Last night on Twitter, Greg Verdino left the following twit:
“i was trying to explain stumbleupon to my wife and said, “it’s like digg” – she had no idea what i was talking about. reality check people.”
Yep. A couple of months ago I asked a group of 20 somethings if they had ever heard of Twitter. All I got was blank stares.
I bet if you took a national survey of people, say, under 60, and asked them if they’ve ever heard of Twitter, Digg, Jiaku, Pownce, Mark Zuckerberg, de.licio.us, Hulu, the social graph, Gawker, BoingBoing, Jason Calacanis, technorati, bacn, or Ning, the overwhelming amount would not have heard of most or even any of the above, they would have no idea what you were talking about and you’d be greeted by blank stares.
This led me to wonder if many of us in social media are stuck inside our own walled garden. Our we so caught up in what we do – it being cutting edge and all – that we’re forgetting how most people out there aren’t on a big social media network, don’t have a blog, and are more interested in maintaining there relationships of friends and family while being offline?
I’m thinking that, at times, we all too often get too caught up in reading each other’s blogs, following one another on Twitter, and friending one another on Facebook that we end up overvaluing our experiences by thinking that either everyone else feels the same way – or they will live just like us because we are on the cutting edge.
But is this cutting edge really just that? Are we pioneers? Or well-intentioned semi-fanatics? As we clamor to post the latest Utterz about our drive into work, or twitter that we’re going to eat a bowl of spaghetti, are we forgetting that in the non-social networking world, information like that is completely mundane? Meaning that no one really gives a shit?
It’s not so much that there has to be a happy medium, but we in social media/marketing MUST seek to understand what the general public is doing out there. Because we could easily come off as being closed off from reality. Which we may well be.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
The short answer is yes, we are in a sort of echo chamber when it comes to all of these tools. The majority of the public has no idea and use for them…yet.
A few points: one, I get the strong sense that many PR/marketing/communications firms use this as an excuse not to get into social media and really learn what it is about. Maybe it takes too much work, maybe they are waiting to see which tools survive an “attention crash” and maybe they are hoping it’s all just a fad that will go away if they ignore it. None of those reasons are valid for ignoring social media.
Two, the “not yet” matters. Social media isn’t going away. Just because your group of 20-somethings didn’t know what twitter was when you asked them, my guess is that a fair number of them are on Facebook and/or MySpace. It’s really just a matter of time before Twitter hits in a big way (a good thing too, maybe give it some time to scale up so it’s not so flaky).
The bottom line: it’s incumbent upon communications professionals to not only understand *how* people are currently communicating, but to also try and determine how the public *might* communicate in the future. I’m sure there were people who thought the telegraph/telephone/fax machine, etc. would not be relevant! There is nothing wrong with learning the tools on the bleeding edge, you just can’t lose sight of the here and now while you are learning.
Great response. And yes, yes, we in social media – no, strike that – in marketing overall MUST learn about this stuff.
But my concern is that many forget that others are not adopting (or may not ever adopt) a lot of the tools that we use. These tools may in actuality be very useful, and here to stay, but they may be more for us insiders. i.e. most highly ranked stories on Digg are related to technology.
A couple of weeks ago Target was getting reamed by the blogsphere…but were they really hurt? Many bloggers felt they would be, but it turned out to be a very small event.
We’re just all early adopters. 95% of what we talk about isn’t understood by the public today, but in five years it is.
People did not understand SixDegrees (circa 1997) and Ryze (circa (2001), but they get MySpace and Facebook don’t they?
They didn’t understand blogging back in 2002, but they certainly understand TMZ, Autoblog, Joystiq, PerezHilton, and Engadget don’t they?
The real challenge for folks in our industry is to take the complicated and make it obvious. Blogs and social networks are obvious today, but were confounding five years ago.
Social search (Mahalo), social news (digg, propeller, reddit), and social bookmarking (stumbleupon and delicious) are going to be confounding to some for some period of time…. then they will be obvious.
That’s the fun part of what we all do isn’t it?
best j
Another element that is important to recognize here is that what is going on in social media and forms of PR is truly new. It is a new arena that everyone is playing with. Some will fail and some will succeed and this will really depend on what theoretical ideas are most easily translated into actual useful tools or products.
Well, Saul, there are lots of people who will disagree with you, but they’re using new tools with old models. What *we* do is indeed completely new but what lots of other practitioners do isn’t new… same shit, new tools.
Do you really need to tell everyone what you are eating at the moment? (just an example) Is it really that important?…..Stop blogging and go have a conversation with a real person. Call your mother, don’t post something for her to read. Social networking is great, I love it, but only to a certain degree.
Stop being web 2.0, new media twats!
StumbleUpon is one of the greatest things to ever happen to the internet, but every once in a while I have to set my laptop down, turn my iPhone off and go interact with actual humans. I know it sounds weird.
I am eating pistachios.
*head in hands* defense rests……twats
Hi Chris. Great post! Better late to the comment party than never. Following up on Jason’s comment about people not getting ideas when they first come out. The role that early adopters play is to take raw ideas and technological “seeds” and develop them onto tools, products and systems that are seen by the other 98% as useful or valuable. That role is not limited to marketers but rather innovators from all kinds of backgrounds (but we do tend to get really excited by shiny new stuff)
Chris Penn has been talking a bunch in the last few months about being stuck in the fishbowl. Same difference really.
If you pour the fishbowl into the ocean, will all the fish survive? Some will, some won’t. It’s more about expanding the fishbowl, making it bigger so more people can swim and learn.
This is why NewBCamp and those like it are so important to social media. Making an effort to introduce a blog to a friend or helping them get set up on iTunes and subscribe to a few podcasts, taking steps to teach others outside what it is we’re all hyped up about will allow the bowl to expand or the gate to the garden to open.
Your Metaphor May Vary. ;)