Social Media Has Changed Everything! Really! Except It Hasn't.
4 min read
I've stumbled across a few conversations recently where people have been trying to push the notion that, as a result of social media, the audience has changed.
Social media has changed what interactions look like, but they haven't changed the nature of interaction.
The idea that social media has wrought a change in human nature is laughable. Two things, however, have shifted: more people now have the means to join in the conversation; and the combination of better search and social networks make it easier to find the conversations that are relevant to you.
As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to engage in a one sided conversation. It has also become increasingly difficult to control your message, or even to stay on top of/ahead of where your message goes.
A recent and ongoing example: at the NYSCATE conference, a vendor selling filtering tools titled his presentation The Enemy Within: Stop Students from Bypassing Your Web Filters. As one might suspect, there were people who took issue with the title, and began leaving comments on the editable web page linked to earlier in this paragraph (also, on the chance that the company doing the presentation would attempt to control some of the PR fallout by deleting the page, I took a snapshot of it, available here).
This situation provides a perfect example of what has changed, and what hasn't. Here's our situation:
1. A vendor/sponsor does a session at an education conference. Someone (probably the marketing folks) comes up with a "cute" title -- this title also happens to be offensive, but in defense of marketers they are not often the best to spot these issues.
So, far, nothing new.
2. In the olden days before social media, the people at the conference would have been offended. Maybe someone would have brought it up during the session. Maybe someone would have written a letter to the company, or the conference organizers. However, the key factor: some people would have been annoyed. The people who were annoyed, however, would have lacked the means to convey their dissatisfaction to a broader audience.
3. Now, however, people are annoyed. They are blogging about it. They are posting about it on Twitter. And the wiki page created for the presentation is filled (for now, anyways) with comments registering this disapproval.
The disapproval is not new. The means for expressing it, and the means by which the topic can be discovered, however, have changed.
The lessons from all this:
First, if you're going to try and be cute, make sure you're not saying anything offensive. Nothing destroys cute like offensive.
Second, let your work be your publicity. Do good things. Talk about them. If you're worried about the balance between doing good things and talking about what you are doing, err on the side of doing.
Third, if you can't be fully transparent about what you are doing, be transparent about your reasons why. The intarwebs hate bullshit artists. Just ask anyone who tried to sell Vista or host a Windows 7 launch party.
But most importantly: realize social media exists, and realize that -- to a small but growing segment of the population -- it matters. Talk with people. This doesn't mean that you should hire a "social media guru," as this is the equivalent of buying digital snake oil. And if you are trying to figure out how or why the audience has changed, stop wasting your time. The audience hasn't changed. They can just talk now. And good companies doing good things will know enough to listen.
The meme, however, that social media has changed everything is all around us, and really, it is time it went away. It gets in the way of more people understanding how to use the communication channels that are currently available. It's also worth noting that an effective use of social media involves listening, a markedly low-tech skill.
