Brad Rourke

Thematic Taxonomy Of Social Media Tools

At the No Better Time conference, my friend Joe Peters and I will be running a session called “Tech Savvy Citizenry.” That could mean a lot of things, but for us it means we are going to talk about different ways of using social media to engage the public.

One thing we’ll be doing is creating, in the session, a sort of thumbnail taxonomy of social media tools. So instead of just talking about particular tools, we’ll be discussing types of tools.

I thought I would just do a quick list of possibilities — knowing full well that in the session people will come up with a lot more ideas:

Overall Social Media platforms:

  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • LinkedIn

Text-Based Content

  • Blogs
  • Forums (Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, etc.)

Photo-Based content

  • Flickr
  • Picasa
  • Photobucket

Video-Based vontent

  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • Ustream
  • Seesmic

Bookmarking

  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Del.icio.us

Status Updates

  • Twitter
  • FaceBook
  • MySpace

Mobile-Based Posting Services

  • Posterous
  • Twitpic
  • myFrog
  • Tumblr

Location-Based Content Sharing

  • Latitude
  • Urban Spoon

That’s a lot! It got me thinking that maybe there is a simpler way to cut it, because the above list is just too much to keep in mind at once. So:

Content: This is all the tools that allow people to create and post content — blogs, YouTube, Flickr, forums

Sharing: These are the tools that allow people to share that content — Digg, Del.icio.us, link-sharing in Facebook, link-sharing in Twitter

Categorizing: These are the tools that allow people to gather bundles of shared information together into thematic subjects– the tagging functions in YouTube and Del.icio.us, Squidoo.

Platforms: some tools are built to incorporate all of the above at once — Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn.

Why is this important? It may not be. But it seems to me if I am mounting a “social media strategy” for a project, I will want to have these four bases covered. I’ll want to create content, get it shared, and provide people a way to categorize it properly. And I will deply these strategies within one or more platforms (as well as beyond).

As an example, think about the No better Time conference. I am creating material both in the conference but also on this blog and on Posterous (images). I’m sharing that information by seeding links to the content, and conference organizers are helping people categorize it through use of the “nbt09” tag. And we’re doing this through social media platforms (Facebook) as well as through other channels.

These are just some late night thoughts as I prep for the session.

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3 responses to “Thematic Taxonomy Of Social Media Tools”

  1. Suggested Taxonomy of Social Media | Solution Journalism

    […] is what I have so far.  For other social media taxonomies, see Betsey Stone, Brad Rourke and Connected […]

  2. Chris Berendes

    The ongoing discussion about possible socioeconomic and class differences between Facebook and MySpace bring up three other ways to characterize each tool, plus a bonus third:
    (1) who uses it?
    (2) what sorts of relationships and interactions does the tool support?
    (3) how well is the participant group defined?
    (4) what’s the time constant?

    WHO: the myspace/facebook audience debate is the classic here
    http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/30/pdf_talk_the_no.html

    RELATIONSHIPS: Forums, some blogs, some Flickr groups seem to support pretty tight communities, who interact around very particular interests, such as photos of sequential numbers (http://www.flickr.com/groups/sequential/) or open government (http://groups.google.com/group/open-government), with a pretty flat participation structure. Twitter doesn’t, to my mind, foster conversational interaction as well; rather, followership (e.g. of Aston Kutcher) or very brief, one or two “move” interactions.

    GROUP DEFINITION: In a forum or Google Group, you know or can easily find out who is participating and watching, and there is often a sense of community (“ah, there’s Joe Blow again” or “why has Jane been so quiet recently?”). That seems less likely in Twitter, say, or Delicious.

    TIME CONSTANT: Twitter is all about now, and even the search truncates after something like 30 days. So, “what’s new today?” is a reasonable question, “what’s new this year?” really isn’t. Delicious presents data in lots of ways. In some tools, you have to dig to get to recent changes, e.g. Wikipedia, where “what’s new today?” would be more work to determine, and mostly isn’t the point.

  3. Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

    I think Platform is your Hub and Content, Sharing and Categorizing are the spokes, offering a variety of ways to construct a social media strategy.

    ie: Musicians use MySpace as their hub with Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and a blog as spokes. Writers use a blog as their hub, with Twitter, YouTube and Smashwords as spokes. Boone Oakley is an ad agency that uses YouTube as its hub: http://www.booneoakley.com/

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