The Persistent Myth of The Social Media Generation Gap
October 3, 2012 Leave a comment
Last week I attended a meeting of a non-profit board I am on. In discussing membership initiatives, the role of social media came up, as is inevitable these days in any conversation related to marketing, communications or public relations. Predictably, one of my fellow board members said that we should get some of the “younger” folks to focus on our social media efforts.
Otherwise reasonably tech-savvy “older” professionals referring to social media as some sort of self-imposed line of generational demarcation is one of my pet peeves. These same 40+ executives, who have had no problem integrating other evolving web technologies into their personal and professional lives, and are adopting mobile applications at a blistering pace, for some reason have become Luddites with respect to social media. This attitude has the danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: If social media is cast aside as a younger person’s game, then the older generation will indeed put itself on the bench.
Why does this mindset exist with respect to social media, while other new technologies are perceived as age-neutral? I believe it is because of a failure to understand what social media is: “Social” implies a trivial, non-business purpose, and “Media” suggests that non-marketers need not bother.
Neither is true. Social media builds networks and communities – of friends, yes, but also of professionals and their businesses’ customers, prospects, referral sources, suppliers, employees and contractors. Twitter, in particular, is more of a tool to find and discover important links, news and information, curated by trusted sources that you may not have any personal relationship with, which you can draw value from whether or not you tweet yourself, as discussed in this blog post by Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley. Social media has opened new pathways of communication and collaboration, facilitates connections that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, and is a key enabler of the virtual business model. Social media destroys the hierarchical, command-and-control organizational structures of yesterday, where information had to be sent upstream to be aggregated, distilled and sent back downstream. Instead, we now have a spider web of interrelationships that can be leveraged to share knowledge, generate business, and get work done. Point-to-point, rather than hub-and-spoke. As Nilofer Merchant writes in a Harvard Business Review blog post, these seismic shifts render the very term “social media” a misnomer. Ms. Merchant, who also has written an ebook on the topic, writes, “Social can be – and already is – more than media.” She advances the theory that traditional business models and strategies have been rendered obsolete by social media’s ability to create value through the distribution of power and innovation.
The irony is that the facts do not even support the notion that social media is only for the young. Regardless, as another board member observed, whether you are older than the typical social media user or not, if you’ve got another 10 or 20 years left in your career, you’d better figure it out.
Virtual Lucidity 