IN THE STUDIO

As we diligently work to stay abreast of social media trends, we found some great sources that define social media terms that are particularly beneficial for businesses. The information below are a combination of two sources that are at the cornerstone of social media:  The Salty Waffle and Social Media Today.

View Part One: # thru D

What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Two, E thru K

External Social Communication: Any conversations that happens on public social networks; companies would be wise to organize an External Social Communication plan, because it’s happening even if you don’t yet know what they are saying.

Eye Rest: Well, these numbers and bold type are an example of eye rest. Eye rest is a technique used in blogs to make the post easily readable and/or offer more to the reader. Other examples are hyperlinks, bullets, images, and lists.

Facebook: Facebook is an online social networking service, whose name stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends." As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users.

Feed: Feed isn’t just a term that applies to social media, but in the social media world it applies to areas where information from your social network gathers and is presented. For example, your Facebook feed shows you updates from friends regarding anything from events to new pictures. Feed may also refer to an RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication) which makes it easy to publish, collect, and keep track of multiple sources of many types of content.

Flash Mob: Flash mob is a sudden gathering of people in a public place. Usually they perform something and then quickly move on. The term is typically applied to mobs that gather because of social media networking, viral emails, or for promotions put on by guerrilla marketing firms for clients. The idea here is to be viral and share the video of the flash mob performance.

Forum: Also known as a message board, a forum is a site dedicated to discussion. Generally forums are themed and moderated by someone from the site. Many forums are run by large companies as another form of customer service. Users can help each other solve problems and moderators or company professionals can also easily get into the conversation and provide assistance.

Foursquare: We have talked about Foursquare a bunch in the past, but it just fit in too well here and we haven’t made it a part of our social media vocabulary section yet, so here goes. Foursquare is a location-based social network that allows users to check-in to venues and see others and get special offers. It is one of the leaders amongst geo-location based social networks.

Geotagging: is on the rise. Geotags are location-based tags attached to status updates, media, or other posts that gives GPS information on the person posting or the media. Check-ins on Foursquare and other location-based social networks are a form of geotagging.

Google Latitude: Latitude is simple, it allows those you choose to see your current location. It uses GPS technology in your phone to broadcast where you are in real-time. You can limit its accuracy and it is easy to manage who can see your location. There is also feature called Location History that allows you to see where you have been recently in addition to your current location.

Gowalla: is a location-based social network. Much like Foursquare, Gowalla allows people to share their location in real time as well as check into places and earn prizes and discounts.

Groupon: The group buying start-up that just happens to be the fastest growing company ever. Group + coupon = deals for you. They offer deals daily and as interest from businesses all around has grown, have come to offer many deals in each city.

HTML: Stands for Hyper Text Markup language. HTML is the language that is considered the building blocks of the web. HTML describes web pages through tags and a browser reads those in to display what you see as the web page.

Internal Social Communication: A company hosted social platform upon which all employees of an organization can engage; this can be a powerful change to increase efficiency in an organization.

Joomla: Joomla is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) that allows people to build websites and web applications.

Kyte: Kyte is an application for streaming and hosting live video through its online and mobile platform. They help people produce video, distribute it, engage audiences, analyze traffic, and monetize their work.