We’re often asked to define social media either directly (what is social media?) or indirectly (we need a social media strategy), so I thought I’d provide a list of the key platforms that make up what we call “social media”:

1. Article directories that publish original user generated content (UGC).
2. Blogs that feature original content and allow comment from users.
3. Blog aggregators like Technorati that allow members to bookmark, tag, syndicate and recommend blog content to other people.
4. File sharing sites with community and comment functions like YouTube and Flickr.
5. Forums that allow users to post within a special interest community such as Crackberry.com for Blackberry users.
6. Microblogging sites like Twitter and all associated sites like Tweetdeck that carry and syndicate content to their users.
7. Review sites for products and services (like Travelocity) that carry user generated content (UGC) and reviews.
8. Social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg that allow tagging and tag sharing so that other people can explore the same tags.
9. Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn that allow communities to manifest themselves online.
10. Wikis - online encyclopedias that can be edited by anyone - like Wikipedia

It’s worth noting that there are two critical components in social media, the 2 C’s: Content and Community. These are the two sides of the social media coin.

On the one side, content lies at the very heart of social media. Content populates all the components above, all of which would cease to exist without content. In the case of social media, content is often user generated (User Generated Content or UGC) as opposed to being generated by a professional publishing house.  If you are thinking social media in any way, you must be thinking content; without content there is no social media.

Community is the other aspect of social media.  Communities gather around people of similar types (alumni, workplace, school, product users etc) or common interests (stamp collecting, trainspotting, FX trading) in the same way that “birds of a feather flock together” in many other aspects of social sciences. Communities are also important because they create a demand for content as members seek opinions or seek to make their own views known. Without communities there would be less of the subtle “friction” that causes many types of content to be generated and consumed.