Unless your associates are completely post-fact -- and that's increasingly common, although those people aren't persuadable anyway -- they're going to get tied to the real definition of socialism at some point. It's like debating people about what is or isn't capitalism (another term that's popularly nebulous). At some point, if the person is at least someone connected to reality, you can go to authoritative sources on the matter to establish what it really means. I won't deny that this is a whole process, but at least you're talking about socialism at that point, and they're not just shutting down the conversation out of hand.