Social media isn’t about personal relationships
Posted: November 20th, 2009 | Author: Ron Bronson | Filed under: Ideas, Social Media, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | Tags: mass media, Online Communities, Social Media, Twitter | 8 Comments »You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Social media isn’t about personal relationships”.
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1. Yes social media IS about building relationships.
2. You are narrowly focused only on twitter which I can tell you that now I ONLY follow people that I’ve meet or true thought leaders. So you might want change the title to only focus on twitter or the article to cover all these channels.
3. I don’t consider myself a social media expert, but others might. With that said I’ve been telling people for well over a year now that social media comes last in their internet marketing toolkit.
So from a business standpoint true maybe the business doesn’t need to fully engage, but it’s called social for a reason. I’ve meet and started incredible relationships around the US with wonderful people through the web and if that’s not social media then I don’t know what is.
Thanks for the perspective, Kyle.
I was speaking to a very specific demographic and using Twitter an example, but it’s covering a broader point about how certain people view and engage social media tools.
I laugh a lot when I think about how many people I’ve met through the web since ’95 or so, that I still keep in contact with and count among my best friends to this day and the higher ed connections I’ve made in the past year or so of this blog have been astounding.
But that’s the trick. We have a community that connects us. Lots of other people meet their significant others this way and so forth. Folks like us though, are still anomalies though and it’d be a mistake for us to assume that we’re the majority and that lots of people have the luxury of using the tools this way for something as simple as the lack of a job that affords them the time.
For us as people who communicate the usefulness of these tools to a bevy of people, it’s just important to understand how other people engage these tools and how they see them from the perspective of the outsider. They might not even be non-tech savvy, I know plenty of digitally savvy folks who could really use a tool like Twitter, Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn or [insert your favorite social tool of the week where we have beta accounts here..] and the bottom line is, it doesn’t make one iota.
Why? Because we’re not mass market. We think we are and that’s the mistake that many of us assume. That “our world” reflects some greater world that’s out there that everyone could benefit from if they just knew how to do it. On one hand, it represents a market opportunity. But on another, the recognition of the barriers that prevent that from being a realistic strategic posture can only make us better at what we do.
And that was my point, in a somewhat round about way. :
Interesting post. I agree with Kyle that social media is by definition social. If you’re talking about social networks in particular, by definition you’re talking about relationships. I agree with you that not every individual needs to participate, and in my opinion Twitter in particular is less directly social than other networks. If you’re job requires Web strategy and/or marketing, especially in higher education, you MUST start learning how social media works. Many prospective students, students and young alumni are heavy users of social media, and if you don’t know how your target audiences are communicating, you won’t be effective in the long term. But if you’re not doing Web or PR as a profession, just do what fits into your lifestyle and work habits.
Ugh. I meant “if your job.” I really do know how the English language works, honest.
I think we might overstate the role that social media plays in helping students make their choices. Using a tool doesn’t mean you trust it for anything other than what you use it for and find the rest of it as an annoyance.
I think naturally for the average reader of this blog, they’d interact with social media in a different way than people who don’t. But I was writing this for those people, because it can be easy for those of us who engage social media as a professional to make assumptions about everyone uses the tools the same way we do and by making that assumption, it can lead to a certain shortsightedness about how said tools engage a wider audience.
In other words, I think it’s incumbent for professionals to “see how the other half lives.”
Thanks for the comment, Davina.