Social Media - Beginnings and Characteristics

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is still a very fresh, exciting and risky medium for marketers. It continues to be developed everyday by the internet audience, social media sites and the few brave marketers who have taken the plunge into this promising ocean. At Apollo Media, we thought we’d take a step back for a moment and look into the not-so-distant past, to the origins of Social Media.

Although it appears websites like MySpace and Facebook suddenly cropped up, the Social Media explosion didn’t happen overnight. You might be surprised to know that major networking sites as we know them have been evolving for over a decade.

It all started in 1997 with a social networking site by the name of Six Degrees. This innovative website sought to bring people together online and followed the general principles that have shaped social media:

  • User profiles - a feature already available on dating sites.
  • List of Friends - used at the time on sites like ICQ and other messaging platforms.
  • Share Friends with others - offered singularly on sites like classmates.com.

Fast forward to the Year 2000 where SixDegrees.com closed down due to the following reasons:

  • Users were uncomfortable putting information online and interacting with strangers.
  • The users’ network was not online simply because the internet hadn’t caught on yet.
  • Too early for its time. People didn’t really get it, what it was for and how they could use it.

Despite the early demise of Six Degrees, it helped establish the central characteristics of Social Media that would be later fine-tuned and elaborated on, expanding its appeal to a wider user base.

Defining Social Media

“Social Media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.” (Source: Wikipedia)

All social media websites share 3 main characteristics:

  1. Public or semi-public profiles for users.
  2. Members connect with one another because they have some sort of shared interest.
  3. Members can view and connect with other individuals (friends or friends of friends).

In addition, the most popular SM sites seem to have the following features in common:

  • Services allow for user-generated content.
  • A reward system is set up to encourage member participation.


Can you help define social media? Leave your comments in the section below.


Stay tuned for A Brief History of Social Media - Part 2, where we discuss the social media revolution, starting with the rise and fall of Friendster and tracking the social media progression into a mainstream phenomenon.