on the fly. Not exactly like having to run a television commercial campaign is it. What they hate? That they cannot fully measure the branding value of their sponsorship, that Web companies can do click fraud and waste their money, and humans that for some strange reason have not gotten into a SocMed site so they can be targeted.

3 – The UGC Elite – In case you missed that memo, this stands for User Generated Content. Statistics tell us that about 80% of the content uploaded to SocMed sites is created by less than 5% of the users. Sorry Perado, but your rule does not apply here. Thank God for these people because they are the ones that have primed the pump and created the UGC movement that has become YouTube, Scribd, SlideShare, Blogger, etc. They love any new tool that makes it easier for them to upload content fast. They also love when their content is redistributed in some way to a new group of users. They love “views” and the more the better. Get five million views of your YouTube clip of people catching laptops with their back ends, and you are an instant star. (Look that one up if you want.) They hate being blocked from uploading, people ripping off their content and not attributing it, and user’s that write childish and crude comments that attach forever to their work of art.

4 – The Average User – This includes millions of normal people that use SocMed sites for work, to stay in touch with family, to find old friends, or to just communicate with like-minded people. The users have a huge amount of power in the SocMed game because they can make a Platform Provider rich, or break their heart. They can identify themselves electronically to a Sponsor so they can be “sold.” They can view UGC so many times that they elevate an unknown content provider into a media star. They love new tools, new capabilities, and everything for free. They love simplicity and getting results with less than 30 seconds of investment. They love knowing their friends all use the same platforms and that they can now entertain themselves, or be productive at any moment, on any device they have. They hate sites to be down. Once they come to depend on a platform, they expect it to be like the electricity in the wall. It should always be on. They hate having their privacy invaded – oops, don’t tell the Sponsors because if the users really knew how deeply they are tracked, they might run and hide from SocMed. They also hate spam, malware, and rude brutish users.

5 – The Newbie – Everyone is new to pieces of SocMed. We all had to start somewhere. So we all were (are) Newbies at some point. The only real question is how long we stay Newbies. For some people, it is forever. They never really learn how to use SocMed tools. They perpetually sign up for accounts, but never really learn how to use the Platforms. They might be signer uppers that never use the systems, or they might actually connect with two ore three people just to test things out, and then abandon actually using the system beyond that. Essentially they will buy a hammer, drive a couple of nails, hang it on the wall and stare at it for ten years now that they know how it works. They love to tell their friends that they Twitter, even though they only did one tweet and connected to two people. They love to ask questions about how you use the Platforms, but then they rarely go try it on their own. Thankfully, sometimes they love to learn more and they move into being Average Users. They hate having to remember all the passwords. They hate the fact that they have to invest time in actually learning how to use these Platforms. They hate when something new gets hot and they have to go learn something else now.

6 – The Luddites – We all know a few of these. They refuse to have anything to do with SocMed. So why list them at all? Because they will be the outcasts. They will be the people that will one day either be forced to play, or will go to the grave believing that the effort for them to learn a new way is to great. That something hundreds of millions of other people have found valuable, is simply not valuable to them. The only reason I list them is because they will waste lots of our time trying to convert us to their way of thinking so they do not have to be lonely in their cocoons…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

If the Internet is the foundational first tool that allows us to create a collective and shared knowledge-base, then social media/networking is the second stage. With an infrastructure that allows us to communicate for free (or next to it) and that provides tools that make connections possible from anywhere at anytime, we are now exploring the boundaries of creating new ad-hoc electronic tribes. We have labeled this social media/networking and these tribes are now blossoming, imploding, and reforming at a high rate. These tribes can be technology based – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. Or they can be media based – Youtube, Scribd, or SlideShare. Or community based – Ning, corporate Intranets, or event based sites. As a member of most of these tribes, I now have a powerful collection of new tools for marketing, relationship building, idea sharing, and communicating. Every day there is a new innovation in this social media world, and I feel blessed that I understand this new movement and how to leverage it as a tool. I feel blessed for mankind that we will forever more have a set of tools that will allow us to relate to each other in new ways, to vote on the content we think is powerful, and to create streams of thoughts and ideas to share moment to moment. Alas…

I read one time that monkeys in a specific group will learn how to use a stick as a new tool and will for many generations pass down that knowledge. Yet monkeys from other tribes will never get it – even when they observe the behavior benefiting their own kind – they don’t get it. I mean really, how hard is it to understand sticking a twig in an anthill and pulling it out with lots of ants attached as a tasty meal?

I had a long conversation with an executive the other day about Twitter and the concept of microblogging and why it is a great marketing tool – he did not get it. I mean really, how hard is it to understand a flow of communications from selected sources that let’s us communicate concisely to a self-chosen group.

If you feel like I have been wandering you around on a safari in getting to the point, let me be clear… There is a powerful and growing collection of new tools under an umbrella we call social media. It is nothing more than a bunch of humans (your customers, clients, and members) learning to use the Internet infrastructure as a tool to create tribes in order to share information, communicate, and collaborate. It is more effective than many of the methods of relating we have had in the past (TV, radio, telephone, fax, etc.) It is cheap, unregulated, unfiltered until I choose to filter it, and scalable to a number of people I have never been able to share with in the past. Young people use it because it works. It is not magic, it is not complicated, and it is not expensive. It is the most democratic institution we have ever created because it crosses all geographic boundaries, and is uncontrolled by any power-broker. It is not a fad, it is a powerful trend and the longer you wait to get it, the more you are losing.

I have heard all your excuses – here they are in order. I don’t have time for this! I don’t understand this! I am afraid people will learn things about me! What if someone says something bad about us! I don’t know many others doing this in my circle!

I guess I just wonder how much you might have to see before you will accept that this new tool actually provides value. Or, I guess you can self select out of the game and let the next generation show you how to use the tool when they take over…

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com