I asked that question about a month ago in the Future Social Media group over on LinkedIn. This morning, the thread received its 50th comment. A few excerpts:

“Social media, in my work, is the democratization of media – Where movies had a bandwidth of maybe 150 known stars in the 1940s, it went to television with a bandwidth of about 1,000 smaller stars, and in the modern era it’s tens of thousands of microcelebrities. Simply put, anyone can be a star now.” (Jason Pace, Community Manager and Social Media specialist)

“There is no online or offline, there is only blended reality.” (Alan Moore, Founder consultancy SMLXL, entrepreneur, author, blogger, speaker)

“Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it, nobody knows how. When it’s finally done, there is a surprise it’s not better.” (Mehmet Günce Akkoyun, Owner, Publicist Reklamevi)

There’s some good stuff in the thread, by turns entertaining, thought-provoking and occasionally silly. If you’re a LinkedIn member, I suggest you check it out.

When all is said and done, though, I still haven’t found a definition of “social media” that nails it better than this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff, Social Media.