The Modern Journalist

Social Media is for Geeks. But You’re a Geek Now, Too.

There’s been much chatter on Twitter recently about the nature of the mobile Tweet platform.

If that sentence just confused you, be thankful I haven’t brought up the Great Color War of 2008. But I digress.

The point is this: Twitter, the mobile social network, is largely made up of the digerati, those of us who live and breathe to be first adopters of new technologies. To seek out new lives and new civilizations through cyberspace. We make friends we’ve never met. We make plans to attend BlogWorldExpo or South by Southwest Interactive or ComiCon or the Game Developers Conference — or whatever is on the corner of Nerdville Avenue and Dorktown Road.

That’s just the way these things begin. But then something happens, a critical mass is reached. Someone from the “mainstream” press writes about a technology; or a company does something mildly interesting with new technology (mildly to us) that brings this to the masses.

But it doesn’t happen on its own.

Jared Goralnick wrote a brief piece about this today.

Suddenly you have people wearing suits and ties discussing the importance of Second Life. You have marketers extolling the virtues of MySpace. You have a groundswell of movement towards what is fashionable.

But you don’t have a groundswell of movement in the right direction. You go to what’s popular. Not to what’s usable.

The key to social media isn’t any one piece of technology. It’s not lifestreaming. Virtual worlds. mobile networks. Social networks. Wikis. Read/Write technology. Ajax. Air. Virtual media lockers.

The key to social media is understanding the principles behind it, how it can applied to what you do and how it should be deployed to both grow your business and connect your readers. Once you understand how to think like that, the rest is really not hard.

Twitter, I fear, isn’t going to catch on as a large social network community (although it would be great if it did). I’m not even sure they’ll be able to sell this platform to the business world (even though this is maybe the coolest, real-time, live, up-to-the-second way to make sure you are in touch with everyone, all the time).

Why? It’s too geeky.

Read the press. Even PC World has a story about how people don’t get it. And strangely enough, the author did the same type of search I did. Here’s PC World’s Google News bundle for press reports on people not getting Twitter.

Instead of trying to understand the inherent value in a mobile platform, it gets written off as geeky. Even those people who are supposed to get it, who are supposed to be experts on Web 2.0, are completely baffled by it.

The point, though, is that it makes no difference if it’s geeky anymore. It makes no difference if its hard to be out on the bleeding edge of technology. That’s the game. And if you do it incorrectly, you might find yourself in the situation this McCain staffer found himself in after forwarding a video using Twitter — or worse yet, you might find yourself completely out of the conversation.

So if you don’t get the social media. If you don’t understand why Twitter is important because it’s a platform — not because it’s a social network. Facebook is better than Myspace because it’s a platform, not a single marketing tool. If you don’t know why the Color War is funny, that’s okay.

But go out and hire a few social media geeks, preferably ones who understand technology better than they do your business. Then…listen. Let them talk about how this is being used. Let them show you how it’s used. Then use it. A lot. Then figure out how to use it in your business.

Then…you can get your geek on.