I think we can all agree that site owners are interested in "social networking" as the mechanism by which their content is shared and discovered by people passing links around. Essentially, the propagation of "word of mouth".
But they've been tracking data based on a definition of "social networking" that only includes the big social networking sites.
And that when they broaden the definition to "this traffic is the likely result of social networking" to "someone has directly requested a deep link without referrer data", they see that even the sum of traffic from all those huge sites is just the tip of the iceberg.
Which comports what we all already know. Which is that Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/et al didn't invent any new social behaviors. They just aggregated large chunks of them.
I think we can all agree that site owners are interested in "social networking" as the mechanism by which their content is shared and discovered by people passing links around. Essentially, the propagation of "word of mouth".
But they've been tracking data based on a definition of "social networking" that only includes the big social networking sites.
And that when they broaden the definition to "this traffic is the likely result of social networking" to "someone has directly requested a deep link without referrer data", they see that even the sum of traffic from all those huge sites is just the tip of the iceberg.
Which comports what we all already know. Which is that Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/et al didn't invent any new social behaviors. They just aggregated large chunks of them.