We got several ‘thank you’ mails post our blog post on explaining blog terms. We feel humbled on that and would like to continue with one more such explanatory mail on social media. As the term catches on, it becomes important to clarify all the related jargon that will flow along with it.

Here goes few of them:

Community – It is a group or forum of people with some similarity between them (could be same city, school, interest, hobbies etc) come together on social networking site or any other platform and share their ideas and views. Join our Windchimes communities on Linked In and Facebook

Keyword – The word that a user enters into a search engine to gather information on.

Link – An element on a web page or blog that can be clicked on to move on to another page or another section of the same page.

Micro site – It is a supplementary web page that is a part of the parent web site. It is typically used to highlight specific information or purpose as compared to the parent web site that would be more generic in nature.

Page Rank – A value between 0 to 10 assigned by the Google algorithm that quantifies a particular link’s popularity and trust.

Podcasting – It is a contraction of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcasting’. However it is not restricted to iPod only. Unlike a broadcast, podcast can be downloaded to any MP3 player and then viewed at any time later without Internet connection.

Portal – A site or service which offers a wide array of features to users in an attempt to make that portal their ‘home page’ on the web. There are two kinds of portals – Vertical and Horizontal. The former has more in depth information and links related to a particular sector while the latter covers topics that are more generic and broad in nature. Rediff, Yahoo, and MSN are examples of portals.

PPC (Pay Per Click) – It is a contextual advertisement package wherein the advertiser pays the channel (such as Google, Yahoo) only when an user clicks on their advertisement link that appears on relevant sites. ‘Adwords’ is the most common example of PPC advertising.

Search Engine – It is a program that helps a user search for a document by using specific key words or key phrases.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – It is a form of paid Internet marketing that promotes and increases visibility of a particular website when people use in specific related key words. It is usually on the right side of google search page is marked in different colour.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – It is the process of increasing the volume of traffic to a web site from search engines for targeted keywords. In our searches, the higher a site lists, the more searchers will visit that site.

Site map – It is a page on a website that links to every other page on that site. It helps user by clarifying the data structure of the site. See Windchimes Site map

Social bookmarking – It is similar to ‘favourite’ in Internet explorer just that here your bookmarks are stored on Internet with you.  That way you can access them from any computer. Also you can share them with specified group or with all. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine. Here is an example of social bookmark

Social Media Optimizing (SMO)– It helps the user increase his own blog visibility and presence on web space. This can be done by adding links / back links with other blogs, using user voting services such as Digg, Reddit and social book marking sites like Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily searched for

Social Media Release (SMR) – It is designed to get the conversation going by providing readers with the ability to disseminate information and multimedia, bookmark and share the content, and in turn, spark threads. It also serves a purpose of providing information to new media influencers in one package

Social Networking Site (SNS) – It is place where people can register and upload and share their personal information including photos, audio and videos with friends. Best examples of SN sites are facebook, orkut, big adda etc

Viral Marketing – The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to create messages that appeal to a particular segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive games, ebooks, images, or even text messages

Web 2.0 – This term has been coined for websites that encourage user interaction, participation and collaboration.

Widget – It is also known as plug in. Widgets are codes that can be embedded within a web page or blog. These are usually made by third party.

Wikipedia – (Definition taken from wikipedia itself) It is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. The name is a contraction of the words wiki and encyclopedia. It attempts to collect and summarize all human knowledge in every major language

Word of Mouth – Information that is passed on between individuals, especially recommendations, in an informal, person-to-person manner is called as word of mouth. WOM is typically a face-to-face spoken communication, although phone conversations, text messages, blog posts, message board threads, instant messages and emails are now included are part of it

Do write in your comments about the same in case you would like us to continue with this series or junk it. We would love to hear from you. Having got the terms in place, it would be good idea to read Essentials of a Blog and Essentials of a Website series of posts.