What is “social media”?

In the process of researching social media strategies, tools and capabilities for a client, I’ve come to the conclusion that we just aren’t clear yet on what social media really is. Some of it is frankly just good usability. Like embedding search into a topical link, or being able to see people’s interest and expertise when we search. 

That last one is something we were trying to solve when I was back at Sprint in the mid 90s. That’s right, more than 10 years ago we were tackling that “next generation of the phone book.” So, now we talk about social tagging (good metadata management), blogging (easy publishing and commenting on content), ranking (providing feedback on content), wiki (more publishers without complex development capability), etc. It’s just the next evolution to a more usable web, right?

So, my challenge is to determine what social media really is. I’m open for interpretation from any and all. After you give me your thoughts in this, let’s talk about how to establish criteria that will help organizations determine which of all these make sense to deploy.