Your post inspired me to write my own, and so I have: http://www.walkerjon.com/social-media-is-a-myth.html

It’s hard, I think, to find a properly descriptive name that doesn’t have inaccurate or bad connotations. But I also think it would be harder to get that new name into widespread use. (Those who dislike the term ‘intellectual properly’ have so far failed on both counts.)

So I don’t have a quick or easy answer to the problem.

Yes, you’re right. And I wonder how the last two connotations - “social issues” and “social vs. business” - are playing into and negatively affecting people’s perceptions of social tools. Especially given the current credit crunch, where people are bound to act more conservatively. Even if they are not directly affected by the housing meltdown, all businesses are going to feel the increase in fuel costs, as those hikes percolate through the system raising prices generally.

If you feel that times are financially risky, are you really going to start investigating something that, from the outside, sounds a bit like left-leaning liberal namby-pamby-ism? I can just imagine the thought process: “Social media? I don’t need people gossiping and watching videos when they should be working, dammit!”

I wonder if it’s too late to start using other terms. I worry that ‘collaboration’ also sounds a bit alienating to people who don’t know what it is we’re talking about. This train of thought almost makes me prefer Web 2.0, because that’s vague enough that people who don’t know what it means can’t make many assumptions about it. It’s clearly more advanced than Web 1.0, and it’s about the web… beyond that, it could mean anything. And maybe that’s something we need to see as a good thing, instead of a negative.

Kevin,

In your post you say ‘Perhaps the problem is that the social realm is the realm of trust, so saying things are social is asserting “trust me”.’ And I couldn’t agree more. We are asking people to just trust us, not just because that’s how the social realm works, but also because we are in general asserting that social tools are constructive, when they see social behaviour as chatting, hanging out in the cafeteria, going for a fag break, all of which are things that don’t involve - ostensibly, although we know the opposite is often true - the doing of any work.

Quick anecdote: Kev once worked on a radio show, helping to get callers to discuss the hot topics of the day. He did all his work via a browser and email, visiting blogs, finding people with first hand experience of the day’s topic and then contacting them electronically via comment or email. His colleagues did all their work using the phones. They got really annoyed with him because all they saw was him online, surfing the net. One colleague said, when Kev asked them why they were getting huffy with him: “We only use the internet to shop or book holidays, so that’s what we were assuming you were doing.”

So we’re creating confusion and distrust around ’social media’ simply by using the word ’social’, and not considering the very negative connotations it has in people’s minds. It’s like we’re the car manufacturer that decides to call their new car something that turns out to be insulting or unappealing in another language. We come from the land of Web, and we’re happy speaking Webbish, but some of the people we’re talking to are hearing something very different because they’re speaking Businessese and the words mean something different to them.

http://bit.ly/socialmagic

We (y’know, you and me and most people reading this blog) mean it in the sense of connecting people together to build relationships and get stuff done.

The other connotations are, as you say, to do with “social issues” - ie usually problems and often used as an antonym for ‘commercial’ - ie the kinds of social enterprise who gathered at 2gether08. Or else it’s social as opposed to work - “do you know him socially, or through your job?”

In either case, without some careful explanation it’s an easy assumption to make that social software has no place in most corporate environments where people’s social problems and social activities are usually considered to be inappropriate to even talk about.