Social media and the tale of '300'

Everyone wants exposure for their blogs via "social media." Being seriously Dugg on the news-sharing site Digg is quite the rush, for example.

My DVD blog was among the first to report on the boxoffice for "300" the morning after the film debuted. Before long, my post become ground zero for Diggers' comments on that wildly anticipated film. Once the "300" story link made the top 10 lists (in entertainment, then the home page), the traffic meter went into overdrive and kept spinning for days. (I still get page views off all the comments attached to that piece.)

Digg's tech-savvy audience appears to be "blind" to Google links, but I did sell quite a few Spartan-related books and DVDs via contextual links to Amazon.

Heady stuff, but hard to repeat. Bloggers often try chumming traffic with "Digg bait" -- top 10 lists of "hottest" this or that are always, well, hot -- but content seems to work out best when you just worry about pleasing your audience.

Digg is always cited when "social media" comes up, same with My Space, but the definition of SM always seems a bit fuzzy. (Same with Web 2.0, but let's skip that one for now.) Does social media mean user-generated content? So is Amazon a giant social media site in addition to a retail giant?

Joe Marchese, an Online Spin writer over on Media Post, offers this in today's piece about "Defining Social Media":

What many of us are defining as social media today are actually just technologies specifically architected to facilitate people’s natural tendencies to seek out, share and discuss media content. Think about it. How is MySpace (a) social medium? I would certainly say that MySpace is the largest and most influential social media platform of our time, but it doesn’t create media (at least not for most of it). ...

Eventually all media will be social media in the most literal definition. This will have serious implications for media companies and advertisers alike, so it is important that we are not dismissing social media as the user-generated portion of the Internet.