Blog > July 2008

According to wikipedia “Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures.

The second paragraph goes on “Social media use the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video”.

Robert Scoble says “When I say “social media” or “new media” I’m talking about Internet media that has the ability to interact with it in some way”.

That’s the definition I like the most.

Interactivity is the key – like a conversation. Our friends at iCrossing have written a whole ebook on Social Media Others call it, User Generated Content (UGC), Consumer Generated Media (CGM) or even Consumer Generated News (CGN) but a s far as we know it all means the same thing. The one addition we would add is that this information needs to be available on the internet.

So now we understand the term Social Media, Social Media Analysis is just what is say on the virtual tin. But hang on a second – how exactly do you analyse forums, blogs, and things like Facebook? Well the simple answer is it’s not easy.

The best way to think about it is it’s as if you could take all the results for a search on Google, figure out when they were posted, pull out the main topics of conversation add sentiment for each topic and put all that together you would have some sort of answer.

We explain how we analyse social media on our technology page. Brandwatch is a tool that is specifically designed to help you understand social media – not what it is so much as what it means to you.