The BBC have hired us to work with them looking at the overlap between their enthusiastic entry into the world of social media (especially blogs) and their responsibility to be accountable to the people who pay their licence fee. This is getting us into some extremely interesting conversations with some brilliant people at the BBC, but the conversation has now also widened to address the public as well - scarily (and ironically given my earlier thoughts on the subject), I've just published a post to that end on the BBC Internet Blog from beyond the grave (or beyond the P45 at least).

Matthew

Is Amazon's collaborative filtering social? Is democracy social? Is the BBC iPlayer a piece of social media?

We recently had an interesting debate at one of our BBC training sessions about whether what Amazon does with its website could really be considered "social media". We certainly define it thus, but one of our session attendees asked whether its maths-driven recommendations could be considered this way. Isn't it just good sales analysis (albeit on steroids)? Is it "social" to use the combined knowledge of the activity of all one's customers to make better recommendations for each customer in particular? Our debate hinged on whether a customer or user needed to be conscious of their involvement, or active in their participation to make something "social".

In many ways this could be thought of as really just a semantic debate, a quarrel about the term social, but it did get me thinking about what it means to know something about large numbers of people. Marketing people obsess about this kind of knowledge, hoping it will strengthen the effectiveness of their message. But marketing rarely feels social. National scale democracy polls as many as possible to form a picture of opinions across society, but to me often doesn't feel particularly social. Oddly, it often feels utterly disconnected from the place I live, the people I know and the things I think about.

We were asked whether we thought the BBC's iPlayer was a piece of social media. Our off the cuff answer was that it isn't, primarily because it makes no attempt to learn from its users.

So maybe being social is about intent: that knowledge about the group which benefits members of the group can be a social good. That learning about users and trying to improve a service with that knowledge is as social as having comments on page or shared interest forums. To be frank, we haven't come to any hard and fast answers on this one; maybe there aren't any. But thoughts on the matter are welcome...

Justin and Simon