Basic Social Networking Terminology

I spent the last three days at the annual summit of the Society of International Business Fellows (SIBF). SIBF is an organization of about 500 international business executives and owners that share international and domestic business ideas and assist each other around the globe. SIBF has been quite helpful in our efforts to build our business internationally and find suppliers abroad.

A focus of this year's summit was social networking. While these are brilliant business people, especially internationally, Thomas Nelson is ahead of the SIBF members for the most part when it comes to social media and networking. (That unintentionally landed me on SIBF's Social Networking Committee.)

The social media terminology below was shared with the SIBF members this weekend. Even though I believe most of us know these social networking terms, I thought I would share them with you.

Blog - a journal on the Web. Weblogs can be used to improve communication and culture in an organization while enhancing marketing, branding and public relations efforts. Weblogs cover as many different topics, and express as many opinions, as there are people writing them. Some blogs are highly influential and have enormous readership, while others are mainly intended for a close circle of family and friends. A blog entry usually consists of a title, headline, body, post date, comments, tags, and more.

LinkedIn - the world’s largest professional network with over 40 million members and growing rapidly. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted contacts (i.e. SIBF Group) and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals.

RSS (Rich Site Summary) - 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. Users save time by not needing to visit each site individually.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach.

ShareThis - a program found on a blog which simplifies and accelerates the online world by making sharing content as instantaneous and customizable as possible.

Technorati - an Internet search engine for searching blogs. Technorati looks at tags that authors have placed on their websites. These tags help categorize search results, with recent results coming first.

Twitter - Social networking and microblogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface. Twitter enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Twitter is used by organizations and individuals to quickly and effectively communicate news and information.

Wiki - a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wikis have become an effective and popular means for organizations to collaboratively increase communication efforts amongst its associates and members.

Facebook - a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better. (From wikipedia)

What other basic social networking terminology should be added to the list above?