CHAPTER 1

What Is Social Media

1.1 Introduction

The generation that has grown up with the Internet has also grown up with the assumption that social media is a creation of their generation. But they are wrong. Tom Standage, in his influential 2013 book Writing on the Wall, tells us that social media can be traced back over 2,000 years. In Roman times members of the elite in society would not only exchange letters with individuals, but encourage that the content of those letters be copied and shared with fellow members of their social circles. Such sharing was normally via speeches and books—but these messages were also posted on the walls of buildings in public areas. Note how the term for placing a message on a publicly viewable space is called posting. As in: we post messages. As in: posting a message on social media. Mr Zuckerberg et al didn’t invent a new term for the act when they developed Facebook; they used a good old English term (actually, its etymology is Latin, but you get my drift). I mention this because, whilst the technology has changed since those times, the need to connect with friends and members of the community to share information remains as we progress through the 21^st century. Standage goes on to assert that many of the issues—both positive and negative—raised by digital social media have arisen before and so history might provide some valuable lessons to the contemporary digital marketer.

Long before Internet technology made it possible, social contact existed between communities of like-minded people who shared views on anything from sports teams through politics to the best way to prune roses. Importantly, however, such communication was restricted by the logistics of geography and the limitations of communication tools available to those generations. Effectively, your social contact existed only between a close circle of friends and associates. For the marketer, this limited the number of people to whom you could express delight or criticism of a product, brand, or organization. Such restrictions do not exist for the digital generation. Be it on a PC, laptop, or handheld device, user-generated content can be diffused around the globe at the click of a mouse or—as is now most common—the touch of a screen.

1.2 So What Is Digital Social Media?

Such is the nature of the subject that it is possible—even likely—that any definition offered on these pages might be out-of-date before they are published. This is, perhaps, an exaggeration, but when a previous book of mine (An Introduction to Social Media Marketing) was published in 2015 the content included no mention of Periscope because it simply did not exist when the book was written. Not only that, in little over a year, Periscope was launched, bought by Twitter and relaunched. Furthermore, in December 2016 Twitter announced the launch of Twitter Live, which—as it’s essentially the same—may turn out to be a replacement for Periscope. Vine, on the other hand, was included in An Introduction to Social Media Marketing, but it pretty much ceased to exist in 2016 (at the time of writing, owners Twitter had announced its relegation to being a limited-application camera app).

Although any definition might be fleeting, a book on social media marketing must at least make some attempt to offer a definition of what social media is. In another book from way back in the first decade of the century (time moves very fast in digital circles), I defined social media as: “a collective term for the various social network and community sites including such online applications as blogs, podcasts, reviews and wikis” (Charlesworth 2009). At the time I deliberated over replacing collective with umbrella. In retrospect, I think I prefer the latter. These days I tend to use a rather vague, though perhaps more tangible, definition of: “any web presence where users can add their own content but do not have control over the site in the same way as they would their own website” (Charlesworth 2014). These definitions reveal a conviction on my part that (a) social media existed long before the digital revolution made it a cultural phenomenon, and (b) social media is not social media if the content is published on the writer’s own website. A caveat to this is that it is an indication of the uncertainty as to what social media actually is that even the author of books on social media can confuse the issue. Sharp-eyed readers will notice that later in this tome I list blogging as being an aspect of social media, and yet it is not unusual for a blog to appear on its author’s own website and/or domain name.

At this point it would be sensible to offer the reader other pertinent definitions—and I will, once another issue is addressed. In the previous paragraph I treated social media as a noun, but it might also be considered that in the term social media, media is a noun and social is its adjective. I’ll stick with it being a noun, but as has become in the case with the word data, a noun that can be used as singular or plural without English scholars getting too upset. I doubt you will have seen Facebook described as social medium, or as I say in this book social media is, not social media are. Ho hum, let’s move on and hope that sometime in the future historians can write: “eventually the digital people got their act together and came up with a definition for social media with which everyone agreed.”

I’ll end this section by throwing another spanner into the metaphorical definition works. The definitions presented refer to websites—but websites could just as easily be replaced with tools. Or when social media is conducted on mobile devices, apps. And in a class yesterday I found myself using the term platforms to describe Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. So I looked up the technical meaning of the word and got this from techopedia.com: “A platform is a group of technologies that are used as a base upon which other applications, processes or technologies are developed.” In personal computing, a platform is the basic hardware (computer) and software (operating system) on which software applications can be run. From my less-than-technical point of view isn’t that everything on a computer? However, referring to platforms has a sensible ring to it—and I can even elicit the support of Mark Zuckerberg on this as he has described Facebook as a platform.¹

So what other definitions of social media are out there? Two from old school dictionaries are: “forms of electronic communication (such as Web sites) through which people create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, etc;” (Merriam-Webster) and “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking” (Oxford Dictionaries). These are similar, with an emphasis on networking and communities. Cambridge University Press offer up: “websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information on the internet using a computer or mobile phone.” This definition seems a bit, well: loose. “Computer programs?” In this context, isn’t that software? Or do they mean apps? And “communicate and share.” Does that mean communicate in order to share or communicate as well as share? Or both? But their example of the term used in a sentence then takes us on a tangent to the definition by saying: “companies are increasingly making use of social media in order to market their goods.” I’ll come on to social media marketing in Chapter 3, but it is generally accepted that social media is, was, and always will be, for people to “communicate and share information.” That organizations have hijacked it to carry marketing messages should not take us away from the original concept.

Dictionary.com also uses a business example rather than a social one in its sample sentence (“many businesses are utilizing social media to generate sales”) after its more societal definition of: “websites and other online means of communication that are used by large groups of people to share information and to develop social and professional contacts.” If I was to be picky on this one, I ask what “large” is in this context.

Moving away from traditional sources into the digital arena, that doyen of crowd-sourced information, Wikipedia states that: “Social media are computer-mediated technologies that allow the creating and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.” However, it follows the theme of this chapter by adding: The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition. Techopedia (techopedia.com) is far more helpful for the purposes of this book, not least by offering examples, when it says:

Social media is a catch-all term for a variety of Internet applications that allow users to create content and interact with each other. This interaction can take many forms, but some common types include:

Worth noting is that the first in this list describes the original use of the term blog, where—in the days before search engines—surfers would seek out lists of websites that had been compiled by bloggers. Not unlike the nature of many contemporary blogs, these bloggers were showing off to newbie surfers by saying: “check me out, I’ve been to all these sites before you.” Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) further associate social media with digital technology when they describe social media as: “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content.”

This requires us to consider yet another misunderstood—and misused—term from the digital lexicon, Web 2.0. Kaplan and Haenlein were not the first to make this connection, however. In their influential 2006 book Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams drew popular attention to a link between Web 2.0 and the new social media by suggesting that the old web was about websites, clicks, and eyeballs, but the new web—Web 2.0—was about the communities and participation. Constantinides and Fountain (2008) followed this up with a paper that gave a definition of Web 2.0 which might also be used to describe social media. They said that: “Web 2.0 applications support the creation of informal users’ networks facilitating the flow of ideas and knowledge by allowing the efficient generation, dissemination, sharing and editing/refining of informational content.” They went on to identify that social media had potential for business, however, in that it presented businesses “new opportunities for getting and staying in touch with their markets, learning about the needs and opinions of their customers as well as interacting with them in a direct and personalised way.”

Based on David Bowen’s original concept (entitled Web 2007), Table 1.1 shows the four levels of content on the web that will help readers understand the concept of Web 2.0 as well as demonstrating its link with social media. The matrix attempts to describe how Web 2.0 translates into online activity. The crossover to social media in the four quadrants shows how web content moves from that controlled by the organization through to that over which it has no control (Charlesworth 2014).

McConnell and Huba (2007) suggest that social media is not about the technology, but instead: “the sum total of people who create content online, as well as the people who interact with it or one another.” A different slant is offered by Bryan Eisenberg (2008) who puts forward the notion that the various elements that make up social media do not actually represent media but: “a platform for interaction and networking,” which raises the issue of whether we are trying to define the publisher of the communication or the content of that communication?

Table 1.1 The four levels of content on the web

Source: Charlesworth (2014) from an original idea by David Bowen.

And finally in this roundup of definitions, my sister’s description of social media is: “the most dangerous thing in the world.” She has a point … but it is an argument for a book on sociology and not marketing.

As is accepted practice in academic publications, I need to determine the definition of social media that is to be used within the content. For this, I’m going back to my definition quoted at the beginning of the chapter as the basis for the definition of social media for the purposes of this book, and that is: an umbrella term for the various social network and community sites that are composed of user-generated content. Sharp-eyed readers will realize that I have replaced collective with umbrella as I previously suggested. The user-generated reference emphasizes that social media is developed by society, as opposed to social media marketing where the content is developed by representatives of an organization, brand, or product. This definition is expanded upon in the next two chapters where the various elements of social media are identified when associated with first users and then marketers. However, having declared a definition, it is reasonable to suggest that social media is actually whatever it is perceived to be by any individual participating in it.

So having defined what social media is, what are its constituent parts? Like its definition, the elements of social media are open to debate, but here’s my list. However, before that there’s something else to clarify. Facebook is not part of social media; it is an entity that exists to facilitate social media. Ditto Twitter. Ditto Instagram. Ditto Snapchat. Ditto any social media brand or platform. Although they are sometimes referred to as social media tools, a better term for those organizations that provide access to social media is the aforementioned platforms. In years gone by websites would have been an adequate description for Facebook et al., but in the days of mobile devices and apps, platform fits the bill better, even though some hard-line computer scientists might berate a simple marketer on this assertion (if I was writing this on a social media platform and not an academic text, I’d have ended the sentence with a smiley face emoji). Social media platforms can be categorized as either: social networks and online communities, social sharing, blogging, or user generated content. There are, however, a couple of caveats: (a) there are gray areas where these meld together, and (b) remember these are related to social activities, not marketing—which comes in Chapter 3. It is necessary to emphasize some important and fundamental points with regard to the brand-name platforms: (1) They exist to make money for their owners or shareholders, (2) they do not exist to further mankind’s communication, and (3) they do not exist to make marketers’ lives easier—though doing so attracts more advertisers, which in turn increases their income, and so pleases their owners and shareholders. We will return to these issues throughout the book.

1.3 Social Networks and Online Communities

I find it difficult to differentiate between social networks and online communities. In his excellent Marketing to the Social Web, Larry Weber (2007) seems to have the same problem, stating that social networks are “member-based communities that enable users to link to one another based on common interests and through invites,” whilst e-communities are “online sites where people aggregate around a common interest area with topical interest and often includes professional content.” The only difference seems to be the issue of professional content on community sites—which is a point well made, but it ignores the fact that sites like YouTube thrive on clips from TV shows and videos of recognized music artists, all of which are very professional.

Looking back to my own definitions from around the same time, in Key Concepts in e-Commerce (2007) I mention a term popular at that time but that has fallen out of fashion of late, and that is virtual. I refer to the phrase virtual communities—attributed to Howard Rheingold, the author and founding executive editor of Hotwired—which refers to the way in which people can interact with each other using information technologies rather than face-to-face contact. It is also a sign of the times that back then I also refer to virtual community websites, which reflects the era before social media platforms or apps. In that book I also make an attempt at differentiating social networks and online communities by stating that all social media sites require content to maintain visitors’ interest—and that they soon lose any appeal they may have if that criterion is not met. However, it is perceived usefulness of that content that is a significant antecedent of a member’s sense of belonging to the virtual community. This might be an example of how social networking and online communities differ. Facebook, for example, is perceived more as a method of communicating (networking) with friends, be they virtual friends or the real-life versions. Communities, on the other hand, are a more select group of people who share an interest, but are not necessarily friends in the traditional sense—with any perceived usefulness of the community extending beyond bonding and togetherness.

1.4 Social Sharing

Defining social sharing is problematic. Indeed, although I use Twitter as the mainstay example of social sharing, it would be a reasonable argument for it being in the previous section. Moreover, such are the changes at Facebook—and the way it is used—that some of its functions might also be described as sharing. However, let’s stick with the definitions of sharing being more of a one-way communication, whereas networking—from the verb, to network—is about making contacts and exchanging ideas, thoughts, and so on. Hence, the likes of YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat fall into this category. Social sharing is commonly described as the broadcasting of our thoughts and activities, which suits the concept of Twitter’s 140²-character message format, Instagram’s service that enables its users to take pictures and videos and send them to friends or the public, and Snapchat’s shared images that are both short-lived and self-deleting. That YouTube’s content includes—among other things—distinct marketing messages (e.g., TV adverts and public relations events), clips from TV shows and movies, and music videos should not distract us from the raison d’etre for YouTube’s social content is video clips posted by the general public, for example, the ubiquitous skateboarding dogs, cuddly cats, and a series of young men performing stunts that result in their personal pain.

1.5 User Generated Content

That we have not yet reached the end of the first chapter and I’m once again introducing a caveat that suggests that the chapter’s titular subject is so open to interpretation on so many levels that perhaps I should start each section with: in my opinion—or would that be just a way of covering my back?³ Like other topics covered in this book, user generated content (UGC) is yet to be bestowed with a definition that is agreeable to everyone. Furthermore, other popular terminology used in the same context as UGC is user generated media (UGM) and both of these with the word user replaced by consumer, that is; consumer generated content (CGC) and consumer generated media (CGM). To add to the confusion, consumer is commonly replaced by customer. That customers and consumers are not the same is irrelevant in this context—let’s just be glad they start with the same letter and so reduce the range of acronyms. We could get pedantic and examine any possible differentiation of these terms, but in reality there is little—with their application being down to individual preference or practice. Therefore, for the purposes of this book, UGC it is. Although UGC was initially limited to textual content, the popularity of smart-phones that come complete with high-quality video and still cameras has served to increase the use of video clips and photographs as UGC. The bulk of UGC that is not considered part of the categories covered in previous sections of this chapter (i.e., social networks and online communities, social sharing, or blogging) is produced as part of reviews and ratings of products or services—hence the use of consumer/customer in CGC.

Note that the subsequent chapters of this book concentrate on how marketers can utilize social media platforms as a channel for their marketing efforts and within that remit marketers can influence online reviews and ratings (e.g., by making them available to potential customers), but genuine UGC has had a significant impact on marketers and marketing as part of social media. A Facebook entry or Tweet praising or condemning a product the writer has used, for example, is merely the passing on of an opinion to friends—and not posting a review for total strangers who may be anywhere in the world, to read. Rating sites and/or facilities differ slightly from reviews in that they offer the appraiser a simpler—quicker—alternative to typing out their own review. This can be as easy as clicking on an image of a thumb up or down to signify recommend or not, an overall star rating or more complex multi-element star ratings based on various aspects of the product.

1.6 Blogging

Although the term weblog was first used in 1997, with blog being introduced in 1999, the practice dates back to the early 1990s when individuals who surfed the web and listed (or logged) websites that they found interesting, often with their own review of the sites (Charlesworth 2007). Such logged lists—normally in categories—were the way in which folk found websites in the years before search engines existed. One definition of blog that gives an insight into bloggers comes from Webopedia⁴ which says a blog is: “a web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.” The last six words of this definition are the key to blogging. Bloggers have attitude. They have an opinion on everything—or a specific subject—and they are not shy about letting others know their views. The best social media writers have similar attributes. For the next 10 years, online blogs developed to the point where they were mini websites based around the thoughts or interests of the writer. Then blog-hosting sites (e.g., blogger.com) which facilitated their easy development became freely available, and the practice of individual blogging increased out of all proportion to what had gone before. That rapid expansion turned into an equally swift decline as a proliferation of alternative platforms of social media resulted in blogging becoming less popular. It is fair to suggest that many personal Facebook pages and Twitter feeds are much the same as the personal blogs that went before them.

It is apt that the chapter ends with an emphasis on the social—personal—aspect of social media. From this point on, the focus of the book is on the commercial use of social media as a marketing tool.

¹ In a live interview with Sheryl Sandberg in December 2016. Available on: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10103353645165001/

² Whilst the book was in the final stages of publication Twitter confirmed a longstanding rumor that it was raising the character limit from 140 to 280. However, the change was not universally lauded–might it have changed back by the time you read this?

³ Another smiley face here, perhaps one with its tongue out on one side of its mouth?

⁴ www.webopedia.com