My problem with social media

I have a problem:

I have:
* 1230 contacts on Facebook.
* 315+ followers on Twitter.
* I run an Internet startup that's about sharing media.
And I'm not sure what "Social Media" means.

I understand it's a buzz word. Something like the media (news, video, music etc), but made social.

You've probably heard it a lot too. Twitter is social media, there's hundreds of  social media conferences, social media experts. But what does the word actually mean?

A definition:

According to this guy social media is "people having conversations online". He even made us a nice list:

social media = (micro)blogs + chat + rss + widgets + social networks + bookmarks + forums + podcasts + video/photo sharing + virtual worlds + wikis

That seems pretty vague.

When the average person talks about media, he/she thinks TV, magazines, different types of vectors of information.

So what's a social medium? I would define that as a way to spread information, directly between users. The idea is that they are about simple people, not companies. And about dialog, not just one way communication.

Not B2B, not B2C, but maybe peer to peer. I know, more umbrella terms.

The problem:

So, which vectors can people use to spread their content easily?

Of course, the Internet comes to mind. Podcasting, blogging, wikis, media sharing sites are obvious methods.

Less obvious would be forums, in their pure technical sense, but places like SomethingAwful have shown they can be platforms for media sharing, and not simply discussion.

But does social media need to be online? What about fanzines? amateur tv and radio channels? They're definitely as social as some of the examples above. And they're definitely media.

Yet you'll never hear a "social media expert" talk about those. Instead you'll hear about joining "the conversation", and optimizing your online media presence.

So what is it then?

It seems that all social media seems to be online. And it seems to be mostly about sending a traditional message to the same recipients as before, just using different means, and getting more feedback.

So should we start calling those "Online media" or "Interactive media"?