Thursday, July 1, 2010

Network tools and categories

There are some buzz words trying to categorize some of the offerings on the internet. First, some definitions.

Media: Text, pictures, video, and sound.

Audience: The recipients of media.

Social: 2 way interactions with groups of people. Among business associates, this is also called networking. The social audience is typically a dozen to the low hundreds.

Advertising: Announcing news with a pointer to some content.

Broadcasting: 1 way information dissemination usually to an anonymous audience. The audience of broadcasts can be scaled up to thousands or millions.

  • Facebook, linkedin, and Myspace would be examples of social media.
  • Email among personal contacts is also social media. It is sharing media with contacts.
  • Email lists sent by companies is broadcasting and advertising.
  • Chat rooms and virtual worlds are social interaction, not social media.
  • Webcam chat rooms, like stickam and justin TV are also social interaction.
  • YouTube and blogger, wordpress, et. al. would be examples of broadcasting to an audience. Although there are comments, I don't consider the initial post to be the beginning of a conversation.
  • Twitter can be many things. From a personal account with a small group of followers, it can be considered social media. If the account is corporate, it could be advertising.
  • Shared bookmarks (such as delicious and digg) are also advertising, not "social bookmarking".

1 comment:

  1. nice list and i might add that delicious can be used in a pseudo marketing way - by making publicly viewable lists

    the number of delicious bookmarks is also a metric used by grader.com to measure your SEO

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