Open Air

Social Media for the non-believers

September 16th, 2008 Posted by: l.dewis

Was great to read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on ‘Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don’t Use Social Media‘. Thank you Marshall for the recognition that not everyone uses social media. It’s easy to get tech-blinkers and think the whole world is using the latest geek toy. In fact the reason many social media tools take off is because geeks love being the first to get their hands on something. The latest thing might only allow them to do one simple thing, but that’s cool because they already have 672 user accounts for the other tools they need. And they are tolerant when it breaks – the fail whale has become an inside joke. The rest of the population are waiting for something to come along that works and allows them to do lots of things in one place. Sensible late majority that they are.

I used to work on a project where I had to reach people who probably didn’t own a computer. They might have had public access to a computer in a library, job centre or at work but let’s face it, they weren’t spending time on twitter. And yet many people on the project insisted the best way to reach them (at no cost and minimum effort naturally) was through social networking. Hmm… I said. Or something like that. But now I see I have been using the technologies I love to reach the non believers in a round about way and there is more still to do…

Entry Filed under: Innovation, Uncategorized, Web 2.0