Last night I had the rare pleasure of getting to hear Gillian Shaw speak to the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Authors Association. Gillian’s topic was, as you’d expect, social media and she did a fantastic job explaining it. Gillian delved into blogging (a wee bit) and (mostly) Twitter to a pretty diverse crowd of writers, and what surprised me most wasn’t what people didn’t know about social media, but what they did know about social media—but were wrong.
For example, a good part of the audience were aware of Twitter, but they thought that if you were on Twitter you needed to share everything about yourself. One member of the audience had a terrible run-in with Internet trolls, and another a victim of identity theft, so it’s understandable (and a good word of caution) that they had excellent points and questions about social media. However, it seemed to me that what was most interesting was that people’s perceptions of social media didn’t match many of the things that many of us find most useful.
Continuing with Twitter as an example, like Peter Wilson and Gillian, a lot of what I use Twitter for is information. With a whole column dedicated to information sources that I consider “news”, tweets when people have new posts, and other items that filter in, Twitter is my primary source for breaking news. Sure I still use RSS (thank God Gillian didn’t get into RSS, I think heads would have exploded), but Twitter is rapid and constant.
Then we run into the whole problem of “explaining” Twitter. Gillian, Peter, and I agreed that without seeing Twitter, it just doesn’t make sense. Twitter isn’t a hard concept; it’s not like multi-dimentional, multi-variate stats or anything, but I think we all (myself included) suck at explaining it without a computer in front of us. We live it, use it, crave it, maybe even are addicted to it, but we can’t seem to explain it. Why is that? Is it because we’re too close to it to see the greater whole? Is it that we try to encompass all of Twitter in a couple short sentences? What ever it is, we pretty much suck at it.
As I’m reflecting on this, I’m also looking forward to the first (re-)organizational meeting of Social Media Club, Vancouver, where I think one of the most important things we can do as a group to just help other people get it.
Explain why Twitter has changed how we all consume news and information. Explain why writers have both a lot to fear and a lot to gain from social media. If we think social media is great, we need to find better ways at showing the benefits of social media in terms that people get.
We don’t have to explain email anymore.
We don’t have to explain using the Internet anymore.
Now we need to explain how we’re building stronger friendships and connections with social media. We need to explain how social media can quickly galvanize people to a cause. Right now there are more tweets about helping the people of Hati than any other single topic. Of course you’d expect this, but the call to raise money started moments after the quake. Faster than the TV reported it.
I think only when we can clearly articulate social media to people who have basic concepts of the Internet, will social media be accepted by the mainstream and then become something more interesting than it is even now.
