Social Media Definitions

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Twitter Network is either a “presence app” or a “microblogging tool” depending on whom you ask. In English that means, it’s a place where you send short updates to say what you’re up to (thus the word “presence”) and/or it’s a place where you can do very short (140 characters or less, like a text message) posts that might share good information around a specific topic etc. It’s a great tool for keeping in touch with a group. You can see our CEO Andre leftwich “Tweets”, as they’re called, here.

Often called Facebook for grown-ups, Linked-In, is your resume online plus the ability to connect with a wide array of folks. Good place to find jobs, connect with people for new business, ask a question and get a good answer, etc. Maybe it’s Facebook for work. If you’re reading this, and you’re not on LinkedIn, join right now.

Picture that all the data on the web was sort of tagged and defined so that computers themselves could know what those pieces were. If so, then the Internet itself (or actually the computers connected to it) could analyze that data and do some of the “thinking” for us. Cool, huh?

Wikis are collaboration tools. They allow multiple people to work in the same document, and that document lives online. Plus, it saves all the old versions, keeps a history of who changed what, etc. So it’s way better than Word in that respect, particular for groups that aren’t on a shared server. But, besides Wikipedia, these haven’t taken off like people thought they would, in part because you need to know a few wiki codes to make things bold, etc.

Some define widgets as mini-applications that can live away from their parents. Probably not the definition that you’ll see in a dictionary, but it works in try to better explain. These might be desktop widgets that update the weather for you automatically, for example. (Vista and Mac OS both have widget capability.) Or they live in Facebook, Open Social, or many other places. Many are using widgets to drive traffic to their sites, which is sort of counter-intuitive.

Just fun to say, But KickApps is a very cool tool for building your own social networks. And they’ll give it to you free if you let them run ads on your network. (Or you can buy out the ads. If you do, you can have no ads or you can sell your own ads and make money.)

Tumblr, is a way to post and manage youtube video or really short blog posts. Some people call it the blogging platform for busy people. You can also pull in feeds from your other posts, share pictures, etc. Think of it as in-between super-short Twitter and super robust WordPress (which this site uses).

del.icio.us. If you do the latter, you can get it on any computer. More than that, there’s a social component to del.icio.us. For example, if you are the one who always bookmarks stuff , you can follow your tagged entries.

Enterprise 2.0 is simply this: Using all this social media tools and stuff to change the way we work within an organization. How we collaborate. How we use the wisdom of crowds.

Social media newsroom is a great example of SMO for press content.

Please note – It rhymes with dream. Memes are ideas that catch on, and a variety of people run with them, build on them, expand on them. The definitions for this one are somewhat varied, it is probably best to think of them in the simplest terms as an idea that spreads.

Mash-ups are great. Take two pieces of content and mash them together to make something new. One very, very common one is a custom Google map. But mash-ups are limited only by your imagination and computer skills, so don’t just think they are Google maps.

Social Directories are very cool tapping directly into vertical audiences and then building your own local social profile. The Every Merchant network is launching over 2000 of these vertical social directories. Here a a few – EveryStoreDeal.com, EveryMenu.com, EveryBusinesslisting.com, EveryBusinessReview.com, EverySEOCompany.com and 1000’s more…

The social graph is a diagram of the interconnections between people, with the people serving as nodes, and the lines between them showing the connections. People say it sounds much cooler if you now refer to it like this. It’s a buzzword. A well respected blogger, Dave Winer says that social graph and social network are the same thing, and you if you might sound stiff or scripted if you use the term social graph.