The Seven Faces Of Social Media

A tremendous amount of content is being generated nowadays that refers to Social Media as if it were some large and homogeneous form of communication and interaction.

The problem with this type of thinking is that when content providers or marketers start to develop Social Media strategies, they quickly realize that generalized “Social Media” thinking leads to one size fits all ideas and a lack of focus.

In actuality, Social Media comes in many distinct forms, which I think of as different faces of the same general concept. Understanding the nuance behind each of these faces is critical to understanding Social Media as a whole.

Social Knowledge networks such as Yahoo! Answers allows users to ask questions about a wide range of topics and then allow other users to answer them. As I have written about before, they are also one of the fastest growing forms of Social Media.

Social Bookmarking sites, such as De.licio.us are mostly about saving and tagging web pages for future reference. They become social by allowing others to read your profile and access other pages that you have tagged and saved.

Social Content, as seen in sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and most forms of blogging, is the most pure form of Social Media. In fact if we didn’t use Social Media as a catch all term for all the above types, it would be a good way to describe this group, which focuses on the submission and discussion of user generated content such as videos, music, photos, and the written word.

Social Networking is a form of Social Media that enables people to connect with other people. While there is a user generated content aspect to social networking, it is less about the content and more about collections and connections of friends, and keeping up with what they are thinking and doing. This is where sites such as Facebook and MySpace reside.

Social News sites such as Mixx, Stumbleupon, and Digg facilitate the sharing of news and different forms of social content by allowing members to share, comment and vote on what they like or don’t like. These sites are heavily involved in the viral aspect of Social Media.

Social Gaming is a form of online gaming that moves beyond the personal experience and adds a layer of social interaction. Two of the most well known examples are World of Warcraft and Second Life. While WoW has built upon a PC game by taking it online and adding a huge world centered on collaboration and social interaction, Second Life makes a game of social interactions by the simple fact of allowing people to fully act out self-created avatars and allowing them to interact with other avatars in a virtual world.

Social Collaboration has many different aspects, but I see it primarily being less a form of media and more a form of crowdsourcing. It can range anywhere from wikis to prediction markets to something like Wikipedia.

I’m sure there are some distinct faces of Social Media I may have missed, or that I’ve grouped together into one of the above. Are there any others out there that people could suggest?