Social media: The natural way of learning

Ask 10 people what ‘social media’ means and you’ll probably receive 10 different answers. Those who think in terms of concrete tools will answer ‘Twitter’ or ‘Facebook’. ‘Collaboration’ is a typical answer for those that like to abstract, and then there are functional definitions like this one: “Social media is people having conversations online.” It's a quote taken from the very popular slideshow What the F**k is Social Media? posted by Marta Kagan two years ago, which is a lifetime in the world of social media, where a Twitter update is out-of-date within minutes. Kagan’s is a marketer. Her point is that the way people use the Internet to communicate about brands completely subverts traditional marketing. Broadcast adverts, press releases and ‘push’ promotion is far less effective than the word-of-mouth that takes place in the conversations now taking place on-line. These conversations take place using tools such as blogs and wikis, over micro-blogging tools such as Twitter and are collected and fed to people’s desktops through RSS feeds, sometimes aggregated by a variety of widgets. All this amounts, Kagan says, to a conversation, and her point for those in marketing is a clear one: ‘Messages are not conversations’.