Community vs. Social Network – Lithosphere Community.

Since 2008, “social media” has become a heavily-used buzz word in the corporate world. The question is “what is social media?” Many seem to equate social media toFacebook-likedsocial networking sites; others seem to think that they areblogs, theTwitter family of applications for micro-blogging,Flickr,YouTube, or similar type of content sharingWeb 2.0 applications. Yet, answers to this question may still range fromsocial collaboration sites (likeWikipedia,Delicious, orDigg) toonline communities (like those we host for our enterprise clients orYahoo! Answer).

Well, they are all correct to some extent, and these are functional classifications of social media. Author and bloggerBrian Solis, introduced another classification of social media, based on the types of conversation. He called itthe conversation prism. However, if you want to understand social media from a relational andsocial anthropological perspective, you will find that there are really only two major types of social media:

1. Social Networks
2. Online communities

Human social networks and communities actually pre-date their online counterpart for millennia. Both are very well-established and robust social structures that have survived the test of time. And they have emerged and reemerged as civilizations collapse and rise. Humans are naturally predisposed to gravitate to and desire this type of interaction.

For this initial post of the mini blog series, I hope to offer you a perspective that lets you see some basic differentiating features between these two types of social media. Later on, I will show you what we can learn about them from studies in social anthropology.

Continues @ http://lithosphere.lithium.com