Meme: Okay, I’ll confess; I did not even know how to say this, but now I’m told it rhymes with ‘dream’. A catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet.
Retweet: The process of a user taking another Twitter user’s tweet and tweeting it themselves. The credit still goes to the original user that tweeted it, but the tweet appears in all the retweeter’s followers’ timeline. This is shortened to ‘RT’ on Twitter.
Tumblr: This may sound like the modern day Humpty Dumpty with bad spelling, but it is another blogging website and social networking platform. It enables users to share content and connect with others based on their blog entries. Like many other social media platforms, users are able to ‘follow’ other users’ blogs.
Widget: No, no, it’s nothing like a wedgie! A widget is a mini application that performs a specific function and connects to the Internet.
RSS: (Really Simple Syndication)—a web standard for the delivery of content — blog entries, news stories, headlines, images, video — enabling readers to stay current with publications without having to browse to their content.
Tag: Not what you identify your dog with! It’s a phrase or keyword that is added as an association with a blog, website or social network. Much like keywords, these words and phrases represent what the user is discussing online, and associate the discussion/text with relevant words to aid SEO.
Geotagging: The process of adding geographical identification to media, enabling others to know your location when you do so. Commonly found on smart phone apps for social media like Twitter and Facebook. Why anyone would want everyone to know exactly where they are at all times is something I will never understand!
Hashtag: Nothing to do with drugs, believe me. It is simply a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to tweets. The creation of a hyperlink on Twitter by placing the # sign in front of a word. This is now a hyperlink that once clicked on performs a search of that word within the Twitter website.
Pinning: Yeah, you like someone else’s content, you put a pin on it! Pinning is how to show that you like content on Pinterest. Once the content is ‘pinned’, it then appears on your own Pinboard.
Social Graph: A visual representation of the different connections that an individual has within a larger social network. I’m quite sure there are folks out there who place greater importance on their social graph than on their career graph. Oh well!
Social Media Optimization (SMO): It’s about making sure all the content you have, have created or have curated is available across the best media and easy to access by your target audience. Check if it can be subscribed to through RSS. Can a user submit it to Digg? If you shared a video, is it possible to take it and embed it on a site?