Months ago I pushed for to eliminate the word ‘social media’ and now @garyvee thinks so too.

I think this marks the 3rd or 4th time that I’ve went on the rampage against the term ‘social media’.  I especially hate this term when it relates to marketing.  Today I ran across this video post by Gary Vaynerchuk where he totally agrees with me.

Here’s the dealio… You can use various ‘online social mediums’ to get your ideas out about new products.  You can use them as a customer service aid or as a market research tool, but symantically speaking, THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY THAT AN ORGANIZATION CAN CREATE SOCIAL MEDIA.

This is the other part of the word social media that I hate.  It throws the word media around in completely nonsensical ways.  Media would be things like text articles, audio recordings, static images, or movies.  Social media would be when people (not organizations), collaborate to create or modify some sort of media product.

The tools that enable this creation are ‘social mediums’ just like tv is a video medium, radio is a sound medium, and newspapers are a print medium.  Facebook is a social medium, because it allows users to create media in a social way.  I type a short blurb.  My friends comment on it.  I post a picture of my friends, my friends tag themselves in it.

So when @comcastcares uses twitter, a social medium, to solve a customer’s problem, the PERSON who is operating the @comcastcares account and the person with the problem are creating media together.  Sure, comcast’s brand is a part of that, but the ‘social media’ is created between 2 or more humans using a ‘social medium’.

So enough of that… here’s Gary’s video

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