@bounder at least “social” is better than “web 2.0″ – remind me to come back and comment on that post later, yeah? http://tinyurl.com/ce5x3k

Great idea… Social Media is an insiders jargon that is difficult to comprehend. Jargon is simple for insiders to use, but is often meaningless to outsiders. When I try to explain what Social Media is I often have to switch to simpler term’s such as “word-of-mouth” and “online conversation” so that they can understand what I mean.

@james_rock

oh no – and just when the council finally got round to organising an internal ‘social media’ group. there’ll be chaos now I tell ya. I daren’t tell them.

Great idea – though I’m not sure how you go about changing a term that’s in common use.

@Jo, we just start using it — there was a tangle between “social network” and “social graph” for a while last year. As we start to study these things more, we’ll need proper accepted definitions, which might mean breaking things down more.

Hi Jon. Delayed response; but my problems with the word ‘conversation’ are the following:

1. It suggests a degree of turn-taking and exchange – this doesn’t necessarily happen with social media
2. Real time: I can leave an e.g. twitter discussion for days and then return to it – can’t really do that in a conversation
3. You can’t really have a conversation with more than a handful of people. Thousands of people participating in something is great, but it’s not a conversation
4. I would say that there are varying degrees of conversation (ie dialogue, discussion, response, exchange) between different social media platforms e.g. having a discussion on Twitter is more conversational than e.g uploading photos in a flickr group. You may simply upload 10 photos and then vanish – there’s no discussion or intercourse there.

Perhaps something is as conversational as the participants make it; but I wouldn’t whitewash all with this word.

I know what you’re saying about the term ‘social media’ and there’s something to be said about finding a new term that suggests interactivity, collectivism, exchange, communication, participation – just not sure that ‘conversational’ is the right one ….

@Fiona, I see where you’re coming from, but I feel your definition of conversation is unnecessarily limited — you can converse with any number of people, over vast spaces of time and (er) space — although it practise people converse with a limited number of people over a limited timescale even online.

To me “interactivity, collectivism, exchange, communication, participation” and “dialogue, discussion, response, exchange” would be a couple of good collections of synonyms — implying that “conversational” isn’t as far away from being a good term as you think.

Totally open to someone (please!) finding a better one tho’.

[...] Do we mean “social” or do we mean “conversational”? – jon bounds – It seems social media types are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the definition ’social media’. Pete Ashton has also been in search of alternative term. I like Jon’s idea of ‘conversational’ media. I picture in my head a circle of bloggy globes, all in some kind of inter-planetary, mutually-dependant sync with each other. Have no fear – no nauseating, sound-bite term is going to come from this musing, it’s just the image in my head: solar system media. Oh God.  Get the feeling I’m going to have to stand in the naughty corner for this one. Share and Enjoy: [...]

[...] had an idea ages ago for a sort of scraper of the social web that helped define “conversational” (here I mean natural language) boundaries rather than administrative ones (for example, [...]