I'm hearing these two terms interchanged quite a bit lately, and am liking it. After glancing at an article in Wired Magazine's April issue about social media advertising, I was reminded that many people mistakenly define the advertising within social media networks as the fulcrum of social media marketing.

An effective tactic? Maybe as much as any banner advertising. The pivot point upon which all other social media efforts rest? Far from it. James Clark had a good social media program post on Capture the Conversation today about the "marinade" needed to address the word of mouth (most effective) side of social media.

I was listening to a podcast of Kris Smith interviewing Chris Brogan, Chris Heuer and Chris Messina at the recent South by Southwest event. Hey, that's a lot of Chris's (stay tuned for the "Chris Conference").

One of the more significant statements to me was in the opening of the podcast when one of the Chris's said the fragmentation of social media is starting to wear on people. Other than companies trying to catch the "video boat," businesses are really beginning to look for aggregation tools that leverage the many social media web applications and properties.

This couldn't be truer. And although more aggregation tools keep popping up, they are not keeping up with the formation rate of social networks and communities (whether they consist of 30 people or 300,000). Can they ever?

For social media marketers, this is good news. But it also brings on new challenges because staying on the bleeding edge of online marketing means you are the pioneer when it comes to determining which efforts are relevant and impactful to your client. 

You can keep up with what many of the experts are saying, but must ultimately take action yourself (and learn from it). We must also keep in mind that the fragmentation of social media certainly isn't limited to the tools. Afterall, it's really about the people. 

My first and only twitter post, admittedly not that long ago, was "trying to figure out why I just created a twitter account." I would repeat Stepan's statement of "twitter me insane," regularly. I quickly concurred with a respected marketing director's recent opinion of how twitter was such a wasteful exercize in vanity.

Now I am EATING MY WORDS. A few posts ago I mentioned the research related to 42% of A-list bloggers postiviely responding to an outside pitch incentivizing them to write about something (i.e. a pitch from a public relations or social media agency).

That topic, in and of itself, is a white paper waiting to happen - but an obvious consideration is the method by which an agency might effectively reach out to an influential blogger. I'm happy to say my social media agency now knows from experience that when email isn't working to reach out to influential people, twitter can be (and the results have translated into valuable and relevant coverage for our clients).

And forgive me if I'm just cluing into the obvious - but it took me a while to re-accept that some people I know prefer to communicate with others via texting simply because vital information can quickly be communicated without the expectation of a lengthy email or phone conversation as the receipt. 

If I'm receiving tons of email because of my influential prowess online, seems obvious I would embrace twitter.

illustration credit: Deborah Goss