Media in the New Millennium

NateWarren
“Now that the “Wow, golly!” phase of social media is over for the all but the Johnny-come-nevers, I think of socmed sites more and more as socially-based news aggregators. With that comes a dwindling patience for “Making sandwiches NOM NOM NOM” and “I’m the new mayor of Walgreen’s” updates. It seems some folks have a compulsion to fill in the update form with whatever, whenever (The Oatmeal said it best).

When talking about this post, we were reminded of this little piece of Facebook badinage

I try to think of every update as a performance: I’m going for laughs or I’m sharing a resource, or both. My proposition to all my socmed friends is: render a trenchant viewpoint, make me laugh, give me something I can use, or shut the hell up until you actually have something to say. If socmed is a news desk, I often find the reportage lacking. But then again, I’m a notorious crank on the issue.

What’s your tolerance for chatter? And by what criteria would you filter it out? We solicited a multi-generational take from around the Metzger Associates table; first a serve from our president and CEO, then a return from two junior members of our team…

John Metzger
Back in my days as a cynical tech trade editor, 99% of the stuff thrown at me was garbage. I had to sift through it to find the hottest news — who was firstest with the mostest, what company had something to say that was going to impact their industry and affect the greatest number of my readers.

It felt, at times, very unproductive. Technology was, and still is, about creating productivity gains, and the traditional way to achieve this in the Information Age was to reduce interruptions, keystrokes and any other break in the stream of consciousness. Word processing was the classic example. As a magazine editor, I watched my writers improve dramatically, maintaining their concentration while making big copy edits with a few keystrokes instead of literally cutting and pasting with scissors, tape, white-out and other distractions.

Today’s social media technology has increased productivity in water cooler communications to that rare situation where the gains have taken us beyond the tipping point of delivering actual productivity. Sifting through 99% of the noise on today’s social media reminds me of being a journalist, sifting through the haystack to find the needle. I strongly support the notion of re-defining socmed as a news aggregator. When hundreds of people stop what they’re doing to read about one person watching a nice sunset, I don’t think too many people are gaining much of anything, be it productivity or even warm fuzzies. When those same hundreds of people read something that’s relevant, delivers insight — or that at least makes us laugh — that’s another story.

Doyle Albee
First, I agree with both of you that “I’m eating yogurt” just isn’t the kind of thing that makes me want to jump on a site and engage. That being said, let’s think about many of our own conversations.

When I walk in the office on a Monday morning, my typical salutation is not “Good morning. What are your thoughts on the political upheaval in Burkina Faso?” It’s more likely to be “How was your weekend?” As a species, much of our conversation is just small talk. That’s OK. I think the key is to fit in with your group.

During our conversation on this topic, we also talked about how much many of us hated games like Farmville on Facebook. Count me among them. However, more than 30 million people disagree with me. Who’s right? We both are. It’s just like real life, if you think about it. I have friends that love romantic comedies, but they don’t invite me to tag along because they know I’m not a big fan. I love college football, but I have many friends who would rather go to the dentist for a significant procedure than spend a day in a bar watching game after game with me. That’s OK, we’re still friends, but we don’t share everything in common.

That’s where social media is going and needs to continue to go. This really hit home for me when I reviewed the top Twitter trends of 2009. I hadn’t discussed one of them with my more than 2,000-strong peer set. I realized that, despite being a regular Twitter user, my group on the network is talking about different things. Again, that’s OK.

So the key for me is: know your audience. If you have a group of friends on Facebook that never ever respond to your Farmville or Mafia Wars overtures — get the freakin’ hint. My weekday tweets interact with an entirely different group than my Saturday-during-college-football-season tweets, and both work. The key is not to be the guy that insists on screaming “Freeeeeebiiiirrrrd” at the opera or butting into an intense political discussion with “How ’bout them Broncos?” It doesn’t work in real life and it doesn’t work online. Start, join and add to conversations and stay out of of the ones that don’t interest you.

Cortney Harvey
Constant updates on who’s brushing their teeth or going to the gym is overwhelmingly annoying and isn’t my idea of a news update worth reading. But regardless of whether or not I care to share a play-by-play of my daily activities with thousands of people, it’s still there and can’t be ignored. I’m not part of the generation that saw socmed change from corporate America forwarding each other jokes via email to a techie-blogging black hole. I entered the socmed scene when it was socially acceptable for a 40-year old soccer mom to have a Facebook profile. In my opinion, growing up with and not growing into (like many of you old hands have) socmed forums makes a big difference in what I look for in conversation.

Although there may not be much “value” in reading about someone’s hygiene, the point isn’t to gain much of anything. CNN can certainly help you accomplish that task. And who is to decide whether that information is or isn’t of value? Like Doyle said, I think that has everything to do with your audience. Not every conversation is appropriate in every forum. When I engage in a conversation, I know who’s gonna give a hoot about what and thus don’t waste my time trying to talk about why a Mac is better than PC with my grandma.

It’s all about knowing what topic of conversation is appropriate in which arena. All it takes is one person reading about or taking interest in something to turn “blather” into the next hot topic. Socmed has changed, but have the people who claim they are participants of it done so? So what if people don’t wanna hear about this or that! That’s the point of socmed. It’s there for people to do what they want with, and make their own.

Gabe Lee
Like those before me, I agree that situation dictates, but for the sake of keeping everyone’s attention, I’m going to explain my reasoning behind those tweets and updates that don’t really seem to grasp the conversation in any way. I rarely tweet or give an update that isn’t relevant, but that’s my opinion. I remember tweeting about being in a meeting with Doyle Albee, John Metzger and Dave Taylor, something about me feeling like I was “surrounded by greatness” (do I smell a raise?).

Seriously though, these three are influential in my world, and many others’, as well. That tweet was relevant to me and perhaps 11,000+ of their followers. But not everyone knows who they are, let alone care if I am in a meeting with them. Why should they? But my tweet was effective for me because my message netted me a few followers and some comment. For others, it was garbage.

Maybe our yogurt tweeter is lactose intolerant and for the first time in three years they are finally able to enjoy their favorite childhood treat. Means nothing to me, but their followers follow them for a reason. It might be because they share the same affinity for that gooey, semi-curdled milk byproduct or because they normally tweet about “relevant” issues. I think that there is a lot of time-wasting tweets and updates, but some of them are from people who are new to socmed, or perhaps we’re just not close enough to their circle for it to matter.

Share on Facebook