Like Stephanie V, the primary connotation is "douchebag" for me. The only people who seem to need a term for the technology set ("social media") is douchebags who are outside it trying to figure out how to exploit it. Those who are in it with no further motivations beyond enhancing their personal lives don't need a term for it all. They just say specific things like "I posted on your Facebook wall" or "Did you see my tweet?" Try using the term "social media" in a sentence in a positive sense, and where you identify with the term, without sounding like a douchebag. Any of this sound like something you'd be caught saying?

• "I am a social media professional"
• "I am a consultant, I help small businesses use social media to connect with their customers."
• "I work in social media"
• "I do social media for Microsoft"

Working on the technology side is slightly more respectable ("I do social media analytics" or "I build Facebook apps and other social media tools for clients.")

Quora is partly responsible for the connotation. I thought that before, but the right label didn't occur to me till I heard the term on Quora.

A survey on social media use in content marketing that I just saw broke out "blogging" separately from "other social media."

That's the reality of it. The only piece of social media that has acquired a modest amount of depth and credibility is the blogosphere. The creative potential of other media being limited, the most you can do there professionally is douchebaggery.

Quality audio, video and slideshows have great potential of course, but they are also much harder to do than pure text. So those tend to be full of either junk or douchebaggery as well.