When Instant Messaging is Social Media and When it’s Not

I had a wonderful dinner with Glenn, Daniela, and Saurabh from Factiva and John Aguilar from Podtech, we enjoyed a fine meal and an even finer glass of wine. Today I’m helping them with a fantastic session on on measuring social media. One of the more interesting topics was focused around on defining the attributes of Social Media

When Instant Messaging is not Social Media

One of the ways I think of Social Media is the ‘conversations of the people’ and that implies that it’s often a many-to-many conversation vs one-to-one.The case was brought up that Marketers are using Instant Messaging to advertise, market, and bait users. I believe this is an example of Interactive Marketing, rather than Social Media. Given the above characteristics, Instant Messaging is NOT Social Media.

When Instant Messaging IS Social Media

Many Instant Messaging clients have a feature called presence. It let’s you know when someone else is logged in, available, busy, logged off or any other state.Most modern clients allow users to enter in chat rooms (which have been around since mid 90s) where you can discuss with several folks in a many-to-many environment.

When these above characteristics are applied, Instant Messaging is indeed a form of Social Media.

Instant Messaging has features that enable one-to-one communications as well as many-to-many features, thus enabling it to straddle two forms of usage. Deep conversations between individuals and groups may be happening here.

I stopped using IM for an indefinite period of time.
Oh, and yes. I’ve cut out Instant Messaging from my communications right now, It’s a very refreshing thing to do, I encourage you to try
it for two weeks, you may notice your productive input will go up.

I know that Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo’s top blogger), Robert Scoble (Blogger) and Michael Arrington (of Techcrunch) have cut out IM at least for a period of time if not permanently.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 4:40 am and is filed under Social Media, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.