Key terms, phrases, strategies and tools in social media, social media marketing and internet marketing.

A social media glossary

Linda Young, Marketing & Communications July 2008

• Authenticity: Authenticity is a critical element in social media and social media marketing. Being authentic, transparent and human allows for 'real' interaction between people and enables discussions about issues of shared interest. Being authentic also allows an institution to have personality.


• Blog: A blog is an online journal that's updated on a regular basis with entries that appear in reverse chronological order. Blogs can be about any subject. They typically contain comments by other readers, links to other sites and permalinks that let others link to a specific entry within the blog. See the Creative Writing program's Open Text blog and the CultureNet's blog A Collection of Digital Curiousities.


• Blogosphere: Blogosphere is the term used for the totality of blogs on the internet and for the conversations taking place in these spaces.


• Collaboration: Social media tools allow for collaboration between individuals and groups in the online world as they help remove the boundaries of time, space and location, which are barriers to collaboration in the 'real' world.


• Content - Content is any web related material (including text, photos, audio, video, or other media).

• Content management system (CMS): Content management is a process used to create, manage and integrate text, images and data for marketing communications purposes. Our content management system is Active CM.


• Digg: Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best.


• del.icio.us: del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website - the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. See my bookmarks on del.icio.us.


• Direct response marketing: Direct response marketing means marketing via a channel (the web, for example) that allows the consumer to respond directly based on a call-to-action that is trackable and measurable.


• Facebook: Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet. See the Capilano University page on Facebook.


• Feed: A feed is simply a method that lets you conveniently capture the latest video, podcast, blog entry or news item published via RSS (see below). By subscribing to a feed, you can read the latest posts or watch the newest videos on your computer or portable device on your own schedule.


• Flickr: Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application. They help people make their content available to the people who matter to them and enable new ways of organizing photos and video.


• Forum: A forum is an online community discussion group, usually centered around one topic or theme, where people can post messages or comment on other messages.


• Internet marketing: Internet marketing is also referred to as online marketing, internet advertising and eMarketing. Internet marketing does not simply entail building or promoting a website, nor does it mean placing a banner ad on another website. Effective Internet marketing requires a comprehensive strategy that synergizes a given company's business model and sales goals with its website function and appearance, focusing on its target market through proper choice of advertising type, media, and design.

• Lurkers: Lurkers are people who read, but do not participate in online communities, such as forums, discussion groups, blogs, and wikis. The one per cent rule-of-thumb suggests about one per cent of people contribute new content to an online community, another nine percent comment, and the rest lurk. However, this may not be a passive role because content read on forums may spark interaction elsewhere.


• Ning: Ning allows you to create your own social network for anything. (A Ning community for Active CM users is currently under construction!)


• Podcast: Podcast, which the Oxford American Dictionary named the "Word of 2005," is a media file (usually audio but sometimes video) made available for download to a portable device or personal computer. Podcasts use feeds that let you subscribe to them, so that when a new audio clip is published online, it arrives on your digital doorstep right away.


• RSS: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format that lets readers stay current with blogs and news content using a feed reader, or aggregator. All blogs, podcasts and videoblogs contain an RSS feed, which lets users subscribe to content automatically and read or listen to the material on a computer or a portable device.


• SEM (Search Engine Marketing): SEM is a series of online tactics that, when combined with SEO, help to attract consumers, generate brand awareness and build consumer trust.
  

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is the process of editing a web site’s content and code in order to improve visibility within one or more search engines.


• Social media: Social media are works of user-created video, audio, text or multimedia that are published and shared in a social environment, such as a blog, wiki or video hosting site.


• SMM (Social Media Marketing): SMM includes writing content that is remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularizing it or even by creating a “viral” video on YouTube and other video sites. Social media is about being social so SMM can include getting involved in other similar blogs, forums, and niche communities.


• SMO (Social Media Optimization): SMOis a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. The focus is on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.


• Tagging: Tagging is a way of organizing and finding information on the internet. A tag is a simple category name, or one-word descriptor. Many social tools, like Technorati and del.icio.us allow users to tag their photos, posts, and/or bookmarks in a way that makes sense to them.

• Technorati: Technorati is the recognized authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs. They help people search for, surface, and organize bloggers and their daily posts. Who's saying what. Right now.


• Twitter: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts ranging up to 140 characters long using the web, your phone, or IM. Shortly after the Queen of England launched her own YouTube channel last fall, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown started twittering from "10 Downing St."


• User created content: User created content, sometimes referred to as user generated content, refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users. This includes news, gossip, research, videos, comments, blogs, podcasts, wiki entries, reviews and all kids of digital media.


• Web analytics: Web analytics is the study of web site performance metrics to understand whether business objectives are being met.

• Web 2.0: Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of the Web, which enables people with no specialized technical knowledge to create their own websites, to self-publish, create and upload audio and video files, share photos and information and complete a variety of other tasks.


• Web 3.0: Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform. Web 2.0 services like digg and YouTube evolve into Web 3.0 services with an additional layer of individual excellence and focus. Web 3.0 has also been defined as highly specialized information silos, moderated by a cult of personality, validated by the community, and put into context with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets.


• Widget: A widget is a small module of content that can be easily added to a Web page, social networking profile or blog.


• Wiki: A wiki is a collaborative website that can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Wikipedia is a well-known example. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into the largest reference Web site on the Internet. The content of Wikipedia is free, and is written collaboratively by people from all around the world.


• YouTube: You Tube hosts user-generated videos. See CapilanoMC, marketing & communications' YouTube channel.

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