Social media includes web-based and mobile based technologies which are used to turn communication into interactive dialogue between organizations, communities, and individuals. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Social media is ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable communication techniques.

Social media technologies take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons article published in 2010. According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (e.g., Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), content communities (e.g., YouTube), social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms. Social media sites are sites like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and MySpace

Erik Qualman (born 1972) is an American author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business, and is a speaker within the Internet community. In 2010, Socialnomics was a Book of the Year finalist as voted on by the American Marketing Association. He is a columnist for Search Engine Watch and ClickZ Magazine.

Qualman was born and grew up outside of Detroit, Michigan in Rochester Hills. He attended Michigan State University receiving a BA in Marketing. While at Michigan State (1990–1994) he was named Academic All-Big 10 for Basketball. Qualman also holds an MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas (1999). In 2011 Qualman gave the keynote address to the McCombs graduating class on the Austin, Texas campus.

He is currently the Global Vice President of Digital Marketing for EF Education headquartered in Lucerne, Switzerland and a Professor of Digital Marketing for Hult International Business School's Masters program. Prior to joining EF Education and Hult, Qualman worked in online marketing and eBusiness functions at Cadillac & Pontiac (1994–97), AT&T (1998–2000), Yahoo (2000–03), EarthLink (2003–05) and Travelzoo (Head of Marketing 2005-08).