I created my first blog about 7 years ago because I thought it was cool that I could publish what I wanted without a lot of hassel and overhead. I didn’t think much about the implications at the time. Since then thinking about the implications of “social media” is about the only thing I have done.
I created this presentation in 2007. It was part of my process for understanding what this stuff was all about. With over 77,000 views, I guess I was on the right track.
Social Media Is…
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Throughout this time I have wrestled with defining the underlying fundamentals of what it is that defines Social Media. What I have come to believe is that social media, and it’s enterprise cousin: collaboration, are simply the infrastructure necessary to support the exchange of subjective content.
Traditional IT systems deal strictly with objective content. Financial data, sales data, HR data, etc. Just the facts. These systems cannot deal with opinion. Social software can.
What has to happen now is to figure out an effective way to integrate the subjective content with the objective content. Currently social systems tend to be in a silo with respect to the rest of an organization’s operations. This is one reason that it has been so hard to quantify the “business value” of social content. When we can integrate the subjective social content with the objective process content we can begin to more effectively demonstrate the value social systems bring to the enterprise.
Filed under: Corporate Social Media, enterprise 2.0, infrastructure | Tagged: enterprise social software, social media |
Inside Conversation 
I like your “subjective” framework as a perspective (although I would argue that most traditional push marketing is hardly objective). The idea that social media is not simply about information, but about relevance, interpretation, and expansion is a nice way of seeing things.
For me, the key principle is the abilty to talk back and the power that the conversation has to change the nature of the interaction and the behavior of the communicators.