Social Media Jargon Buster

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation.

SMO

Social Media Optimisation. The use of social media channels to deliver presence for your brand, or the seeding of links and content on social media channels to drive traffic to your site.

SOB

Now we know what you're thinking... but apparently SOB is also a term used to refer to a Successful and Outstanding Blog / Blogger.

Second Life

A 3-D virtual world, built and owned by its residents, which has approx 5m members. Started in 2003 by Linden Labs in San Francisco.

Seeding

Placing messages, pictures and videos on third party sites to generate reach or attract traffic back to your site.

Social Bookmarks

A simple method for internet users to store, search, organise, and most importantly - share web pages e.g Del.ici.ous and StumbleUpon.

Social Media

Social media is a term for the tools and platforms people use to publish, converse and share content online. The tools include blogs, wikis, podcasts, and sites to share photos and bookmarks.

Social networking sites are online places where users can create a profile for themselves, and then socialise with others using a range of social media tools including blogs, video, images, tagging, lists of friends, forums and messaging

Spambot

Automatic software robot that posts spam on a blog.

Splog

Spam Blogs, or blogs not providing their own or real content. Sploggers use automated tools to create fake blogs full of links or scraped content from other sites in order to boost search engine results. This is getting silly. Apparently a 'Plog' is a political blog but where does it end? A dlog = a blog about, or written by, dogs?

StartPage

A startpage - like Pageflakes, Netvibes or Google Personalised Home page - is web page that you can configure to pull in content from a range of web-based services including email, feeds from blogs and news services; a multi-purpose aggregator.

Streaming media

Audio (sound) or video (picture) files transmitted online that play as soon as they start being downloaded to your PC.

Synchronous

Communications that occur in real time, like chat, audio or video.

Syndication

The mass online sharing of content.