Social Media and Online Glossary of Terms | Chisel and Brand Blog

The world of social media is constantly changing, with new platforms and terms popping up daily. There?s a lot to keep track of and we want to help make things a little bit easier for you. Hope this helps!

Last updated 9/9/12

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

AddThis: A social bookmarking service that provides a code users can put on their websites so that when people visit that site, they have the option to share via Facebook, Twitter, etc. www.addthis.com

Algorithm: An algorithm is a set of formulas developed for a computer to perform a certain function. This is important in the social sphere as the algorithms sites like Facebook and Google use are critical for developing content-sharing strategies.

Application Programing Interface (API): A documented interface that allows one software application to interact with another application. An example of this is the Twitter API.

Atom: Web feeds are used by the blogging community to share recent entries? headlines, full text and attached multimedia files. These providers allow other websites to incorporate the blog?s ?syndicated? headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds under various usage agreements. Atom also provides a standard way to export an entire blog, or parts of it, for backup or for importing into other blogging systems.

Aurasma: A visual browser that brings the physical and virtual worlds together. Companies create an aura, an overlay of an image, video or animation on top of scanned content. When a user uses the app and hovers over the trigger image, the user sees the overlay. www.aurasma.com

Avatar: An image or username that represents a person online within forums and social networks.

B

Bit.ly: A popular free URL shortening service that provides statistics for the links users share online. Use it to condense long URLs and make them easier to share on social networks like Twitter. Use of bit.ly can be controversial due to rumors of its association with Libya; for those concerned about this, ?organizations can also use shortener (http://goo.gl) among other alternatives. www.bitly.com

Blog: A word that was created from the two words ?Web log?. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. ?Blog? can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Blogger: A free blogging platform owned by Google that allows individuals and companies to host and publish a blog. www.blogger.com

BoardReader: A free search engine that allows users to search for keywords only in posts and titles of online forums. www.boardreader.com

C

Chat: Any kind of communication over the Internet, but traditionally describes one-to-one communication through a text-based chat client commonly called an instant messaging application.

Circles: A cluster of a user?s friends on Google+, ie. colleagues, school connections, family, etc. Having circles allows you to share with subsets of your full list of friends.

Collective Intelligence: A shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision-making in social networks.

Comment: A response that is often provided as an answer of reaction to a blog post or message on a social network. Comments are a primary form of two-way communication on the social Web.

Compete: A Web-based application that offers users and businesses Web analytics and enables people to compare and contrast the statistics for different websites over time. www.compete.com

Creative Commons: A nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. It provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, etc.

Crowdsourcing: A combination of the words crowd and outsourcing, it refers to asking a question via social media and collecting answers from your various communities and users. The term has become popular with businesses, authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

D

Delicious: A free online bookmarking service that lets users save website addresses publicly and privately online so that they can be accessed from any device connected to the Internet and shared with friends. www.delicious.com

Digg: A social news website that allows members to submit and vote for articles. Articles with the most votes appear on the homepage of the site and subsequently are seen by the largest portion of the site?s membership as well as other visitors. www.digg.com

Disqus: A comment system and moderation tool for a website or blog. It enables nextgen community management and social Web integrations to any site on any platform. www.disqus.com

DropBox: A free service that lets you bring your photos, documents and videos anywhere and share them easily. www.dropbox.com

E

Ebook: An electronic book, usually published as a PDF. Available for download and/or for use on an e-reader like Kindle, Nook, etc.

Eventbrite: A website that provides online event management and ticketing services. Eventbrite is integrated with Facebook, so users can also promote their events there to drive more visits to their event page and sell more tickets. The service is free to use if your event is free; if you sell tickets to your event, there is a small fee per ticket. www.eventbrite.com

F

Facebook: A social networking website. Users can create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages and profile updates. It is the world?s largest social network with more than 600 million users (as of January 2011). www.facebook.com

Flash Mob: A large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via social media, viral emails or phone.

Flickr: A social networking website centered around online picture sharing. The service allows users to store photos online and then share them with others through profiles, groups and other methods. www.flickr.com

Follow: A term used to describe how one receives information from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Follow Friday (#FF): A hashtag trend, whereby Twitter users suggest other Twitter users for their followers to follow. These tweets tend to look like: ?@username1 @username2 @username3 #ff,? though there are many variations.

Forum: An online discussion site (also known as a message board). It is the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dial-up bulletin board system.

Foursquare: A location-based social networking website, software for mobile devices, and also a game. Users ?check-in? at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application ? they?re then awarded points and sometimes ?badges.? www.foursquare.com

Friends: In the Facebook world, these are the people you allow to see your Facebook page and engage with you.

G

Google Documents: A group of Web-based office applications that includes tools for word processing, presentations and spreadsheet analysis. All documents are stored and edited online, and allow multiple people to collaborate on a document in real-time.

Google+: A social networking service operated by Google Inc. The service launched on June 28, 2011 in an invite-only ?field testing? phase. plus.google.com

H

Hangout: A video service on Google+ that allows you to chat with up to 10 Google+ users at a time. You can name these chats, watch YouTube videos during them, open a Google Doc with colleagues and much more.

Hashtag: Used by Twitter as a means of annotating and/or categorizing messages. A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a ?#.? Example: #yourhashtag. These are often used for events (ie. #SXSW), though they can take any shape. Recent trending hashtags have been: #BackWhenIWasAKid #ThrowBackSongs #LiesPeopleAlwaysTell

hi5: A social network focused on the youth market. It is a social entertainment destination, with a focus on delivering a fun and entertainment-driven social experience online. www.hi5.com

HootSuite: A Web-based Twitter client for individuals and organizations. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule Tweets and view metrics, and teams can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and other social networks via Web, desktop and mobile platforms. www.hootsuite.com

I

Impressions: An impression gives Facebook administrators a look at how many raw impressions an administrator initiated post on the Page received, as well as the overall feedback rate. These insights are aiming to help Page administrators understand more about the time of day, day of week, and type of content is most effective for delivering information to a fan base.

Insights: Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.

Instagram: An iPhone photo sharing app that lets users take photos, apply filters and share them instantly on the network and other networks like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Foursquare. The app is targeted toward mobile sharing.

Instant Messaging (IM): A form of real-time direct text-based communication between two or more people. More advanced instant messaging software clients also allow enhanced modes of communication, such as live voice or video calling.

J

Joomla!: An open source content management system (CMS) which enables users to build websites and online applications. Many aspects, including its ease of use and extensibility, have made Joomla popular. www.joomla.org

K

Klout: A tool that grades individuals and brands on their level of influence. Based on the number of followers, retweets and posts on Twitter and likes, interactions and posts on Facebook. www.klout.com

L

Lifecasting: A continual broadcast of events in a person?s life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the Internet and can involve the use of wearable technology.

Like: An action that can be made by a Facebook user. Instead of writing a comment for a message or a status update, a Facebook user can click the ?Like? button as a quick way to show approval and share the message.

Link Building: An aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) in which website owners develop strategies to generate links to their site from other websites in hopes of improving their search engine ranking. Blogging has emerged as a popular method of link building.

LinkedIn: A business-oriented social networking site. LinkedIn had more than 100 million registered users in more than 200 countries. LinkedIn?s own version of a social news service is called LinkedIn Today. Every industry on LinkedIn (marketing, journalism, technology, etc.) has its own LinkedIn Today. Stories are selected based off which ones are posted and shared the most by users of LinkedIn.?www.linkedin.com

Livestream: A live streaming video platform that allows users to view and broadcast video content using a camera and a computer through the internet. www.livestream.com

Lurker: A person who reads online discussions on a message board, newsgroup, social network or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates in the discussion.

M

Mashable: Founded in 2005, Mashable is the top source for news in social and digital media, technology and Web culture. With more than 50+ million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific news site reporting breaking Web news, providing analysis of trends, reviewing new websites and services, and offering social media resources and guides. www.mashable.com

Mashup: A content mashup contains multiple types of media drawn from pre-existing sources to create a new work. Digital mashups allow individuals or businesses to create new content by combining multiple online content sources.

Meme: A meme on the internet is used to describe a thought, idea, joke, or concept to be shared online. It is typically an image with text above and below it, but can also come in video and link form. A popular example is the ?I Can Has Cheezburger? cat meme that turned into an entire site of memes.

MySpace: A social networking website owned by News Corporation. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, but it was overtaken by its primary competitor, Facebook, in April 2008. www.myspace.com

N

News Feed: On Facebook, the News Feed is the homepage of users? accounts where they can see all the latest updates from their friends. The news feed on Twitter is called Timeline (not to get confused with Facebook?s new look, also called Timeline).

News Reader: Enables users to aggregate articles from multiple websites into one place using RSS or Atom feeds. The purpose of these aggregators is to allow for a faster and more efficient consumption of information.

O

Orkut: A social networking website that is owned and operated by Google. Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. www.orkut.com

P

Pandora: A social online radio station that allows users to create stations based on their favorite artists and types of music. www.pandora.com

Permalink: An address or URL of a particular post within a blog or website.

Pinterest: A social site that is image, rather than text driven. Users ?pin? content they find on the web onto virtual boards. It started as a means of event-planning, but has opened up into boards featuring ?things I like,? etc. Users can repin content and follow other users. All images contain a link back to the site on which it is contained, which is great for SEO. www.pinterest.com

Podcast: A non-streamed webcast; a series of digital media files, either audio or video, that are released episodically and often downloaded through an RSS feed.

Posterous: A blogging and content syndication platform that allows users to post content from any computer or mobile device by sending an email. www.posterous.com

Q

QR Code (Quick Response Code): A specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) that is readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera telephones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, URL, or other data.

Quantcast: A media measurement, web analytics service that allows users to view audience statistics (traffic data and demographics) for millions of websites. www.quantcast.com

R

Real-Time Search: The concept of searching for and finding information online as it is produced. Advancements in search technology coupled with the growing use of social media enable online activities to be queried as they occur, whereas a traditional Web search crawls and indexes Web pages periodically and returns results based on relevance to the search query.

Reddit: A social news site similar to Digg and Newsvine. It is built upon a community of users who share and comment on stories. www.reddit.com

Retweet: A retweet is when someone on Twitter sees your message and decides to re-share it with his/her followers. A retweet button allows them to quickly resend the message with attribution to the original sharer?s name.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): A family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works ? such as blog entries, news headlines, audio and video ? in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a ?feed,? ?Web feed? or ?channel?) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an ?RSS reader,? ?feed reader? or ?aggregator,? which can be Web-based, desktop-based or mobile-device-based.

S

Scribd: A social publishing site that turns document formats such as PDF, Word and PowerPoint into a Web document for viewing and sharing online. www.scribd.com

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via unpaid or organic search traffic.

Second Life: An online virtual world. Users are called ?residents? and they interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade virtual property and services with one another, and travel throughout the world.

Seesmic: A social software application site offering Seesmic Desktop, an Adobe Air application that integrates multiple Twitter accounts and your Facebook account and pages. Seesmic also offers a browser-based client for Twitter, a native Windows desktop client, and clients for mobile phones. www.seesmic.com

Sentiment: In the context of social media, sentiment refers to the attitude of user comments related to a brand online. There has been an explosion of free and paid social media monitoring tools that measure sentiment, including TweetMeme, HootSuite and PostRank, to name a few.

ShareThis: An embeddable bit of code that allows users to share content across multiple social media platforms. sharethis.com

SlideShare: An online social network for sharing presentations and documents. Users can view files on SlideShare or embed them on other social networks. www.slideshare.com

Skype: A free software application that enables users to make video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Users can also purchase plans to receive phone calls through their Skype account. www.skype.com

Social Media Marketing: A term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Social Media Monitoring: A process of monitoring and responding to social media mentions related to a business or brand.

Social Mention: A free social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the Web into a single stream of information. www.socialmention.com Streaming: A process of broadcasting media live over the Internet. It involves a camera for the media, an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher where the streams are made available to potential end-users, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. The media can then be viewed by end-users live.

StumbleUpon: A free Web browser extension which acts as an intelligent browsing tool for discovering and sharing websites. www.stumbleupon.com

T

Tag Cloud: A visual depiction of user-generated tags or simply the word content of a site, typically used to describe the content of websites.

Timeline: Timeline is the new Facebook format for personal profiles. It is essentially a digital scrapbook of a user?s life, displaying their profile in an actual timeline format so they can see at exactly what point in time something a story occurred. This is also the name of the Twitter news feed.

Trend: A trend is seen on every social network. Facebook shows what is trending when multiple users are sharing the same link or discussing the same topic. Google+ highlights trending topic when a user conducts a search. Twitter has a section to the bottom right of its home feed which clearly shows what topics and hashtags are trending in tweets. And LinkedIn shows what industries (in LinkedIn Today) that a certain story is popular.

Tumblr: A microblogging platform that allows users to post text, photos, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. www.tumblr.com

TweetDeck: An application that connects users with contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more. www.tweetdeck.com

Tweetup: An organized or impromptu gathering of people that use Twitter.

Twitter: A platform that allows users to share 140-character-long messages publicly. User can ?follow? each other as a way of subscribing to each others? messages. Additionally, users can use the @username command to direct a message towards another Twitter user. www.twitter.com

TypePad: A free and paid blogging platform similar to Blogger. It allows users to host and publish their own blogs. www.typepad.com

?

U

Unconference: A facilitated, participant-driven conference centered on a theme or purpose. The term ?unconference? has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.

Ustream: The leading live interactive broadcast platform that enables anyone with an Internet connection and a camera to engage their audience in a meaningful, immediate way. Unlike previous webcasting technology, Ustream uses a one-to-many model, which means that the user can broadcast to an audience of unlimited size. www.ustream.tv

URL: Most popularly known as the address of a web page, e.g. http://www.example.com

?

V

Video Blog (vlog): A blog the produces regular video content often around the same theme on a daily or weekly basis.

Vimeo: A popular video sharing service in which users can upload videos to be hosted online and shared and watched by others. Vimeo user videos are often more artistic and the service does not allow commercial video content. www.vimeo.com

Viral Marketing: A term that refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes.

?

W

Web 2.0: Commonly associated with Web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the Web. A Web 2.0 site (e.g. Facebook) enables its users to interact with each other as contributors to the site?s content, in contrast to websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information.

Web Analytics: The measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.

Webcast: A media file distributed over the Internet using streaming media technology to distribute a single content source to many simultaneous listeners/viewers. A webcast may either be distributed live or on demand. Essentially, webcasting is ?broadcasting? over the Internet.

Webinar: Short for Web-based seminar, a presentation, live meeting, training or lecture that is transmitted over the Internet. It is typically one-way, from the speaker to the audience with limited audience interaction, such as in a webcast. A webinar can be collaborative and include polling and question & answer sessions to allow full participation between the audience and the presenter.

Widget: An element of a graphical user interface that displays an information arrangement changeable by the user, such as a window or text box. Widgets are used on both websites and blogs.

Wiki: A website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked Web pages via a Web browser, enabling collaboration between users.

Wikipedia: A free, Web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 15 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. www.wikipedia.org

WordPress: A content management system and contains blog publishing tools that allow users to host and publish blogs. www.wordpress.com

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X

Xing: A social software platform for enabling a small-world network for professionals. The platform offers personal profiles, groups, discussion forums, event coordination and other common social community features. www.xing.com

?

Y

Yelp: A social network and local search website that provides users with a platform to review, rate and discuss local businesses. Over 31 million people access Yelp each month, putting it in the top 150 U.S. Internet websites. www.yelp.com

YouTube: A video-sharing website where users can upload, share and view videos. It is the largest video sharing site in the world. www.youtube.com

?

Z

Zooomr: An online photo sharing service similar to Flickr. www.zoomr.com

Did we miss anything? Add it to the comments below and we?ll work on adding it to this list.

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Source: http://chiselandbrand.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/social-media-and-online-glossary-of-terms/

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