Social Media Glossary

A

Adsense: Google’s pay-per-click, context-relevant program available to blog and web publishers as a way to create revenue.
Adwords: The advertiser program that populates the Adsense program. The advertiser pays Google on a per click basis.
Aggregator: A web-based tool or desktop application that collects syndicated content from news feeds (see “feed”).
AJAX: An acronym (Asynchronous Java Script and XML) representing a way to create real-time Web applications.
Akismet: Comment spam filter popular with WordPress blogs.
API: An acronym (Application Programming Interface) representing a computer system or application allowing for requests to be made of it by other programs and allows for data to be exchanged. Think “programmable web”
App: Abbreviation of “Application software” and popularized by the iPhone, an app is a computer application designed to perform a specific task.
Archives: Most often an index page, often organizing posts or entries by either category or date.
AstroTurfing: A fake grass roots push to generate buzz or interest in a product, service, or idea. Often this movement is motivated by a fee or gift to the writer of a post or comment or may be written under a phony pseudonym.
Atom: A popular feed format used for syndicating content.
Avatar: A graphical image or likeness that replaces a photo of the author of the content on a blog.

B

Bit.ly: A free URL shortening service commonly used to condense URLs to make them easier to share on social networks like Twitter.

Blog: Short for “web log”, a blog is a type of website containing entries or commentary, descriptions, graphics or other media, usually in reverse-chronological order.  “Blog” can also be used as a very, meaning “to maintain” or “add content to” a blog.

Blogger:  A free blogging platform owned by Google.  Also, a word to describe anyone who writes a blog.

C

Comment: A response often provided as a reaction to a blog post or message on a social network.  Comments are a popular means of two-way conversation on the Internet.

Creative Commons: A nonprofit organization whose aim is to develop, support and steward legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing and innovation.

D

Dashboard: The administration area on your blog software that allows you to post, check traffic, upload files, manage comments, etc.

Data Mining:  The process of extracting patterns from data automatically using computers.  On the web, these data include text, links, video and all other content.  We can “mine” that data to find patterns in what people are searching for, talking about, linking to, retweeting, “liking”, and so on.

Delicious: A social bookmarking site and a property of Yahoo! Allows users to quickly store, organize (by tags) and share favorite web pages. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds of other users and share a page specifically with another user.

Digg:  A social news website that allows people to discover, share and recommend  content  from anywhere on the web.

Digital Storytelling: The use of digital tools to let ordinary people tell their own real-life stories.  This can be done with any combination of images, video, narrative, music and text.

Disqus: A comment system and moderation tool that allows you to add community management and social web integration on any site.

Domain Name: The identifying name of an internet site, such as “marketsentinel.com”.

E

Edublog: A blog site focused on education, be it teacher, administrator, consultant or student.

Engagement: The extent to which a consumer has a meaningful experience with a brand.

EFF: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties group defending people’s rights in the digital world.

F

Facebook – Currently the largest social network in the world with over 500 million users.

Feed: Also known as “RSS fees” or “news feeds”, these are data formats used for providing users with frequently updated content.  Content distributors syndicate a feed, thus allowing people to subscribe to it.  Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator (see “feed reader”).

FeedBurner: A Google tool allowing web sites, blogs and podcasts to syndicate content in a simple way for readers to subscribe.

Feed Reader: An aggregator of content, subscribed to by the user, so that specific content or search results arrives in their “reader”.

Flickr: An online community for sharing images and videos, widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

Folksonomy: The collective indexing by use of tags, labels or keywords by the consumers of the content. The tagging system of Flickr of Delicious are examples of this social indexing.

Foursquare: A location-based social network which allows users to “chick in” at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application (i.e. iPhone or Blackberry).

G

Groundswell – A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell, pg. 9)

H

Hashtag: Words or phrases prefixed with a hash symbol (#) with multiple words concatenated, for example, “#RealAle is my favorite kind of #beer”.  Hashtags are a popoular means of grouping posts on Twitter.

HTML: Acronym for HyperText Markup Language, this is the coding language used to create and link together documents and files on the World Wide Web. The code is embedded in and around text and multimedia files in order to define layout, font, colors, and graphics.

Hyperlink: A navigational reference to another document or page on the World Wide Web.

I

Influence Analysis: The study and discovery of the most influential people discussing any given topic, brand or product. Identifying influential people has become important because they share important opinions with their peers, which are in-turn influenced by them.

L

Link Building – An aspect of search engine optimization (SEO), link building is the process of improving visibility of a website in search engines via “natural” or un-paid search results.

LinkedIn:  A business-oriented social networking site mainly used for professional networking.

M

Mashup: A web application that combines data from more than one source into a single tool.

Meme: A concept that is spread via the Internet and may take the form of a link, video, website, hashtag, word of phrase.

MicroBlogging: Allows users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images or video links via the web, text messaging, instant messaging, email, mobile device, or digital audio. Currently, the most popular microblogging platform is Twitter.

MySpace: A social networking website that was once the most popular social networking site in the U.S. but was surpassed by Facebook in April 2008.

N

Natural Language Processing: A field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. The idea is to create computer programs that “understand” human conversations and can analyse those conversations to understand the needs of their human users.  Often abbreviated “NLP”.

News Reader: A web-based tool or desktop application that collects syndicated content.  See “Feed Reader”.

P

Permalink: An address or URL of a particular post on a blog or website.

Podcast: A series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication.

S

SEO: Acronym for Search Engine Optimization, the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid search results.

Sentiment: The attitude of a user’s comments related to a particular topic.

Sentiment Analysis: An area of Natural Language Processing that uses computers to determine the attitude of a writer on a particular topic. We can use sentiment analysis to determine whether what someone says is positive or negative. This has huge benefits for brands wanting to measure reputation, track a campaign or manage a crisis (see “Natural Language Processing”).

Social Media: Social media describes the tools and technologies that allow people to share and discuss information online.

Social Media Measurement [update URL when we know what it is]:  Refers to the tracking of social media content such as blogs, wikis, microblogs, social networking sites, video and photo sharing sites, forums, message boards, and other user-generated content.  Social Media Measurement provides a way for marketers to determine the volume and sentiment around a brand or topic in social media.

Social Media Monitoring:  The process of automatically tracking online conversation about a brand, person or topic.

Social Network Analysis:  A branch of mathematics that maps the connections in the social web. These maps can be used to measure the value of people in the network based on their connections.

Stylesheet – CSS that determines the look/feel of a site.

Syndication – The process of making web content available for a site in order to provide other people with the website’s content (for example, the latest blog posts or news articles).

T

Technorati: A popular blog search engine that also provides categories and authority rankings for blogs.

Tweetup: An organized or impromptu gathering of people on Twitter.

Twitter: A microblogging platform that allows users to share 140-character-long messages.

V

Viral marketing:  Marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating  viral processes.

W

Web analytics: The measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing use of the web.

Widget: An element of a blog or other piece of software that displays information and is changeable by the user.  For example, many blogs have a “Twitter Widget” that displays their latest tweets.

Wiki: A website that allows the creation and editing of any number of web pages via a web browser.

Wikipedia – A free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

Y

YouTube – A video-sharing website in which users can upload, share, view and rate videos.