B2C? Nope. B2B? Somewhat. G2G? Bingo!

When people begin talking about social media, it's generally helpful to narrow the conversation to keep everybody on the same page. Social media is a broad concept, and one size certainly does not fit all.

At the most basic level, social media simply means that anybody can publish content on the Web. Everybody has a voice (if they choose to use it).

Like "Social Media," words like "Food," "Books" and "History" are nebulous and generic until modified. What kind of food? What genre of book? What period of history? As the focus narrows, the topic becomes more specific and meaningful.

Because social media includes everything from kids on MySpace to mood tweets on Twitter to the 133 million blogs that have popped up since 1999 (according to Technorati), business people typically begin by narrowing the focus to commerce-related domains like B2C (Business to Consumer) or B2B (Business to Business).

Such domains are only partially relevant to what social media means to Synopsys. We don't sell widgets to consumers, so forget B2C. And even though we're a business that communicates with other businesses, B2B is too broad a domain to add much meaning.

For example, Intuit is a Mountain View-based software company that sells QuickBooks to a target audience measured in the millions. They are certainly B2B, but pursuing a completely different business model than ours. Other companies like Cisco, SAP and Intel are also classically B2B, but each pursues marketing and communication goals with a much broader audience than, say, the 50,000 or so EEs doing chip design.

So when Rich Goldman recently coined the term G2G (Geek to Geek), we suddenly had a context to narrow social media to a scope that matches our business objectives.

Social media at Synopsys = G2G.

That's an important definition – and helpful guidepost – as we chart the course ahead.