Social media wasn\u2019t new\u00a0last year. It wasn\u2019t new this year. And it won\u2019t be new next year. In fact, it hasn\u2019t been new for well over a decade. And yet it is wrongly declared new all the time \u2013 usually by those just starting to use the web for directed outcomes or are confused as to what\u00a0social media is.<\/p>\n
The other day Adam Kmiec wrote\u00a0a post\u00a0which yet again trotted out the \u201csocial media is new\u201d line:<\/p>\n
So if we have \u201cexperts\u201d today, that would mean someone would have been practicing social media marketing since 2004. For all intents and purposes that\u2019s impossible. The concept of social media marketing is roughly 2 years old.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Saying this might be good for pageviews, but it\u2019s just not inaccurate.\u00a0I commented on Adam\u2019s post and noted that social media isn\u2019t new, citing forums and boards as just an example of a social tool that has been around since the popularization of the consumer-driven web.<\/p>\n
Adam ceded the point and noted he meant that the term itself is new. But that doesn\u2019t really matter. First, the concept of social media was actually developed with a retrospective look. The first people to ever use irrigation to divert water likely didn\u2019t call it that, rather later on another group stuck the term on it. Doesn\u2019t make it new. Second, social media must remain platform agnostic if we hope the term to be at all meaningful. Otherwise it is reduced to\u00a0nothing more than a buzzword. Despite not always having a specific label (actually, we used to just call it the web) many have been participants in using social tools (for fun and profit)\u00a0for well over a decade.<\/p>\n
Perhaps Adam, as he rallies against the hype (as he is known to) is equally caught up in buzzwords as the rest of the marketing and technology industry.<\/p>\n
As technology blogger Steven Hodson\u00a0noted:<\/p>\n
Just because we slap a new term and some soothing pastel web pages together it doesn\u2019t invalidate what came before it. It doesn\u2019t change the fact that we have been socializing on the web long before someone invented the marketing term of social media. It sometimes seems though that the tech world has this inbreed need to proclaim something as new and totally different than what came before when in fact this isn\u2019t the case.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Indeed. In the same post, also cited is a quote from MIT professor credited with inventing the web\u00a0Tim Berners-Lee:<\/p>\n
The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect \u2013 to help people work together \u2013 and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly represented on the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is of the sort we intend.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
According to the web\u2019s creator, his vision (in retrospect as this quote was from\u00a0his book\u00a0published in 2000) was for the web to be a social tool. He accomplished just that.<\/p>\n
So all we can do is continue to encourage you to ignore industry buzzwords and realize that yes, in fact a generation of people grew up using the web and have been in essence marketing their ideas socially. And alongside that a generation of businesses and media have been using the web to build digital communities surrounding their brand.<\/p>\n
Funny that GigaOM\u00a0picked up\u00a0Adam\u2019s story and quoted his point about social media being new. GigaOm\u00a0is a blog<\/em>\u00a0which has thrived for years due to their community\u2019s interest and has\u00a0posts dating back to 2004 and earlier. They are a business built on social.<\/p>\n
Blogs\u00a0are<\/em>\u00a0social media, as Brian Clark notes:<\/p>\n
I just see so much unnecessary confusion out there.<\/p>\n
What do you think?<\/p>\n
Is it because people with vested interests in confusion portray social media as something radically new when it\u2019s mostly an evolution of the old?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That\u2019s probably about right.<\/p>\n
While it might be new to some, I\u2019d say the concept of social media is already formalized. In fact, we\u2019re already trending to a third iteration of the web which\u00a0will be uniquely personal\u00a0in addition to social.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Social media wasn\u2019t new\u00a0last year. It wasn\u2019t new this year. And it won\u2019t be new next year. In fact, it … <\/p>\n