by JO MARSICANO
I had a surprising conversation with a communications director the other day. She told me that she knows of a very large company, with something like 60,000 employees, whose executive adamantly opposes social media. The company has its website and that’s it.
It was startling news. If you’re awake and living in this country, let alone running a big business, how can you not know about the growth, effectiveness, and excitement of social media? But there it is, the reluctance of the “older digital generation” to adopt what they might perceive as unnecessary and wasteful gimmicks.
The web is a baby in the span of human history, but it has grown at such speed that we now have two digital generations. The older digital generation uses websites, cell phones, and maybe laptops. The younger digital generation lives on texting, Twitter, and Foursquare. The digital generations are often divided by age but not always. The true dividing line is the willingness to adopt emerging tools. I know some people who are middle age but who use Facebook and Twitter like their lives depend on it, and who wouldn’t be caught dead without their Blackberry or iPhone.
I’m making the transition from the older digital generation to the new one. I love quality content and I place it above “tools.” But I realized that if I were going to be professionally relevant in the digital age, I better start becoming fluent in the digital economy.
I came from “legacy media,” having spent a good part of my career as a journalist when all media was one-way communication—outward. The most social you ever got was a phone call from a radio station listener or a letter to the editor. But as the executive director of a Twin Cities professional advancement group said just last year during a networking meeting, “If you’re not reinventing yourself, you’re not paying attention.”
What convinced me to start entering the new digital generation were a few simple things.
First, you don’t have to dive in head first. Think strategically about what your business needs are, where your audiences are, and how best to reach them. Think about which type of social media will do the best job for your organization. You don’t have to bite off everything at once (in fact it’s unsustainable to do so).
Second, rely on people who are totally into this stuff to explain it to you. In some recent networking meetings, people who are in the “new digital generation” told me some really useful information about TweetDeck and Tumblr. I can learn new tricks and so can you.
Third, iron-fisted reluctance is not a strategy. Standing back and refusing to open up your digital media to two-way conversations simply to avoid an uncomfortable change is no way to run an organization. No one says you have to adopt the latest and most popular tool as a replacement for good planning. But as a marketing and communications manager told me just this morning during a networking coffee, “As the medium changes, the strategy has to change.”
We still get to create good content but now we must now push it out through a variety of new channels because those channels have the capacity to reach the people we want to reach and communicate with them in a way that sticks.
A little discomfort goes with the territory. I never died setting up and using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or this blog, and neither will you. Yes, you’ll learn that there is, in fact, a lot of social media junk out there, forgettable within seconds of reading it. But there’s some really good stuff, too, and when you apply good strategy to social media tools, you get to contribute quality content to the web.
A lot of people in the older digital generation will find themselves, as I did, at a crossroads. Either start learning the new digital world or risk eroding your base of customers, supporters, and stakeholders. It really is that simple.
Which digital generation are you in? Need to start making the transition? Consider hiring a web consultant to help you with the task.
Upcoming post: The art of doing less on your website
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