I have faced that word "social media" but have not taken any time to read and understand it, not until now.

Its incredibly corny isnt it. You see the marketing and PR types spurting this rubbish day in day out to somehow show that they 'get it'. I completely agree that 'social media' is simply what the net is these days.

I think the terms 'social media' and 'social software' as not so redundant and a whole hell of a lot more useful to use when speaking to business-types then Web 2.0 - which was always a buzz overloaded marketing term - except when used by Tim O'Reilly.

JD Lasica, btw, has used the term 'social media' for as long as I can remember.

Yes, it's a pretty fuzzy term, but I don't think it's new (at least not in Internet time). I just took a pretty severe scalpel to the Wikipedia article, and will cross my fingers that someone doesn't revert it to its former mess.

VC's sunk a ton of money into Social sites like Friendster because they believed that woman would be more social then men. Then they had too pay woman to be queen bees to attract the guys, but none of these sites ever did an IPO or got sold to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.

When blogs got big they said, ah ha, see social media is where it's at!

I don't see information aggregation as social, blogging communities are a way to get to know things about people, but we socialize when we meet face to face.

Social media seems obvious and ubiquitous until you start talking to people who aren't into technology. While it might seem like social media just refers to everything on the web, I think that's an inaccurate description of the online life of the mainstream American adult, many of whom still use the web primarily for shopping and search.

Honestly, it seems that rather than a misunderstanding of the term, it's more that you simply dislike most social media categories. Ultimately, while the user-to-user interactions that characterize social media might be a long-standing part of your individual web experience (for better or for worse), for many people this is a pretty new set of experiences, and it is to that big part of the bell curve that the mainstream press and business community's fixation on the phrase is targeted.

I would agree more if I weren't constantly coming across web pages with stories or products that I wanted to comment on, and couldn't. (Yes, I could comment on that page on other sites, but it's just not the same.)

I clipped this from a quick article I wrote a few weeks back on my own blog-

"But the real matter of what a Social Media Platform is all about is relationships. It is about human nature and the personal connections we make with information. As the Web is thrust into “2.0″ or perhaps even “2.5″, online wanderers continue to look for one thing- meaningful information.

Search engines like Yahoo and Google have been harvesting data for over a decade, thrusting our personal decisions through an automated process of A + B = C. Along the way, they have dehumanized the very essence of the information. They have disregarded the human equation.

Social Media is all about being human. It is about conversing with your neighbor, sharing ideas with a world famous author, or even sharing a joke with someone around the world. The “big boys” of the search engine world are finding themselves at the mercy of popular opinion as community sites like Myspace and YouTube encourage users to filter information in the most personal way they can."

I do invite you to join the conversation, since we didn't send you the memo. ;-) You can start here: http://www.leveragesocialmedia.com.

Regards,
Rod