Why Does The Social Web Matter to You? – Part Two

This the follow up to a post I wrote last week.  It seemed a little more palatable to serve this up in smaller chunks.  So here are more musings based on my research, experience and conversations with people confused about this whole social media thing.  I hope this helps you to understand the social media ecosystem better and to find where the value is in it for you.

The first thing to remember is that Twitter and Facebook are not the whole of social media, they’re just two tools getting a lot of attention.  The entire internet, and smart phones, are becoming socialized.  The conversations around social media are focused on tools and tactics, but it’s a much bigger ecosystem than that.

Our brains don’t have a precedent to understand the rapid changes and technological advancements being thrust upon us.  This confuses us and makes us say, “oh, that new fangled thing is a fad.”

This is  human nature and basic behavioral psychology.  When we’re confused by complex concepts we create black and white (old way ‘good’ / new way ‘bad’) judgments to dismiss, feel like we’re ‘right’ and move on.  This is how media, politics and religion control and manipulate people’s belief systems.

Yes, text messages can be misinterpreted, though part of the 140 character confusion is not realizing that it can touch people emotionally and psychologically.  If you read tweets from the woman in Australia watching her house burn in the brush fires with her kids and dog in the house you’d have to have been a rock to not feel what she wrote in 140 characters.

Also, if you didn’t know me and read 3 of my tweets that either gave you valuable information, made you smile or made you laugh, you would unconsciously consider me a warm person like your neighbor you wave to. Your brain thinks that’s the same as meeting me for coffee for an hour as long as I made you feel good.

When you read a tweet you receive little pieces of my personality and unconsciously weigh how much you like me.  You see if I’m a self-promoting narcissist who doesn’t ‘get it.’  You see if I just share innocuous information about things you don’t care about. You see if my words entertain or inform you.

Strangers approach me every week at local events because they saw my face next to tweets they liked and it gave them the courage to say, “Hi, I follow you on Twitter.”  Some of these people have become great friends of mine.  If I saw them in the same room without previous Twitter posts we would never have connected.  Compare this with the clinching of your stomach whenever you’ve entered an in person networking event and immediately searched out a familiar face to relieve your anxiety.

Photo source: PersonalizeMedia.com

Another misnomer is that online and IRL (in real life) relationships offline are separate.  I’ve met people on Twitter that helped me move, mentored me in business and meet up with me in person regularly. It’s been more beneficial to me than any slew of offline in-person networking events.

This blog is a social networking tool also.  Clients hired me after reading the blog.  If I didn’t think I had time to share here and across the web, I would have missed out on business as well as friendships. Investing time in creating online content beats any time spent watching TV or doing things that aren’t on the web for 24 hours a day connecting me to great people.

Twitter and Facebook are tools that probably won’t be here in 10 years, but their technology is the foundation for web 3.0 that will be a social web.   You can build a house of relationships with them or waste time playing goofy games and taking quizzes.  Either way, you determine the level of value you receive from them.