Social Business Glossary v0.1

 

@ (+handle, e.g. @jessewilkins) Mechanism for directing content such as a Facebook post or Tweet to a particular user’s attention. Some services and clients will convert the @handle to a link which then takes the user to that handle’s account or page.

 

Activity stream Capability within certain tools to display the content a user has created over a period of time, or the aggregation of the user’s content and content created by the user’s contacts, and updated on a regular basis (or in real time).

 

Agent Search/query functionality that runs in background 24x7, allowing relevant information to be delivered to users as it arrives, and can filter information according to user preferences.

 

Aggregator

 

Alerts

 

Analytics See Social media analytics.

 

App Short for application. Most commonly refers to applications that can be self-provisioned from app stores and that are installed on mobile devices or certain social networking platforms.

 

App store A centralized repository of apps that users can download and install generally without IT’s assistance. Most mobile devices have an app store, though it may be referred to using a different term; some social media platforms and services also have app stores.

 

Application programming interface More commonly referred to as API.

 

Application server A server program that houses the business logic for an application, executing the operations necessary to complete transactions and other interactions between end users and a business’ back-end databases and applications. Application servers provide functionality such as load balancing, database access classes, transaction processing, and messaging.

 

Aggregation

 

Asynchronous communication Exchange of ideas and content that bridges time and space. In asynchronous communications all recipients need not be connected to each other at the same time; messages are stored and forwarded as recipients become available.

 

Authenticity

 

Avatar

 

Back channel

 

Badge

 

Blog Short for Web Log, a blog is a light-weight authoring platform, typically focused on a single-author model, primarily textual, although can include essentially any type of "multimedia" content as well. Commenting or other interaction methods are typically provided for audience participation. The lowered barrier of AUTHORSHIP with blogging platforms is credited with the more rapid adoption of such toolsets versus a traditional web authoring system. See also permalink and trackback.

 

Bookmark

 

Browser

 

Categories

 

Champion

 

Chat

 

Chat room Free-form, "real-time" communication channels, which may or may not have archives for historical views. Used primarily for "live" discussions, such as online meetings, in an enterprise setting.

 

Check-in

 

Classification Organization by categories in a systematic manner – for example grouping by subject, function or other criteria.

 

Client

 

Cloud computing

 

Clustering A term used in the context of document categorization to describe unsupervised methods for identifying classes of documents based on their similarity, typically using neural network or statistical methods.

 

Co-creation

 

Collaborative filtering A method of determining the relevance and/or "value" of content or other contributions, by the actions of individuals. May be influenced implicit actions (such as purchasing an item, indicating "popularity"), or explicit actions (such as a ranking or rating, whether textual or via

a rating mechanism such as 1-5 star reviews).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration_software

 

Collaboration Collaborative software, also known as groupware, is application software that integrates work on a single project by several concurrent users at separated workstations.

 

Collaborative editing

 

Comment

 

Community

 

Community management

 

Community manager

 

Community of interest A group of two or more people that share a common interest.

 

Community of practice A group of two or more people that share a common role,

responsibility or expertise.

 

Concept-based searching A search for information related conceptually (at a higher or lower level) to a keyword – rather than just those containing the specific term.

 

Contacts List of other users with whom the user has established some sort of relationship. Different services and tools use different terms for this, such as connections, friends, or followers/following.

 

Content moderator

 

Content scheduling

Tool that provides the ability for users to draft content and have it published at a particular time, for example every hour or every day at the same time

 

Crowdsourcing A problem-solving and idea-generating technique in which an organization provides details of a specific problem or situation to a group of people (crowd) for potential solutions. May be run as contests, with "prizes" ranging from public recognition, a payment for the "winning" idea, and potentially, a revenue share of the ultimate solution. Used for both simple and complex problems, although the "crowd" being targeted for feedback may need to be adjusted depending on the required experience/knowledge to provide relevant solutions.

 

Development

 

Discussion forums Asynchronous communication platform. The primary difference from BBSs was in the adoption of more open access methods to the forums themselves, whether via e-mail, or a web-based interface.

 

Embedding

 

Emergence Pattern analysis that detects issues/insights that arise out of a convergence of discrete actions. Analysis may be done by algorithms measuring facets of "interest" based on traffic, purchase habits, etc., or by humans observing patterns, such as popularity of blog entries by a simple count of the number of comments on an entry.

 

Empowerment

 

Engagement

 

Enterprise 2.0 A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.

 

Extensions Recommendations to related content, provided to a system user,

based on emergence from similar activity within the system.

 

Favorite

 

Feed See RSS.

 

Feedback Mechanisms established to create "emergent" indicators of the relevance and interest of content, communities, or contexts of Enterprise 2.0 systems. Dynamic and ongoing, the feedback systems and the emerging patterns may be overtly displayed (such as 1-5 star ratings on Amazon) or used to change the presentation or ranking of information.

 

FLATNESSES A framework for Enterprise 2.0 environments, developed by Dion Hinchcliffe. The acronym stands for: Freeform, Links, Authorship, Tags, Network-oriented, Extensions, Social, Search, Emergence and Signals.

 

Freeform A facet of FLATNESSES that refers to the ability to create content with little to no barriers, ease of use.

 

Folksonomy A practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In

contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites.

 

Follow

 

Geotagging

 

Governance

 

Government 2.0 1. The use of Web 2.0 technologies by government entities to conduct business. 2. The broader application of social business strategies and technologies such as openness, transparency, collaboration, crowdsourcing, and mashups to change the way government entities conduct business.

 

Group

 

Handle

 

Hashtag The identification of a keyword by prefixing it with the hashmark (#), e.g. #socialbusiness. Some services convert hashtags into search queries which then provide a mechanism to search for a particular topic

 

Hyperlink

 

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

 

Infographic

 

Innovation management Implementation of new ideas and discoveries, and the implementation of an innovation culture in an organization, to promote and make possible the development of new ideas and business opportunities. Innovation management consists of innovation strategy, culture, idea

management and implementation of innovation processes.

 

Lifestreaming

http://www.wordspy.com/words/lifestreaming.asp

 

Links The use of hard coded (i.e., XML, html) functionality that figuratively ties one piece of content to another. By selecting a link, the user traverses to the other end of the link.

 

Location-based service (LBS) Service that allows users to update their geographic location, often in real time using mobile devices equipped with Global Prepositioning Service (GPS) capabilities 

 

Mashup "A web page or application that combines data from two or more external online sources. The external sources are typically other web sites and their data may be obtained by the mashup developer in various ways including, but not limited to: APIs, XML feeds, and screen-scraping. Often built using APIs that provide a variety of ways to view the relationship between a mashup and any supporting APIs used to create that application." 

http://www.programmableweb.com/faq

 

Metadata A definition or description of data, often described as data about data. For example, the data of a newspaper story is the headline and the story, whereas the metadata describes who wrote it, when and where it was published, and what section of the newspaper it appears in. Metadata can help us determine who content is for and where, how, and when it should appear.

 

Microblog

Tool that allows users to create and publish very short pieces of content, often limited to the size of a SMS (text) message (160 characters). Also referred to as microsharing.

 

Monitoring

 

Navigation The practice of browsing a content repository using a classification scheme, such as a hierarchy.

 

Network-Oriented A facet of FLATNESSES that specifies that all content must be network-addressable.

 

OAuth

 

OpenID

 

Participation

 

Permalink

 

Personalization The process of tailoring pages to individual users’ characteristics or preferences. Commonly used to enhance customer service or ecommerce sales, personalization is sometimes referred to as one-to-one marketing, because the enterprise’s Web page is tailored to specifically target each individual consumer. Personalization is a means of meeting the customer’s needs more effectively and efficiently, making interactions faster and easier and, consequently, increasing customer satisfaction and the likelihood of repeat visits.

 

Platform-as-a-Service (Paas)

 

Podcasting Originally derived from "iPod Broadcasting". Sometimes called "The Multimedia blog" format. What separates a true "podcast" from simple embedded audio/video clips, is that a podcast channel may be subscribed to, using a feed, such as RSS or ATOM, so that users can consume this content by pulling that content, rather than being sent from a broadcaster out to a recipient.

 

Policy

 

Portal A user interface paradigm and development framework to provide the integration of content, community and process in a Single Point of Access (SPOA). Similar to a dashboard, although typically oriented more towards content than numerically or data-oriented information

display.

 

Portlet "Pluggable user interface components that are managed and displayed 

in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are

aggregated into a portal page."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlet

 

Procedure

 

Profile Depending on the service, may also be referred to as about, bio, details, etc.

 

QR code

 

Records management Field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic

control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of

records, including processes for capturing and maintaining evidence

of and information about business activities and transactions in the

form of records. - Source: ISO 15489.

 

Roadmap

 

RSS Really Simple Syndication. The most popular/prevalent SIGNAL from SLATES/FLATNESSES in Enterprise 2.0. Standards-based, and formatted as XML for easy consumption and transformation by feed readers, aggregators, dashboards, or mashup solutions. RSS (and ATOM, avariant feed type) are pull-based rather than push-based (as compared to e-mail, for example) communication streams.

 

SaaS See Software-as-a-Service.

 

Signals From SLATES/FLATNESSES model, Signals are used to actively notify users of new or updated content. Any mechanism that accomplishes the sending of a signal is valid, although RSS and ATOM tend to be the primary delivery vehicles. E-mail tends to be the fallback signal mechanism, due to its near-universal adoption, particularly in the enterprise.

 

Screencast

 

Sentiment (analysis?)

 

Share

 

Short Message Service (SMS)

 

SLATES A framework for Enterprise 2.0 environments, developed by Andrew McAfee. The acronym stands for: Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, and Signals.

 

Social analytics

 

Social business

 

Social bookmarking A form of tagging, done by individuals, to "remember in public" resources (based on URLs), and which communicates context and categorization which may not have been seen through a more formalized taxonomy-driven viewpoint. An example of this is http://www.delicious.com.

 

Social content management

 

Social gaming

 

Social media

 

Social media management system

 

Social networking Dynamic "relationship" (friend, co-worker, family, employer, etc.) building, social networking is foremost about person-to-person connections, and not necessarily "community" or collaboration. Without being linked or integrated into a communication platform (e.g., discussion forum), the value of being able to use the established network is harder to achieve, as discussions are taken out of context into another channel. Facebook and LinkedIn are prime examples of consumer-facing Social Networking sites.

 

Social Network Analysis (SNA) A toolkit and set of methodologies used to uncover the patterns of interactions within a social network. In an organizational setting, SNA may be used to uncover "how work is actually done" vs. a traditional organizational chart of the division of labor. It may be used to identify bottlenecks, or hidden key players who facilitate work outside of what is "normally" seen as their role. The outcome of SNA is frequently a visualization of the network, showing the numbers of connections

between participants, the strength of connections, and in some cases, the volume of interactions (such as e-mail, phone, etc.).

 

Social platform

Tool that provides a number of social technology capabilities, such as blogging, microblogging, wikis, and

social networking, within a single application suite.

 

Social profile Tool that allows users to create a single profile that aggregates their personal and social profile information.

 

Social search

 

Social sharing Tool that allows users to upload content (photos, videos, documents, presentations, etc.) for the purpose of sharing it. These tools also often allow other users to download content, subscribe to a particular user, rate content, or share it easily through a provided link. 

 

Social syndication Tool that allows a user to create a piece of content once and then publish it to a number of sites in one action. 

 

Social voting

Tool that allows users to vote on the quality, usefulness, etc. of a given piece of content. Most frequently used to describe social news sites (e.g. Digg, Slashdot) or ratings/recommendations features (e.g. Amazon Recommendations).

 

 

Software-As-A-Service (SaaS)

 

Status update

 

Strategy

 

Subscribing

 

Synchronous communication

 

Syndication A method of distributing content, frequently based on standards such as RSS and ATOM, to share content between systems directly, with cross-linking between the sender and receiver. Used to distributed content to a broader audience, to provide an ability to "mashup" content/data between systems, and move and re-use rather than copy (or duplicate) content.

 

Tag cloud

 

Tagging See metadata for underlying definition. Tagging tends to refer to activities such as social bookmarking, where users rather than administrators, authors or taxonomists provide metadata for purposes of navigation or search. See Folksonomy as well.

 

Terms of service

 

Thread

 

Trackback

 

Transparency

The property of Enterprise 2.0 systems that allows greater visibility into information and collaboration flow, allowing participants to understand and participate in both lower- and higher-levels. Tied to the tendency of these systems to break information out of siloed systems, and into a larger context. Key to information sharing capabilties, if not to participative decision making processes.

 

Unfriend

 

Unfollow

 

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

 

URL shortener Service that converts a long URL (e.g. http://www.aiim.org/training/socialbusiness/governance) into a much shorter one (e.g. www.bit.ly/aiimsmg) to save character space on microblogging and text messaging platforms.

 

User-generated content

 

Virtual world

 

Voice over IP (VoIP)

 

Voting One of the simplest forms of social interactions in information systems, providing a yes/no, thumbs up/down aspect of feedback that can provide visual or other indicators to other users, as well as in manipulating the ranking/ordering of presented information.

 

Web 2.0 Term coined/popularized by Tim O'Reilly in 2004. Refers to characteristics separating Web 1.0 (the initial popularization of the World Wide Web), from "modern" web applications.

 

Web conferencing Tool that allows multiple users to engage in web-based teleconferencing. May also include other web-based collaboration capabilities such as desktop or application sharing, chat, or videoconferencing.

 

Workstreaming The "professional" and enterprise-focused variation of Lifestreaming (see definition). Used in particular to allow disconnected/disparate team members to remain aware of their teammates ongoing work activity, in place of traditional "water cooler" chats or hallway meetings.

 

Widget Tool that provides specific application functionality that can be embedded into a web page or portal. See also app.

 

Wiki A Wiki is server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web content using a browser. It supports hyperlinks, has a simple text syntax (at minimum) for creating new pages and cross-links between internal pages on the fly. Contributors can edit content as well as the organization of content in a wiki platform. Wikis are frequently associated with the AUTHORSHIP aspects of the SLATES/FLATNESSES models.