Defining social media

Last week, I was asked for my definition of social media. The context was a team meeting where we all shared our definitions.

The first takeaway was that everybody has a different definition of social media. There were some common themes but the scope of the collective definitions was extreme.

I found it very useful for us to understand each others perspective and to debate the various themes that arose during the conversation. We rarely make time to have these high level discussions on trends and definitions.

Below, I've attempted to distill our discussion into a more compact set of definitions for social media. The common themes were people, technology and revenue.
Definition of social media:

• People using technology to interact with each other and with your brand
• Enabling new ways for people to communicate and form relationships on a global scale
• Applications, services and tools to communicate, create and share content
• Community oriented activities – content creation, games, education, fun
  

This led me to an equation that defines social media. The premise is that social media is predominantly about people interacting. The technology facilitates the interaction but too much technology is bad for the overall monetization of social media.

The social media equation:

People * Interactions
----------------------- = Revenue
Technology