I saw my mom the other day. She’s a pretty hip lady for 64. She was a high school teacher for about 30 years, and was always a student fave. Stylish. Knew the music. Knew the scene. Thought Patrick Swayze was hot.
Now, in her semi-retirement, she’s the editor for an online-only newspaper. She takes digital photos, uses a content management system, writes a little SEO copy.
She was asking about Convince & Convert and how it was going. I told her it was coming along nicely, that subscriptions to the blog were way up, and that people like Chris Brogan were saying favorable things about it.
“Chris Brogan? Who’s that? Doesn’t he play for the Coyotes?” she asked.
While I was surprised at how imposing a character Brogan is when I met him recently at Marketing Profs Digital Mixer, I’m pretty sure that he in fact does not play hockey in the NHL. (photo by Brian Solis)
And there’s the lesson.
Social media makes it simple to get wrapped up in our world. Reading blogs, tracking tweets, doing consulting. It’s easy to overlook that none of this passes the Mom test.
SEO passes the Mom test. Email passes. Tivo passes. iPhone passes (at least conceptually). Of course there are elements of social media that pass (MySpace, and increasingly Facebook). But as a discipline, social media and its practitioners absolutely do not pass. Not even Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk.
Keep it Real
I find conferences exacerbate this effect. I was at PodCampAZ recently (hat tip to Brogan and Chris Penn for starting it all, and high five to Evo Terra and Brent Spore for a great job on this year’s AZ version). I probably shouldn’t have been, but I was flat out astonished at the number of content creators in the audience. Watching a live stream of a room that I was in, and having that stream coming from the laptop of the guy sitting next to me was Matrix-esque.
The fact that in 550 years we’ve gone from the invention of the printing press to a world where every kid with a cell phone is a potential real-time broadcaster is exhilarating. But it doesn’t pass the Mom test. The recent Forrester technographics study update backs me up. Only 21 percent of Internet users are classified as content creators. 25+ percent of people are unlikely to create online content any time soon.
The Time Will Come
It’s easy to become frustrated with brands that don’t get it. Marketing directors that refuse to engage in social media. Twitter spammers. Bad pitches from PR folks that have never read your blog. (nice case study from Dave Fleet) And on and on.
But what we can’t forget as an industry (if it can even be called that) is that we are at the very tip of the spear. We’re where SEO was 10 years ago. Where television was 50 years ago.
We can’t expect a business community that has been fundamentally operating under the same marketing principles since the invention of the newspaper to immediately embrace this new opportunity en masse, regardless of how obvious the benefits of doing so may appear to us.
As my Mom used to tell me, “Be Patient. Your Time Will Come.” And when she knows Brogan, we’ll know it has indeed arrived.
Do you agree? Does social media fail the Mom test for now? Are we overeager about social media?
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You hooked me with hockey! We’re overeager, but in a good way; this kind of enthusiasm is what drives things and helps keep momentum and energy, plus feed the wildfire. If we were only mildly excited about it, there would barely be a buzz.
Chris Brogan as a hockey player–I’m grinning from ear to ear. It is amazing how so many folks “get” Facebook (I’ve been on for almost a full year now) but think Twitter is too much or whatever. I have found Twitter to be the single most social media tool to rock my world. Addictive, but I learn so much! (As a librarian, my desire is to at least know how to get to all the information there is to get to.) Thanks for your post, I found it via a tweet from @hockeyskates.
Signed, @pghgurl30
suzi w.’s last blog post..Hide and seek with pop-up books
Well said. We all get so wrapped up in our little Social Media World that we forget that the people we communicate with aren’t big shots to our unconnected friends and family. In time, we’ll stop sounding like a bunch of nuts who talk to perfect strangers on the internet. Until then, we’ve got a leg up and we’re ahead of the pack. The world will catch up to us eventually but we must be patient until they do.
Oh… As a Hockey Mom and avid Twitterer, I know damn well that Chris Brogan isn’t a hockey player.
Dani’s last blog post..Off to Advocate….
What used to take 25 years to make a shift is now capabile of happening in six months. We can not be over eager about something which has so much potential to transform life, business and relationships.
What are they or we learning. Check this out at http://www.relationship-economy.com/?p=909
Jay Deragon’s last blog post..What Are We Learning?
My mom is 70. I try to explain her I blog about podcasts. She is wobbly about the blog part and flunks on the podcast.
I know what you mean
Anne
Anne is a man’s last blog post..Hot, flat and crowded – Thomas Friedman on podcast
This is a brilliant post!
Too often I see people getting wrapped up in titles, accomplishments, and “weblebrity” status…but keeping a sense of perspective is a very good thing. Social Media is making leaps and bounds, but the all important “Mom Test” will be the true benchmark for how mainstream and how successful this self-generated, community-encouraging Internet experience will be. We have to keep a perspective on things in order to achieve real success by bringing in people outside of our own communities and cultivating community crossovers. Then will Social Media reach (and perhaps, even surpass) its potential.
On a completely unrelated topic, I just hung in my office a framed Chris Brogan “Rookie” card. You know — his one season with the Anneheim Ducks? Man, that guy knows how to keep his stick on the ice, I tell you.
Tee Morris’s last blog post..Concerning Web 3.0: Cutting the Yellow Wire and the Green Wire (Part Two of Three)
I think such tools as Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg and others have a set demographic (see Google Ad Planner) that does not favor it to be a good tool for hunting clients (unless you are looking for 40 plus males who have a college degree and have a household income over $75,000).
Facebook’s demos are alittle better (especially with women).
MySpace is still hitting the young people (a demo many advertisers want).
I will be posting Monday on more of “Inbound Internet Marketing by the Numbers”
on my blog.
http://www.inboundinternetmarketingblog.com
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Thanks for your blog post.
Totally agree that SM doesn’t pass the mom test yet, but its getting there. CNN is pushing twitter, so its only a matter of time before Mom asks me which Twitter client to install on her iPhone.
What I think is the more pertinent byline here is the comment around how in-industry conferences and events exacerbate the sense that social media is the end-all be-all to everyone in the world, and the number of “followers”=real world value. (Sure, it does for some in terms of ad revenue.) Its good to take a step back sometimes.
All it takes is a series of seven business meetings about Facebook to realize that social media does not yet pass the mom test. Mention Twitter, and I’d say 1 out of 100 people will look at you like you’re speaking baby talk.
I was shocked when I recently spoke to an undergrad class of PR students, and I was suprised at their lack of knowledge of social media as a career-building tool. Facebook as a photo sharing site they were down with. A few had blogs where they kept up with friends at home. But anything beyond that was pretty much way off their radar.
Tiffany’s last blog post..Leadership Alive: A Lesson, A Book Review, and A Challenge
We’re not “over eager,” social media is an extremely powerful area of communication and represents the direction our society is going in terms of how we relate and communicate with each other–a reversal of the 20th century isolation and a return to our roots as social animals. It’s changing relationships, marketing, politics. I think being “eager” is the right response.
But no, it doesn’t pass the Mom test. This is something I think about a lot: the social media “elite,” and the top social media marketing resources have all been very successful at promoting themselves in the domain of social media users, but there is an “inside” and an “outside.” Twitter, for example, has by most estimates somewhere around 3% the number of users as Facebook. It’s a growing, but small group, and like most small groups, we’re all susceptible to the isolation, elitism, and “intellectual incest” of being “insiders.”
It won’t stay this way, though. Like “social networking” before “social media,” like the web before that, like USENET before that… We need the core of eager, active users to push and maintain the way of thinking and it will spread to the mainstream.