All terms and definitions mine or “borrowed” by me unless otherwise noted. Please feel free to provide your personal feedback, corrections, updates and additions to this admittedly brief and incomplete list in progress.
Answers – An area to ask or answer questions and polls on LinkedIn.
Applications – Widgets and tools used to interact and promote you and your company or brand that are often available as options on social media sites.
Avatar – A type or part of a badge, most often a photo or icon image used as a visual ID by a Twitter account. Appears on home page and on tweets posted by account user.
Background – A customized graphic or color that can be assigned to your Twitter pages. You can designate this by selecting one of the 12 profile templates offered by Twitter, or build your own as simply as uploading an image.
Badge – A graphic, icon or photo that is used to identify you, your company, your product or service and link to another site or service such as Facebook or Twitter.
Block – If you block another user account on Twitter, it will not be able to follow you or send you messages. If your account is public, they’ll still be able to view it, but they wont show up on your followers list, and you won’t be on their following list.
Blog – A blog is an online journal or content-rich site usually authored by a single individual, and sometimes teams. In the context of business communication, these are often used to speak to the marketplace.
Blogger – A popular, free blogging software and service owned by Google.
Blogosphere – The totality of blogs on the Internet, and the conversations taking place within that sphere.
Categories – Pre-specified ways to organize content — for example, a set of keywords that you can use but not add to when posting on a site. They form part of a taxonomy.
Comments – Blogs and other social media sites allow readers to add comments under items, and may also provide a feed for comments as well as for main items. That mean you can keep up with conversations without having to revisit the site to check whether anything has been added.
Community building – The process of recruiting potential community or network participants, helping them to find shared interests and goals, use the technology, and develop useful conversations.
Connections – Your LinkedIn contacts approved by you or by them based on your request.
Contact settings – How you designate on LinkedIn the manner in which you would prefer to be messaged by others, or content made available to others on your pages.
Content – Text, pictures, video and any other meaningful material
Crowd sourcing – The action of querying an entire or large subset of a user group or community for answers, information or feedback.
Direct Message – Also referred to as a DM, it is a private message is sent from one Twitter person to another. You may only send a direct message to a person who follows you. When you receive a direct message, it is saved in your direct message iinbox, accessible from the Direct Message tab in the sidebar in your home page. Set your email preferences to notify you by mail if you have a new message.
Facebook – A free social networking website that was originally designed for college students, but is now open to anyone 13 years of age or older. Facebook users can create and customize their own profiles with photos, videos, and information about themselves, their company or product. Friends can browse the profiles of other friends and write messages on their pages.
Fail Whale – An iconic image signifying that a service or site is not available that originated and was first used by Twitter to communicate to its users as a downtime error message. The cartoon of a whale being airlifted, apparently to an aid station, by a group of bluebirds is now seen on T-shirts and jewelry, and effectively launched the career of illustrator Yi Yung Lu.
Fan page – A subcategory of Facebook pages most often used by a business, group or association. Can be official or unofficially maintained.
Follow – The ability of a Twitter user to view updates of another. To enable, click the Follow button on the other account. If you follow someone, you’ll receive updates on your home page when you log in, or on your phone if you’ve added it. You may view who gets your updates on your followers page, and make changes to who you follow on your your following page. When you post an update to your Twitter account, your followers will get it on their home page and/or phone. You don’t have to follow everyone who follows you, and unless an account is private, you can follow and unfollow who ever you want without them following back. Mutual followers can send each other private messages, and you can even choose to get notified by email when someone new follows you or sends you a private message. Your follower/following stats are listed on your profile page.
Folksonomy – Taxonomies are centralised ways of classifying information – as in libraries. Folksonomies are the way folk create less structured ways of classifying by adding tags.
Forum – A forum is an online discussion around a common topic that anyone may join. Forums are typically moderated, and most often require some level of registration by anyone wishing to post a comment.
Friend – Someone a Facebook user approves to connect with and view your personal information who can post messages and content to your wall and other pages. By default, when approved, you will also be able to view and share information with your friends based on their privacy settings.
FriendFeed – A real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS feed. Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.
Google Alert – A free service that provides automated email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on keywords. Examples of Google Alerts include monitoring a developing news story, keeping current on a competitor or industry, getting the latest on a celebrity or event, or keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams.
Groups – Collections of individuals with some sense of unity through activities, interests or values. They are bounded: you are in a group, or not. They differ in this from networks, which are dispersed, and defined by nodes and connections. NOTE: Email lists and forums sit easily with bounded groups, blogs with networks. A group may use a blog, and an email list may serve a network.
Handle – The Twitter user account name by which it is identified. Displayed in posts.
#hashtag – A Twitter community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to tweets. Added inline to tweets by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. NOTE: You must follow in your Twitter account @hashtag for your tweets to be tracked.
LinkedIn – A social networking website geared towards companies and industry professionals looking to make new business contacts or keep in touch with previous co-workers, affiliates, and clients. Members can create customizable profiles that detail employment history, business accomplishments, and other professional accolades. LinkedIn also works as a two-way platform in that members can search for jobs and companies can search through profiles if they are interested in hiring new employees.
Listening – Paying attention in the blogosphere and on Twitter to general and specific topics, or setting up searches that monitor when you or your organization or product is mentioned.
Logo tweeters – Corporate or product-based Twitter accounts whose primary purpose is to extend their brand. These are identified by the logo or icon image associated with their accounts, rather than a human face. (Word and definition courtesy of Shel Israel, author of Twitterville.)
Mashups – Mixes and combinations of tools that create new web services.
Micro-blogging – An abbreviated blog, or way to communicate in short and succinct bursts of information.Twitter is the best example of micro-blogging.
News reader – A way to collect and aggregate content available on blogs and other RSS feeds in one place. Example: Netvibes, iGoogle, Google Reader.
Networks – Structures defined by nodes and the connections between them. In social networks the nodes are people, and the connections are the relationships that they have. Networking is the process by which you develop and strengthen those relationships.
Podcast – Audio or video content that can be downloaded automatically through a subscription or as a file from a website to view or listen to offline.
Post – An item on a blog or forum.
Privacy settings – A feature offered by many social media tools and services to designate the information and access to your user account by others.
Profile – Personal information about yourself, business or organization that provides additional information to those viewing your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, your blogs, or other social media sites. In most cases, your profile includes a photo or graphic you upload directly.
Protected account – Protected accounts in Twitter receive a follow request each time someone wants to follow them, and only approved followers are able to see the profile page. If the idea of strangers reading your Twitter updates makes you feel a little weird, try protecting your profile at first. You can always change your mind later. NOTE: If an account is protected, it is assumed that you only want your followers to see your updates. @replies sent to people who aren’t following you will not be seen. If you want to interact with everyone on Twitter, you should not protect your account.
Public timeline – A Facebook list of recent activity by you and your friends that is available on your profile page.
@reply – A public Twitter message sent from one person to another, distinguished from normal updates by the @username prefix. If a message begins with @username it is collected as a reply. Reply publicly to any update on Twitter by using the @username format. Formal following status is not required to reply to someone, and all replies are visible in the @username tab in Twitter home page sidebar. (Tweets with @username elsewhere in the tweet are also collected in sidebar tab; tweets starting with @username are replies, and tweets with @username elsewhere are considered mentions.)
Retweet – Also referred to as RT, indicates a re-posting of another tweet. Not an official Twitter command or feature, but added in a tweet to indicate that some or all of the message is a re-post from another tweet, sometimes with a personal comment added.
RSS – Real Simple Syndication. A way to make your content available to others via push technology to a news reader.
Social Graph –The network of personal connections through which people communicate and share information online. These personal connections can be based on common interests, professional experiences and offline social relationships. Examples of social graphs online include: colleagues on LinkedIn, a Google Chat address book and high school friends on Facebook. Each of these examples shows a social graph when put in the context of a utility for communicating and sharing massive amounts of content and data. They also generate larger and larger social graphs as the information shared spreads across multiple touch points. (From Razorfish)
Social Media – The content as well as the tools, sites or services that allow the ability to share or communicate information. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs and forums are examples of social media. Communication is not one-way, as in traditional media like television or newspapers. (See Wikipedia)
Social Networking – The act of building interactive online communities of people with shared interests through communication and sharing of information. Social networks are places where this human engagement occurs. (See Wikipedia)
Status update – A way to communicate on Facebook what you are doing or thinking with your friends. At the top of your home or profile page, enter in a short message into the “What’s on your mind?” text field and based on your settings will appear next to your name and profile image on your own and friends pages. NOTE: When user accounts are active on both, you can modify your Twitter settings to automatically post your tweets as your Facebook status update message.
Tag – Keywords attached to a blog post, bookmark, photo or other item of content so you and others can find them easily through searches and aggregation. Tags can usually be freely chosen — and so form part of a folksonomy –while categories are predetermined and are part of a taxonomy.
Taxonomy – An organized way of classifying content, as in a library. Providing contributors to a site with a set of categories under which they can add content is offering a taxonomy. Allowing people to add their own keywords is to endorse folksonomy.
Theme – A collection of colors and graphics that provides a customized look and feel to your pages on Twitter or your blog.
Tweeple – Those who use Twitter.
Tweeps – Friends who Twitter.
Tweet – (n) A post or communication via Twitter. (v) The act of posting on Twitter. At the top of the user account page is a form field with the question, “What are you doing?” Each entry once sent is considered a tweet. Messages are limited to 140 characters or less and can only be sent by registered users. NOTE: Despite the default text in the form field, tweets may communicate something more from a business perspective, including links to a product launch, blog entry or website of interest to those following you.
Tweeter – One who uses Twitter.
Tweetosphere – Also known as Twittersphere, the global community of Twitter users.
Tweetup – A physical meeting of two or more Twitter users, most often planned via tweets.
Twilert – A free service providing the ability to track use of a keyword (you, your company, your product, or anything) in Twitter by volume of tweets containing it and by whom. You can choose to have these reports emailed to you on a regular basis.
Twipic – A third-party tool that publishes a photo you designate from your mobile phone or computer while also posting a link to it via a tweet in Twitter.
Twitter – A free micro-blogging website and service that helps people communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent, 140-character messages. Users may choose whose messages they wish to receive and how to receive them, or search all Twitter updates to see what people are talking about.
Twitterati – A person who is passionate about Twitter, or a luminary in the Twittersphere.
Twitterer – A user of Twitter. Someone who tweets.
Tweetstream – Also known as a stream for short, is a series of tweets that could be public or private.
Unfollow – The act of breaking off direct contact to an account in Twitter. NOTE: Twitter users are not notified when someone takes the action to unfollow them.
Unfriend – In Facebook, the act of disconnecting yourself from someone who had earlier accepted as a friend. NOTE: Facebook users are not notified when someone takes the action to unfriend them.
Wall message – Something you have written or posted to a friend’s Facebook profile, or they have posted to your profile. Depending on privacy settings, these messages can be seen by others.
Web 2.0 – A term to describe blogs, wikis, social networking sites and other Internet-based services that emphasize collaboration and sharing, rather than less interactive publishing (Web 1.0). It is associated with the idea of the Internet as platform.
Widgit – A portable and typically re-usable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any web page by an end user with minimal effort. A widget adds some content to that page that is not static. Generally widgets are originated by third parties. NOTE: A good example of widgets are those on LinkedIn that allow you to designate books you are reading that also provide links to Amazon, or a way in WordPress to automatically update a blog page with your five most recent tweets from Twitter.
Wiki – A web page — or set of pages — that can be edited collaboratively. Once people have appropriate permissions — set by the wiki owner — they can create pages and/or add to and alter existing pages. Wikis are a good way for people to write a document together. Although wikis are easy to use, that doesn’t mean everyone in a group will commit to their use with similar enthusiasm.
WordPress – A popular free blogging software and service that offers many custom options and themes to users.
Social MediYeah! 