Hi Mary, Thanks for the comment. I don’t know much at all about the history of the term “social media” and appreciate learning more. Blog post revised accordingly 🙂

Tina Sharkey may have purchased the name, socialmedia.com in 1999. But no one used it anywhere.. and there were only 2 or 3 references to it online prior to 2004, when the Blogon conference happened (it’s mentioned on P2 of the Forbes article you cite here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2010/12/09/who-coined-social-media-web-pioneers-compete-for-credit/#71b367751161).

Basically.. as a term or meme, it had no resonance prior to 2004 and Blogon. I scoured the web for references then as I wanted to cite them and couldn’t find anything at all using the term in 2004 or later in advanced google search or archive.org. But I forced the rest of the group making Blogon to use it as the tag line and descriptor for that even. They agreed about 2 months ahead of the conf, and then about a month before the event, I went on vacation to Barcelona for 10 days. During the trip I checked email to find that the rest of our team had *changed back* to “social software” and other terms, removing “social media” from our tag line and everywhere else. I had to force them back to our agreed upon verbage.. and blogged the heck out of it at my blog, Napsterization, as well as putting it everywhere.

The conf allowed 300.. and it was full of the leading bloggers etc of the day.. and yet we still had 100 crashers.. it was almost a security disaster as UCBerkeley’s Haas school where they had a freak out over the numbers.. but we managed it. But what the size, oversubscription and term use meant was.. this conference had defined the term, the discussion and now, everyone at big and small tech companies doing anything emergently Web2.0 started using the term, the press followed and it was a meme that stuck.

I don’t take credit for inventing it.. though I “made it up,” as it were, to describe what I was seeing in blogging and other self expression online — because it wasn’t social software or professional or legacy media. And I did force
‘social media’ to the forefront and so I do take credit for doing that at Blogon 2004.

Forbes is clueless.. they didn’t even blog in 2004 so how would they know? And they didn’t even use advanced search at google and archive.org to find the earliest references — or they would see what I’m saying is correct as to the origin of the meme. I’ll send this along to the author.. if he’s still there as well.

Mary