It’s true. Some people won’t ever understand the power of social media. They want to, they just can’t. Here’s why:
- Social moves at a different frequency. Social is fast. “Stepping onto a moving sidewalk”? Hell, no. Try, “Jumping into a spinning blender.” If you’re not already spinning at warp speed—and wearing teflon—when you jump in, then you’ll soon find your innermost parts splattered on a wall for the world to see.
- Humans are sometimes complacent. Unfortunate but true. Which leads some people to latch onto the simplest explanation for the social media phenomenon, which for them is, predictably, that it’s a generation thing. Argh. 37% of Facebook users are over 34 years old. In the US, that translates into 66.6 million people. And Twitter? 53% have already celebrated their 35th birthday. More stats you’ll ignore in favor of a wrong-but-easy-explanation, here. Hardly a generational thing. More like a “comfort with technology thing.”
Social doesn’t align with their sense of reality. Many people function in little bubbles. This is by design: if they open themselves up, they imagine they’ll be crushed by thousands of people—employees, bosses, customers, recruiters, sales people, job seekers, vendors, researchers, charity solicitors, you name it—and die the Death of a Million Small Interruptions. Why this is is beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say, it’s one thing for a bubble people to try open up a little… and quite another to leap immediately to “totally transparent and accessible to everyone all the time.” It’s such a tremendous shift that many simply cannot fathom it. Or choose not to.- There is nothing in their history to prepare them for this. Social comes with it’s own rules for… everything. Once upon a time, communication was a matter of “ready, aim, fire.” Maybe eighteen years ago, a magazine (Business Week? Inc? Mother Jones?) claimed we had moved to a “ready, fire, aim” world. Today, it’s “light fuse and run.” None of the old metaphors work. And that can be understandably confusing to some people.
- There is so much happening, they simply haven’t prioritized social media to the top of their “do” lists. Tragedies, industry upheavals, political scandals, epidemics, government collapses, celebrity meltdowns, nuclear meltdowns, church meltdowns, fugutive kills. Some people still try to stay on top of all this stuff by “watching TV” and “reading papers,” which takes “hours and hours.” Fools. Don’t they know that a five minute trip through Twitterland would catch them up on a day’s worth of news right now this instant? You should have heard all the cell phones chirping the other night when we landed; I think everyone on the plane had a waiting text message, voice mail, DM, or Facebook message about Bin Laden’s termination.
My advice? Don’t be one of these people. These are tough issues to overcome. And if you are one?
Staple yourself to the chair in front of your computer, sign up at LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and make sure someone brews you a whole lot of coffee. You’ve got some work to do.
Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.
I'm the CEO of Ajax Social Media. We're helping 1 million people shine by making their online stories better. 
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Hi Jason,
If I may, I’d like to address your points one-by-one…
1. Social moves at a different frequency. Yes, social media moves very, very fast. But that doesn’t mean you have to enjoy it or get value from it.
I started Twitter by following a few interesting people. When I joined Facebook, I had a handful of friends. Actual friends. People who lived down the hall from me in college. Fast isn’t just scary. It’s unrealistic to keep up with.
2. Humans are sometimes complacent. Spot on. It’s not a generational thing. It’s a comfort with technology thing. I couldn’t agree more.
3. Social doesn’t align with their sense of reality. I’m not sure I agree with this. Humans are by our very nature social. We tell stories. We connect with people. It’s kind of a hallmark of our species.
That said, we also have a cap on the number of people we can really connect with. It’s about 150. This is well observed and documented. We also don’t treat all groups of contacts the same. Facebook has some functionality to accommodate that, but blogs and Twitter do not.
I think that inability to separate causes some (valid) concerns and issues for people.
4. There is nothing in their history to prepare them for this. I think this is a bit of a miconception. Whether it’s humans connecting (as noted above) or customers talking about businesses, this is old stuff in a new package.
Customer’s always talked about your company. Now you can actually hear them.
5. There is so much happening, they simply haven’t prioritized social media to the top of their “do” lists. I think this, along with a lack of perceived value, is one of the biggest reasons why people don’t actually get social. And I think it’s valid.
Steve Jobs isn’t active in social media. I don’t know if it would really benefit him to be, though. I’m sure he connects with his real-life friends just fine. He also makes a killer product and runs one of the most successful tech companies in the world.
Time spent on Twitter is time not spent doing other awesome things. Or, as you note, wasting time watching TV.
Should everyone be doing social media? I’m not so sure.
Cheers!
Chris
@Chris—Thanks for the reply, and nice use of Dunbar’s Number (148). I’ll stand by my claims, though to be clear, it’s definitely a “some” issue and not a “most” issue. I’ve worked with more than one exec who not only doesn’t get social, but who lacks a foundation for even understanding why she doesn’t get it. Ditto technical folks and corporate rookies.
Glad to know you’re checking in every once in awhile—see you soon, I’m off to go make something, my renegade friend!
Thanks Jason… hope you’ve been well (and nice play on my blogs’ titles)!
PS: Any chance I could convince you to put a “subscribe to comments” plugin on your blog?
You could always go with, “A lot of people already know who their real friends are.” And they know how to contact them. In fact, they might think that “social” cheapens that interaction…and in many instances, I think it does.
People we meet on social media aren’t really our friends. And too many times, people who use it a lot use people a lot. They want something.
I get social media as a tool. But it’s just that. And maybe it’s just not for everyone. The majority of people that I really admire don’t use social media at all. And they’re fine.
@Frank—I spent a long time in the camp of “social cheapens interactions.” In certain circumstances, I am still firmly in that camp. For now.
But more and more, I’m finding that doesn’t cheapen relationships as much as it creates a new category of them. “Single serving friends” is what Chuck P calls them in “Fight Club.” “Hi/bye friends” or “hallway friends” is what we called them in high school.
“Weak ties” is what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls them.
No question that these relationships are not the same quality, on a case-by-case comparison basis, as our “real friends.” But they’re incredibly important, and until now, there’s been no way really to manage them. Social allows us to treat all of our weak ties as a group, and leverage their combined strength.
Which, according to the research, is formidable.
So, I agree with you, but I also don’t. I know who my friends are. I don’t need social to manage those relationships. True. Users are users. True again. For those who have spent a lifetime cultivating their networks, social can create more problems than it solves. Also true. But none of this means that someone else who uses social to sift through weak ties, looking for potential friends, is indulging in cheap relationships. Those people are doing what people have always done. Just in a open forum where everyone can see it.
It could be as simple as “introvert” vs. “extrovert”. Some people will never be comfortable with a public display of their life, even to their friends. Especially in a semi-permanent forum on the internet. An extrovert gains energy through social interaction, an introvert loses energy. No excuses needed, an introvert just doesn’t gain anything from highspeed social interactions.
@TK—”an introvert just doesn’t gain anything from highspeed social interactions,” except maybe the ability to engage from the safety of room where those other people aren’t physically present.
I’m not aware of any studies mapping introversion/extroversion to social usage. I could make the case for both extroverts being more social (the argument you make), but I could also make the opposite case: that because soc media doesn’t involve actual contact, maybe the extroverts find it unfulfilling and the introverts find it fills a void.
I don’t know—anyone have insights into this one?
Great point, TK.
Frank said…
I get social media as a tool. But it’s just that. And maybe it’s just not for everyone. The majority of people that I really admire don’t use social media at all. And they’re fine.
I completely agree. I don’t get the whole “social media for social media sake” thing. There needs to be value in it for people. And not just value. Value that outweighs what they get from not using it.
This ties nicely into TK’s point, though. I think introverts don’t see the value, but I’m not sure that means it’s not there. As Jason noted, being able to interact with the awkwardness of face-to-face can be reassuring.
Anecdotally, I once heard Kris Dunn mention that he used to test as an introvert on Myers-Briggs, but now that he’s been doing social media for a few years, shows up as an extrovert. It’s made him more social in real life.
As much as I’ve riffed that there may not always be value, social media has benefited my career significantly in the last two years. It’s connected me with people and ideas that I otherwise never would have come across. For me, it’s been invaluable.
However, not all social media is made equal. The signal-to-noise ratio was far better two years ago. Now, I’ve found that meaningful dialogue is down and mindless retweeting and quoting random smart people is way up. The obsession with micro-blogging has also dumbed down what we expect from people.
Instead of intelligent conversation in conference sessions, people “Live Tweet” their comments, both productive and smarmy, in 140 characters of distilled wisdom. Out of context, these Tweets often lack the nuance and depth necessary for true impact.
I’m still working through this in my head, but I think that blogs and old-school discussion forums are more valuable than Twitter.
“Introvert” vs. “extrovert” – this explanation is too simple, in general we over label everything, oversimplify. Life and human being are much more complicated. From my own experience; lack of fluency in English in strictly English speaking environment with a high anticipation makes me so called “introvert”. I have on my mind wonderful movie “The King’s speech” directed by Tom Hooper and David Siedler. However, everything is learnable, if we have support, and we are convinced that is necessary.
I agree with Chris Fernandi; ‘ Tweets often lack the nuance and depth …’
Twitter is for me too artificial. I definitely prefer blogs.
On the other hand, social media allow to know the ideas those less clever in conversation in conference sessions. “Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a clever debater, any more than that of a good chess-player.”- (“The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” by Oliver Wendell Holmes).
In addition, John Gilbert Winant’s, who had won national attention as the youngest and most progressive governor in the country, speaking ability was bad; ‘People in the audience wanted to help him to shout out the word he was searching for’ said one New Hampshire resident. “It was clear that much of Winant’s popularity as governor stemmed from his deep empathy and compassion for others” – ‘Citizens of London’ by Lynne Olson.
However, I agree again with Chris Ferdinandi’s statement that “meaningful dialogue is down and mindless retweeting and quoting random smart people is way up”.
It may just as well be me, but one of the reasons why a lot of people (me included) are probably not using social media (and let’s assume, for the time being, that social media = Twitter as far as most practical purposes are concerned) is because of the fact that it is – in my opinion – largely overhyped. There, I said it.
I know that a lot of people are probably going to disagree with the above, but the vast majority of social media output is thinly veiled narcissism that most people couldn’t care less about. I can very well imagine that a lot of people simply don’t feel like being part of something like that. In a sense, it really *is* – mainly due to the way in which Twitter is set up – simply a matter of introvert vs. extrovert, regardless of what some people like to believe.
@Hype—overhyped is an understatement. That said, your simplifications (social = twitter, matter of intro vs. extro), plus your line about “thinly veiled narcissism” suggest that something else is going on.