In line a recent piece from Jaffe about who owns the social media space comes an article on Mashable: “Is Social Media an Industry?” What is particularly interesting to me is the data used to illustrate the piece; a Google Trends graph showing searches for the term since late ’06. Its interesting to me as I ran a similar chart recently looking at the difference in searches for ‘social media’ vs ‘social technology’. This was to support a thesis of mine that we’ve become interested in social media at the cost of the broader business befits that can come from social technologies.
Now I’m not pretending that is this is conclusive supporting evidence, however what is clear is that the two terms enjoyed equal prominence up until late ’06 at which point ‘social media’ tore away into the lead and ‘social technology’ languishes to this day.
