Archive for November, 2009
Facebook Eating Its Young?
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Technology, That's Life on November 16th, 2009
Grandma Wants to Friend You
Everyone has experienced it – the day that what was cool became decidedly not. I remember the day that my mom walked down the basement stairs into the superfund site that was my room and declared that she “really liked that new Pink Floyd guy’s music”. Needless to say, “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall” were not going to be played much until I moved out of the house. While it is possible that my mother was strategically out-maneuvering me, i.e., pretending to like something in order to guarantee that she would never have to hear it again, she was a trained musician and could recognize interesting new trends. After all, she listened to Miles Davis and Ravi Shankar as well as Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.
This brings us to the current conundrum of today’s Gen Y and Gen Z Facebook users. In the brief few years of its existence, Facebook has grown from being the exclusive province of college-age online users to the world-wide social network phenomenon of today. If the site’s self-reported numbers are to be believed, well over 300 million people use the tool and something close to half of them log into the site in any given month. The fastest growth over the past year has been among adults over age 35 with the biggest proportional increase among those over 55. This means that the nightmare scenario of having your grandmother or your mother-in-law (I know this to be true) friend you has come true. My own daughter is still perturbed that her parents want to use Facebook – no doubt to stalk her every movement…
Now comes some interesting data that indicates that younger users may be beginning to abandon Facebook. Mediaweek reports that some advertisers are evaluating how this may require changes in their social media advertising plans. According to comScore, the average number of minutes spent online at the site by people 18-24 fell for the third consecutive month in September compared to the same period a year ago. In July, Facebook usage fell 3 percent, in August 13 percent and September 16 percent. Could be that the drop reflects mobile device users that are not counted, could be that as the fall arrived younger users began to focus more on school (Ha!) or it may reflect the eternal struggle of the young to keep their elders at arm’s length.
When you start getting friended by your grandmother, I think that’s when it starts to lose its cool – Huw Griffiths, EVP, Interpublic Group’s Universal McCann.
Politicians Need To Stop Using Twitter
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Colorado, Politics on November 13th, 2009
State Sen. Dave Schultheis of Colorado Springs has joined former Kansas City Chief Larry Johnson in the “Think Before Pushing Update Button on Twitter Club” by this recent tweet:
@Sen_Schultheis: Don’t for a second think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll
Mr. Schultheis has found himself in PR hot water before and appears to pride himself on his rather blunt communication style. As the notion of constructive and thoughtful engagement with those with whom you may disagree has become tiresome, the rejection of political decorum and the embrace of lobbing verbal bombs in order to garner attention (You Lie!) is now a badge of honor and has become a fundraising bonanza. It isn’t a surprise that Americans view most politicians as somewhere between used car salesmen and child molestors. Disappointing, but so what else is new?
How about politicians and commentators on both the right and the left quit this type of name-calling and get on with the serious business of leading to solutions.
Managing Communication Differences
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Technology, That's Life on November 4th, 2009
Texting - Multitasking or Distraction
An ongoing discussion in both the workplace and the home is whether the persistent usage of social communications tools represents an efficiency gain or a distraction. Jeffrey Zaslow writes in today’s Wall Street Journal of the conundrum that businesses, schools and homes find themselves in – are younger workers and students able to accomplish tasks and incorporate and retain new information more or less effectively while they are awash in the continuous waves of text messages, Facebook posts and tweets? It’s safe to say that this is something of a generational difference with teachers and school assistant principals in agreement with most managers of “a certain age” that the non-stop digital social networking represents a lack of focus (at best) and a titanic time suck (most likely).
A great many workers under the age of 30 (i.e., those that have emerged from their teens and college years never knowing that information existed in a world without Google or Wikipedia) not only believe that they are able to effectively multitask but that, in fact, they are more efficient and waste less time than their, ahem, more mature colleagues on such wastes of time as holding meetings or making phone calls. All of us have had to endure our own Michael Scott-like managers at some point in our careers and understand that a significant proportion of meetings accomplish little more than what the average Facebook post does – at least with regard to how everyone’s weekend/game/vacation/kids are doing. Granting that, there is value and a craft to engaging directly with another human being in a non-digital communications channel. While many points of fact can be effectively shared via a text or IM, the nuances of context and agreement, understanding and alignment, are not so easily whittled down to 140 characters or less. Success in school and in business often is driven by strong interpersonal skills and the capacity to understand a colleague’s thoughts, beliefs and motivations.
In most workplaces and schools (as in most homes), trying to deny the utility and ubiquity of modern digital communication tools becomes its own waste of time. Obsessively checking Facebook or texting during classes or meetings is not going to work for any business or school. The challenge will be in setting standards for appropriate usage and in gathering factual data that shows if those Gen Y workers really are as efficient as their more seasoned colleagues believe themselves to be or are a distracted set of hyper-socializers that accrue vast quantities of information that is trivial from relationships that are shallow. For both business executives and school administrators (as well as parents) it is vitally important to become conversant and familiar with these social tools – not doing so makes managing them impossible.