Regular readers know that I am not of a fan of the term “social media” — and I like “social networking” even less. I originally wrote about it back in September under the headline The era of social media is over – long live collaboration tools — and then last month, following a wonderful event by Web 2.0 guru Debbie Weil titled Social Networking: the Two Dirtiest Words in Gov 2.0 (a Sweets and Tweets event), I wrote Gov 2.0 moves beyond ’social media’ — and why it’s more than semantics.

And just out today, my December column in AFCEA’s SIGNAL magazine has been posted headlined The War on Social Media: The term does not represent the real value of these tools—collaboration.

Tonight, I’ll be on DC’s News Channel 8’s Federal News Tonight at 7:30p ET talking about this issue.

To be honest, this idea largely came from Harvard Business School Prof. Andrew McAfee, in his upcoming book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. The book is just out today — and McAfee spoke about the book, how these tools can help organizations accomplish their mission better, and why he is not a fan of the term “social networking” today on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris. Read more and hear the full conversation here.

“Most of the organizations that I teach don’t feel that they are running a social club, and that adjective actually turns them off,” McAfee tells Federal News Radio. These tools are about empowering people, not getting them out of the way, he said, so there is a social aspect to them, but the term just doesn’t end up being helpful.

Too often, we think about e-mail as a our collaboration tool, McAfee notes — and as I have written about, The First Step Toward Collaboration Is to Stop E-Mailing. But these collaboration tools are very different — information sharing is the reason they were created. It isn’t an afterthought.

There has been an extensive discussion about this subject online. Tomorrow, we’ll cull some of that discussion.

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