It’s rare to find someone who isn’t utilizing social media because they just don’t know about it. At least, that’s how it is with the people I know. Typically, those who aren’t using a given social medium (like Twitter or Facebook) are doing so for one of two reasons.
The first reason is lifestyle. These people much prefer meeting in person and hanging out IRL, if you will, to “Friending” people in a virtual society. Those people look at social media and say, “meh”. They eventually join, but they never get to the point of actually uploading a display picture or writing that first “Just lookin” update.
The second reason is attitude. These people despise the medium. Perhaps they joined early on, had a poor experience, and never looked back. Perhaps they just feel that such a popular site is now too common and passé for them. These people are snobs; if they do join the service they abhor, they usually just complain about how much “it sucks”.
That said, I discovered a third reason. That reason is ignorance. These people simply did not know that such websites existed. They had no idea, prior to joining, that they could connect with friends and family from all over the world through a website. I was introduced to this third tier when I received a friend request from Facebook with a message simply asking, “Are we related?”
As it turned out, we were related. It was a younger cousin of mine. At first, though, I was suspicious. Perhaps it’s something about the nature of Facebook, or the nature of my surname, but I’ve found it not uncommon to get a friend request from a far-removed, unrelated Rausch. Apparently, there are some Rausches who collect Rausches, and I endure their friendship for a time and then typically rescind it, months later.
So, it was with a skeptical mind that I friended this person and checked out their profile. There was no display picture (warning), they had recently added quite a few new friends (caution), and they had just joined Facebook that week (danger!). My finger hovered above the mouse button, and the mouse pointer hovered above the “Remove from Friends” link, poised for the kill. But then I realized something.
What I was witnessing was someone who had never been a part of Facebook until that week. I could see in the way she was using the service, that she had discovered a whole other world previously hidden from her. Seeing this made me think of what it must be like to join Facebook that first time, to find your friends and family easily, to connect with those long lost or far away.
Since joining, her usage of the site has exploded. She seems to have explored every avenue that Facebook offers: friends, pages, photos, comments, wall posts, direct messages, groups, and the all-encompassing applications. It reminds of my first Facebook, where I, too, tried on every available feature and pushed the limits trying to figure out, “Just what is this thing?”, being pleasantly surprised along the way.
The takeaway from this is that, increasingly, marketing or advertising to the social media world is becoming more difficult. Twitter users are made cynical by the barrage of porn bot followers and companies that send automatic replies or follows. Facebook users are made cynical by the effects of poorly made applications that only serve to advertise poorly conceived products. It’s easy, as marketers, to paint all users of these services as distrusting and cautious, requiring exceptional cleverness to win over. It’s easier, still, to think, “How do we hook these users?”
Let’s remember the joy we had at first discovering social media. Let’s take that feeling and inject it, capture it, into our marketing for these services. Don’t hook users; enchant them. Give them a neat way to relive that first blush of opportunity that these services offer us.
Cater to cynics, you’ll only get critics. Cater to wonder, and your message will thunder.
