Can we kill the term social?

Social this! Social that! Is that social?

We get it corporations, you really want to be social!! You’ve adopted facebook to market your brand, you tweet your little hearts out, you’ve got your pinterest boards, and you can out instagram the most selfie obsessed teen in the world. BUT PLEASE STOP SAYING SOCIAL!

NOT EVER ONLINE “SOCIAL” INTERACTION NEEDS TO BE CALLED SOCIAL!

Don’t get me wrong, I understand your need to allow employees to better communicate. Email is so so; those week long email chains just get overwhelming. Global enviroments have forced you to find solutions to keeping all your employess connected. But let’s be honest your intranet with blogs and boards is NOT SOCIAL! Stop adding more corporate buzzwords!

Social Media is just that, media. Somehow you’ve managed to highjacked the term socail to mean only online interactions. And with every video and announcement proclaiming social being the future of business, I roll my eyes. Please stop!

Social: relating to or involving activities in which people spend time talking to each other or doing enjoyable things with each other

SOCIAL IS MORE THAN JUST ONLINE. AND YOU SOUND OLD WHEN YOU USE IT IN THAT WAY

Maybe it is some belated teenage rebillion that makes me want to scream everytime I hear a business say they need to be “social” or it’s cause I just sat through a three hour meeting where the word was used in every other sentence. If you spent your adolescents growing up with facebook, twitter, and tumblr; you don’t think of it as social. It is just something you do.

I don’t view online sharing as social; It’s more like shouting out into the void while debating if you are going to put pants on for the day.

Sure there is an ounce of socialness with all facebook, twitter, tumblr, and whatever new media has arisen in the last week to occupy our time. I can post a picture or write a new status, and of couse hashtag the hell out of it, but am I really being social. Maybe it is my nostalgia of past sleepovers were the night ends mid-converstation out of pure exhaustion or the excitement of getting my mother to FINALLY agree to drive my friends to the movies. Those events where the highlight of little preteen social life. And that’s were businesses just don’t understand being social; it’s not about how much how much you can share, it is about your interactions with other people.