Demystifying the Social Media Vernacular

Often times when companies and individuals approach me about launching a social media strategy they feel overwhelmed by a world with its own language and its own, rapidly changing rules. I assure them that the world is in fact, simple. All you really need to begin understanding social media is time. Of course, time is a person’s most valuable commodity and that is why it is often worth investing in a coach or hiring a consultant.

To get you started on understanding the lingo, here are a few basic definitions:

A Blog: From “Web log.” A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” (Source)

Facebook: Facebook is a social networking service that lets you connect with friends, co-workers, and others who share similar interests or who have common backgrounds. Many use it as a way to stay in touch after finishing school, or as a way to share their life publicly. What makes Facebook different from other social networks is its extensive privacy controls, its development platform, and its large and quickly growing user base. Facebook has been called the "thinking person's" social network. Compared to many other social networks, Facebook gets new features and improvements on a regular basis. My new favorite is a status update feed that functions much like a twitter feed to keep you informed in real time of what is happening in the lives of your friends and family.

Flickr: An image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. It claims to host more than 3 billion images. (Source)

RSS: RSS (short for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Basically, it send out blogs or site content as an email whenever there is an update. (Source)

Social Media: A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or My Space, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Simpy, and other sites that are centered on user interaction. (Source)

Twitter: Twitter is mini blogging that you can have delivered straight to your phone and post to, straight from your phone. It’s the ability to group text message all your friends and have them group text message back. When you add friends outside your immediate network, you can build a valuable source of information and news. There is a great article on it here. (Source)

Wiki: This is a website that includes the collaboration of work from many different authors. A wiki site allows anyone to edit, delete, or modify the content on the web. (The first wiki creator named the site after a chain of buses in Hawaii; Wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian.) (Source)

Web 2.0: The Term web 2.0 was coined by Dale Dougherty in a brainstorming session with book publisher Tim O’Reilly at a conference in late 2005. It was intended to suggest the next generation of Web applications that were turning the Web from a static experience into an interactive one. In the world of computer software, the 2.0 version of a product represents a generational step-up from the original 1.0 version of that product. The applications originally thought of as fitting the Web 2.0 mold, were Google’s Adsense advertising program, Flickr, and Wikipedia. All these sites make interaction with the users, the primary goal. (Source)

Web 3.0: A term first coined by Nova Spivack , the co-founder and CEO of Radar Networks. Web 3.0 is considered the next level up, of interactive applications. Or in less technical terms, way cooler than 2.0. The below chart highlights some key differences between 2.0 and 3.0.

YouTube: Youtube was created by three pals from PayPal - Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The concept is brilliantly simple. People post videos on YouTube and watch and comment on the videos others have posted. The videos can be anything from a simple rant into a cell phone camera by a frustrated teenager to a favorite sports clip off of ESPN - and everything in between. The simplicity of the technology has aided its popularity. YouTube offers the combined quality of Windows Media Player and Apple’s Quick Time without the need to download additional browser plug-ins. In simpler terms, you click and the video plays... period. It’s a medium that allows anyone with a video device to be a star. YouTube has taken the idea of viral videos to a new level. (Source)

So now that you know some of these key terms and tools, which should you be implementing to promote your brand? Tune in later this week for the answer to that question. I’d love to hear your feedback on some of your favorites.

Camp Fire Girls

When I was eight years old, my mother dressed my up in my big sisters Camp Fire Girl vest and sash and sent me down to the street to Mrs. Stutesman’s house to sell her one box of mint meltaways. It all started as I sat idly at the kitchen table, romancing the life of my older sister and her giggly girlfriends that bound around the house in bellbottom jeans, collared shirts and navy blue campfire vests with felt patterns ironed onto the back. At the last troop meeting, I crawled into the room and sat quietly at the back while a pretty lady with yellow hair presented sales tips for cookie season. I committed each tip to memory.

“Mom, why can’t I sell the Camp Fire cookies?” I asked her.

Mom was standing over the dishwasher, unloading last night’s dishes into the cabinets overhead. She didn’t bother to look up, “Because you aren’t a Camp Fire Girl and you aren’t old enough to be a Camp Fire Girl. When you are ready, you can join Blue Birds and when it’s time you can sell a million cookies. Okay?”

“I don’t want to be a blue turd.” That’s what my brother Erik called the little girls at school in the Navy bue skirts and short sleeved shirts that snapped up the front.

Mom sighed, she didn’t have much time for this conversation. She had six other children that would start coming into the kitchen any minute now, asking about dinner.

“Please mom. I just want to sell some cookies.”
Mom sighed. With one hand on her back and another putting a McDonalds Snoopy glass into the kitchen cabinet, she looked over at me.

“Why on earth would you want to sell those stupid things? Your father thinks we should just buy the case from your sister and keep her from asking our friends for money.”

“But mom, that’s not fair. All those other girls will be out their talking to people and telling them all about Camp Fire Girls and giving them yummy candies while Kay sits at home? That’s not fair. ”

Mom laughed and crossed the room to sit down next to me at the kitchen table. Back then, when mom was young, she smiled often and laughed from the belly, kicking back her head and making her breasts bounce up and down. She smelled like Jean Nate and cherry chapstick when she leaned over the table to brush the wispy blonde hairs from in front of my face.

“Well little Ms. Sunshine, you make a very interesting point. Do you want to tell someone all about Camp Fire Girls and eat yummy candies?”

I kicked myself off the chair and onto the floor so that she could understand the full force of my head nodding up and down, “Yes!”
Mom looked down at her watch. “Okay, well how about you bring one box over to Mrs. Stuetsman?”

I jumped in the air. “Okay, okay Mom. I’ll have to wear Kay’s sash though because I don’t have my own. And a Campfire Girl should always represent her sisters with pride.” I started up the stairs.

“And the vest too. Don’t forget the vest,” She called after me.

I skipped two stairs with each leap until I got to my sisters room and asked to borrow her vest. Kay barely looked up from her homework, “It’s on the floor in the corner. Don’t mess it up.”

I stood in the hall mirror, sash down to my knees, vest buttoned down below my hips, cardboard carton full of twenty-four boxes of cookies in my right hand, and a big Campfire smile across my face. Mom stood over me with a safety pin in her teeth while she tightened the sash around my waist. She put the pin in and cocked her head to the side to survey her work.

“We wouldn’t want it to fall off while you were walking.”

My heart was pounding blood through my body and I could feel the pulse in my fingertips. My cheeks turned red with anticipation and excitement.

“Hurry home my little Camp Fire Girl.” Mom waved at me as I bound down the front driveway and turned left towards Mrs. Stuetsman’s house.
Two hours later I arrived back home, a pocketful of cash and an empty cardboard cookie carrier.

After I visited Mrs. Stuetsman, I decided one more house wouldn’t hurt. With the money in my hand, I rationalized , “Just one more house and then I’ll go home.” But when the door opened and they leaned down to hear my sales pitch, I became the center of their world and I loved it. I smiled a toothless grin, they told me I was absolutely adorable and how could they resist. They asked me how much and I shrugged my shoulders. They gave me so much cash that it overflowed from my jeans with the cherry on the pocket. They invited me in to talk about Camp Fire Girls, open the cookies and let me have one. They patted me on the head when I left and told me I was a very good little saleswoman. And for two hours I was someone important, a Camp Fire Girl.

When I got home my mother was panicked. Then she saw the empty cardboard case and the pockets of cash and she suppressed her laughter. I had sold twenty-four boxes of Camp Fire cookies and earned my sister a new badge. After my Dad told me I was very naughty and should have done what I was told, my mother served me dinner and later tucked me into bed with a little kiss on the forehead.

“You are your mother’s daughter,” She said. And I didn’t know what it meant for many years. But I never forgot it.

The Hidden Accomplishment Bullets

A resume is your personal brand. Like a memoir, you are challenged to select the right stories to convey your message. You hang a frame around your previous work experience that shapes the readers perception of your assets and liabilities in the workplace. You stress your accomplishments at each place of employment and show your future employer what you are capable of doing for them. But what about the accomplishments you can’t put on a resume?

These are my hidden accomplishment bullets:

• Sobered up at the age of nineteen, this Sunday will be sixteen years of continuous sobriety.
• Sponsored over twenty young women for as long as two years at a time, listened to ten fourth step inventories, read Bill's Stories 37.5 times, maintained my sobriety throughout.
• Created a relationship with another human being (my sponsor) that has lasted for over seven years and continues today.
• Worked all twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, some quite thoroughly.
• Managed not to drink in the face of being fired, losing several friends and loved ones, breaking up, being broken up with, moving fifteen times in fifteen years, giving up Oscar (the most precious wiener dog ever), fighting with my family, discovering I wasn’t valued in my place of work or loved at home, losing my will to live, being cursed at by my boss, finding out my boss was dead, losing an entire nights worth of tips, having my bike stolen, facing my peeping tom in court, missing my flight to Bosnia for overweight luggage, missing the evacuation helicopter out of Tbilisi, missing my friends abroad, and gaining so much weight that I didn’t fit into my fat jeans anymore.
• Forgave my mother and father for all their mistakes.
• Admitted my shortcoming to two former bosses.
• Didn’t sleep with my married boss, didn’t chase that boy that didn’t want me anymore, didn’t steal that chocolate chip cookie at Cosi (even though no one would have ever known).
• Singlehandedly created multiple on-line dating profiles resulting in 100+ dates from 2003-2006.
• Sat through fifty+ horrible dates and 30+ horrible first kisses, managing to give my date the impression that I was having a wonderful time throughout.
  Dated one man for more than three months, resulting in a successful two year commitment.
• Maintained my MySpace and Friendster profiles, even when everyone else had moved over to Facebook.
• Singlehandedly packed, unpacked and entirely redecorated my apartment within four days of signing a lease.
• Invested forty hours of my Christmas Holiday helping a friend apply to business school.
• Volunteered to make baloney sandwiches for the homeless and continued to make them, even when faced with other volunteers’ lack of attention to detail or poor choice in breading.
• Did not murder the young woman smacking seven pieces of Bubblicious gum, blowing four-foot wide bubbles and screaming into her cell phone on the33 bus.
• Prepared gourmet meals for over 200 friends, threw 30+ theme parties over the past four years, wore humiliating costumes to 10+ of these events.
• Helped 432+ people revise their resumes, resulting in 100% satisfaction.
• Did the right thing 90% of the time, even when it would have been easier not to.
• Consistently expressed kindness to small dogs and children.

These are the bullets that reveal the most about me. These are the bullets that say I will always be willing to better myself, strive to treat my colleagues with kindness, not get drunk at the company Christmas party and always bring something good to the lunch room potluck. And isn’t that what really makes a good employee?

So go on, tell me yours.