David Meerman Scott caught my eye with this blog post:

By my definitions, “social media marketing & PR” as well as “social network marketing & PR” are two different things and both are subsets of the “new rules of marketing & PR.”

The way I see the world, as marketing and PR people we need to think about the new rules as including lots of tools and techniques and social media and social networking are two of those. But there are many others.

I’ve posted a dissenting a comment in the discussion, which I thought worth reproducing here (with a couple of copyedits):

Isn’t there a lot of overlap between what a social media site and a social network site is? Users of Facebook and MySpace write blog entries, upload videos & photos, while many social media sites like Flickr and even Twitter these days have social characteristics - friend adding, personal or group conversations. I do nearly as much socialising online via Twitter these days than I do on Facebook.

All the best social sites incorporate both media and networking. Instead of trying to categorise one or the other, I think it’s better to look a bit closer: think in terms of what messages have social currency on the site you want to engage with - whether it be photos, video, wall posts, Tweets, pokes etc. and then from that formulating a strategy.