Over at Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel argues that the term “social media” is dead:

Amen! So true. Tons of journalists are pulling double duty as bloggers. So, now can we kill the phrase “social media?” It’s irrelevant. Another moot phrase is “the social web.” The web has always been social because that’s how people operate - as Chris Brogan notes. It’s just that the Internet can scale such social connections more than the offline world ever could.

I was going to post a comment disagreeing, but David Rogers beat me to it:

All media is now social media?

This is kind of a weird assertion… You are conflating publishers with media.

PUBLISHERS: Yes, NYtimes and CNN (publishers) are now in the “social media” game (with their blogs, etc. online).

MEDIA: Newspapers (e.g. NYTimes print edition) and television broadcasts (e.g. CNN’s) are very much still not social media.

So yes, the traditional media publishers are all moving (stumbling?) into the social media sphere. But that does not provide any linguistic rationale for eliminating the term “social media.” Without it, how would we even discuss this movement by these publishers? (”Cable news channels are moving from… media… into… media.”)
[...]
We can’t even kill the term “social web” as an oxymoron yet either. Because, guess what? A lot of the web is still not social! The action and the growth may all be in social web properties, but have you not suffered recently through any of the gazillion pages of “broadcast” html still deployed by organizations worldwide?

And it is true; while the social web is edging into the mainstream (as I type, I’m also glancing over an email from MyFootballClub to buy tickets for the FA Trophy Final, which features their team, Ebbsfleet United), and conversely, some brands and media outlets are doing very well in social media (such as Sony’s excellent blogger relations for their latest Bravia ad) - the two are nowhere near the same. For every social media success story and high-fiving in the blogosphere there are a lot of brands who have not yet worked out how to best use online and appeal to a savvy, content-creating audience. It might not even works for them as their strategy stands. Though I don’t agree with Piaras Kelly’s agreement with Steve that social and traditional media are now indistinguishable, I definitely do agree with his proposition that agencies should be the catalyst for bringing the two together on a more strategic level:

The problem with PR is too often we get bogged down in the tactical end of things. Discussions I’ve had with people that focus on social media often reveal that the traditional PR guys come up with a plan, then say ‘Guys this is what we’re doing, we need you to do something with bloggers for it’, which is unfair as these guys should be involved from the start and offer their input into the overall campaign as ultimately it’s more realistic that they will be able to contribute this way.

Well enuniciated. I’m now thinking about how to roll that in with the connected agency ideas that we’ve previously discussed before…