Social Media, Definition, History and Scholarship

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Social Media, Definition, History and Scholarship

by Brian Prenderville on March 18th, 2010
26 Comments

I have recently read a very interesting article on Social Media. The article was written in 2007 by Danath Boyd and Nicole Ellison. Both are pretty formidable entities in the world of Social Network Site (SNS) research. They tend to look at SNS from a sociological perspective as opposed to a business perspective but I guess we can’t really hold that against them Boyd also appeared on the recent BBC series “Virtual Revolution”, a four part documentary presented by Aleks Krotoski. After you finish reading this blog you can check out a Youtube video about the series here but only after you finish reading this post.

The term “social networking site” and “social network site” are often used interchangeably. However, Boyd and Ellison are of the opinion that the uniqueness of these sites is not that they can be used to be initiate relationships, an act commonly associated with “networking” but rather to make visible an individual’s social network. Therefore, they only employ the term social network site. Similar debates exist in the offline literature as to what exactly constitutes social networking vis a vis a social network so I wouldn’t get too hung about it. Also, a guy called Breer gives a lovely response to this paper.

So the paper continues with a description of how social network sites work, such as connecting with others ” friending” and “fanning” etc. and explains how on some sites there are two way directional ties such as facebook ( both parties must agree to the relationship) and one way ties ( such as twitter where you can follow someone without having to ask their permission). I’m mentioning this as the strength of tie within a social network has received much attention in the offline literature and social network sites open up a new avenue of research in this area. From my own experience the dyadic relationships that I have with people on Facebook, while weak in nature have an increased strength of tie compared with those relationships that I have with people who I follow and who follow me on my twitter account drofsocialmedia for example.

According to the article the first social network arrived in 1997 in the form of sixdegrees.com. Unfortunately, this bummed out in 2000. Its founder attributes its failure to the fact that it was ahead of its time as not many people were using such sites and those that did get bored or found nothing to do once they joined due to their reluctance to build new social networks online. The interesting point to note here is that these networks found themselves facilitating existing offline social networks as appose to building entirely new social networks.

Interestingly, the internet first experienced social network sites aimed at leveraging business networks in the form of Ryze.com, a social network site which would never receive mass popularity compared to LinkedIn for example. From the article it looks like the first really popular social network site to hit the internet was “Friendster”. However, the sites strong popularity left it with a number of technical problems in supporting the growth. This, combined with some of the decisions the company made relating to restricting what users could do on the site paved the way for “MySpace”.

While Friendster appears to have had a certain vision where it would remove members who did not conform to the vision, MySpace seems to have adapted its vision to suit its audience (basically listened to its audience). As a result MySpace became the site of preference not only with dissatisfied Friendster users but also become the site of choice with musicians. The musicians began attracting teenagers and MySpace adopted its terms and conditions to accommodate the younger audience. The number of people using MySpace soared and with the former Friendster users, the musicians and the teenagers, MySpace earned itself a price tag of $580 million in 2005. Not bad eh! although a somewhat paltry amount compared to the approx 15 billion Facebook price tag .

The authors go on to mention other social network sites that emerged during the period. Check out the article if you want a definitive list but the point I thought was worth noting is that while some of the sites didn’t take off in the their home country they did gain mass popularity in other countries such as Google’s “Orkut”.

Of course the article mentions Facebook but as I intend to do a blog about “The Facebook Story” by Sarah Lacy I will leave this for another day.

Category: Blogging, Social media Marketing

Tags: analysis, social media, social networking site, story, Sugartone, videos

The Author: Brian Prenderville

Director of social media for an International Bestselling Author. Check out my site for more information. http://www.brianprenderville.com

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http://www.channelship.ie/blog/ fred

Good post Paul. Welcome to Bloggertone! I like this: “If we are not vigilant, delivery will always override development”. I spend a lot of time doing research and delivering. It feels good to deliver but it’s absolutely true that the next task will take over and over. I guess I also have to be vigilant with my development time. Maybe plan 5 hours a week and stick to it.
http://www.btbtraining.com/blog Niall Devitt

Hi Paul, Delighted to have you on board. I think you are absolutely right in terms of the need to maintain and defend development time. Unfortunately our mental wealth or indeed health are not something that employers often consider. The simple act taking some time to access and think about tasks is in itself frowned upon. Excellent post and thank you for starting a very important conversation.Regards, Niall
http://blog.myprojecttracker.com Barney Austen

Hi Paul. Welcome to the world of Bloggertoners. Nice piece. Agree with you 100%. There is always something else to do when you try to do “stuff” for personal and/or business development. I think that putting time aside is a start – but this often falls away if that development time is not spend doing something that is achievable either quickly or has milestones along the way that you can say “yup – I did that and I’m making progress”. Without this, you will quickly fall out of the habit of making the time and end up back where you started!
http://twitter.com/aileen456 aileen456

could not agree with you more. however knowing it and fighting against it are two entirely different things.
it is truly the downfall of many of us potential billionaires.

i do find it gets easier to defend your development time after 20 years of self employment. i would like to find a way to help new entrepreneurs switch it on from the start. any suggestions?
Anonymous

Nice post. You sound like a busy man. I guess that for those who are out of work, they have nothing but personal development time. Without the money, I wonder how they use that time as profitably as those who are in work can, who have the financial cushion, and still get good results. I think there are a lot of very well-developed people out there who probably are not getting a look in. What do you think, and do you see good ways to overcome this problem?
http://www.davisbusinessconsultants.com/ Paul

Thanks Fred. The key is to set aside at least a few hours each week and stick to it. In this way you’re one step closer to removing yourself from the feast and famine revenue cycle that so many find themselves in.
http://www.davisbusinessconsultants.com/ Paul Davis

Thanks Niall. It is something however that will become a thing of the norm in businesses of the future (I think, excuse the pun!). The best way of bringing it into businesses is to have structured development meetings.
http://www.davisbusinessconsultants.com/ Paul Davis

Your exactly right Barney. The best way that I’ve dealt with it is to have somebody that holds me accountable (my mentor) not only for business but also for personal.
http://www.davisbusinessconsultants.com/ Paul Davis

It’s all down to habit. The unfortunate thing is that there are no proper business growth programmes out there for new or would be budding entrepreneurs, or even for existing businesses that can teach them what’s important (apart from my own!). It will definitely have to change for the future.
http://www.davisbusinessconsultants.com/ Paul Davis

You’re right Lewis. The thing is to start looking for opportunities which there are plenty of and which don’t need a lot of money or even any to get started. While it’s a difficult position to be in, it also makes it more difficult to spot the opportunities. You can’t think creatively or see opportunities however unless you get out and about and away from what potentially could be a negative situation for many people. Opportunities show up everywhere it’s just that many people aren’t looking. They’re not obvious to everybody but they’re all around us every day. I posted a few articles on this subject some time ago which might be still on my website news section somewhere. The main thing to do is to start looking at what you’re good at, your strengths, your talents and your gifts. For anybody that has been displaced from a job, for the majority of people that deal with it correctly, nine times out of ten, it turns out to be a really positive experience in time to come because it was exactly what they needed at the time to get them going on what they really needed to do. Start looking at only positive things and keep asking the question – what else can I do? Take at least one action each day that will bring you a step closer. You’ll start to see things differently. To explain – have you ever bought a car only to see the same make and model and colour car nearly every journey you take in that new car. Question – were all those cars already there before you bought the new car? Of course they were. Opportunities are everywhere, you just have to look for them differently. Here’s to Your success.
Anonymous

Excellent thoughts and advice Paul. Thanks for replying. These are all areas that Olga Sheean and I help people with. If you can get into people’s negative subconscious programming and change it, it’s amazing what can happen. A lot of people don’t know they have the power to do that, and many more think that they cannot change a situation because they feel they have no power over it. But, as you know, there are ways….

Good to meet you Paul, and I look forward to hearing more!
http://www.btbtraining.com/blog Niall Devitt

Hi Brian, really interesting read! thanks for sharing your social media knowledge on Bloggertone. I think the most astounding thing in relation to SM is the numbers of people and the speed at which people are engaging. I think it’s becoming increasingly hard to define social media as the tools and more importantly the way in which people are using them is constantly evolving. Cheers, Niall
Anonymous

Thanks for the fascinating article on social media. Interesting that the first failed networks we focused on adding to off line networks. I saw one of the earlier Twitter promo videos lately which gave me a great laugh. Wow we have come along way since 1997.
http://twitter.com/drofsocialmedia Brian Prenderville

My pleasure Niall,

I agree, the speed is formidable. I also find rate at which the different demographics are signing up extremely interesting. No longer is it just the home of “screenagers” and college students, for example back in Feb 2009 the fastest growing segment was women over the age of 55 !

http://twitter.com/drofsocialmedia
http://www.socialmediadoctor.eu
http://twitter.com/drofsocialmedia Brian Prenderville

We sure have Gregfry ! thanks for ur comment. Danath and Boyd did the hard work really , I just gave my take on it

http://twitter.com/drofsocialmedia
http://www.socialmediadoctor.eu
http://www.wchingya.com wchingya

It’s fascinating to read about the past and present about social media. I remember the glorious days of ICQ and Friendster in South East Asia back in the old days. Can’t believe how fast the trend shifted and now nearly all generations are getting online! I’m interested to see what will happen in the next decade. Thanks so much for digging up the history, it’s a lesson to learn.

@wchingya
Social/Blogging Tracker
http://twitter.com/drofsocialmedia Brian Prenderville

glad you liked it @wchingya

http://twitter.com/drofsocialmedia
http://www.socialmediadoctor.eu
http://firstpagegoogleresults.com/ video search optimization

We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments
http://richardmclaughlin.biz/ McLaughlin

It’s interesting to see the time line, user count and other info in one place. How one network is The One to be part of only to be replaced by the next big thing.
I never got into MySpace, I had an account but never really used it. I have a FB account, but only use that to play games with my friends. I have an active Twitter account, and a second account that tweets about things that are green (I never really use that second account, it is fed by several RSS feeds). That second account has over 15k followers and people really seem to like it – funny since it is a bot account with no human behind it.
It will be fun to see where SNS take us in 2010 and 2011, now that FB is more popular that Google dot com and at the same time many business people don’t like FB because of people like me that do nothing professional there.

(nb, FB is not really #1, all of their traffic hits the dot com and google has the dot in, cn, de, co.uk and fr in the alexa top 25)
http://twitter.com/drofsocialmedia Brian Prenderville

thanks for the comments McLaughlin.

Your thoughts got me wondering if Facebook worry about the “Next Big Thing” ! Sure will be fun to see where SNS takes us in 2010 and 2011. Good last point also about Facebook not really being number 1

http://twitter.com/drofsocialmedia
http://www.socialmediadoctor.eu
http://www.fortysomethingbride.com/ Colleen Cole

Does anyone else remember the days of BBS? Those were probably the original, original social networking sites, but they targeted a tiny niche – most people didn’t even own a computer back in the day. Social networking sure has come a long way in a very short period of time.
http://www.codegaconsulting.com/ Una Coleman

Brian, llike you I thoroughly recommend the recent BBC Virtual Revolution series. It’s puts a perspective on current trends – patterns of behaviour versus trends, and how things are likely to pan out in the future. For the non “digital natives” among us, getting our heads around sharing personal information and details of our private lives on open fora like Facebook is painful. Virtual Revolution gives some very interesting viewpoints. In the future, no one will care about the silly photos and commentary one posted as an 18 year old. They will not come back to haunt us. It will be acccepted as normal behavour for an 18 year old.
More interesting is the number of businesses that are opening Facebook pages and how companies and businesses are integrating social media marketing into their overall marketing strategy. And no, it’s not just about the conversation. Content and the opportunity to connect may be the definition of internet networking in the future (as opposed to “social” networking).
Anonymous

some great comments Una, thanks

I must say I really enjoyed virtual revolution and great to connect with someone that seems to have found it as interesting as I have.

Great point in relation to whether people will mind in 20 years time what the 18 year olds of generation Y, M or I did as it will be acepted as ” that’s just what they do”

I think if people are worried about what’s going to come back to “haunt” them and as a result don’t engage they will be missing out on the opportunities afforded to them by social media such as connecting with new people and increasing their social capital.

I was at a “virtual enterprise” conference in Glyndwr Wales recently orgainised by Matt Draycott ( see http://www.socialmediadoctor.eu for a post Matt did for me) and I remember cringing as the ” Ethics and Privacy” speaker started talking about privacy issues related to banking on line etc. I suggested to her that if people thought the same way not so long ago we would have no “ATM” or “Bank Link” cards today ! To be fair I respect her area of study and think that we do need such research so as to keep us in check but it does tend to get my back up sometimes; I feel if we listened to all of these people we would stifle innovation and creativity and probably still be buying Black Ford’s !
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