One of the hardest things to do, for a college teacher, or for a consultant is teaching people that social media is important. The idea of teaching students to blog, and corporations to blog or participate in the social media network seems to run into a standard set of reactions that are worth noting if you are a consultant, or a teacher.
Fear – fear pervades the process with anyone older than 40 unless they started years ago. The most common reaction I get is that they don’t know if people are watching them. While in my opinion, much of this is fear driven via the constant harping of regular media, (predators and the rest) or people use stories like Kathy Sierra or the Yale law students that were pinged and harassed via Autoadmit. The fear of social media is going to keep some of the best people off the social network, this includes Facebook, linked in, and even internal company blogs. They will read them, but they will never write them, even under a pseudonym.
To address fear I usually start off with the augment, who is looking at you when you are walking downtown? Do you know them? Do you know if they are well meaning or want to mug you? By pointing out the risk of social media as a risk they take every day seems to help. You can insert any mass grouping in here, a bus, a football stadium, a rock concert, they key here is to legitimize the things they are thinking, then show them where they take similar risks.
Demonization of Social Networking – every time a person does something wrong on a social network, it is demonized, the press has a field day, and the information is all over the news on how evil social networking is overall. We have seen this in a number of cases, like Lori Drew, and the MySpace child sex predator scare. This has a major influence on the use of social networks. If you go back and take a look at MySpace stats and Facebook stats (although I cannot get the two year stats from compete), one of the beliefs in some research circles is that the flat line in MySpace and the growth of Facebook was when the press was happily demonizing the dangers to your children at MySpace. While MySpace has done excellent damage control with equally visible campaigns to rebuild their credibility, ask any parent of a teenager if they can have a MySpace page they will stop and think about it (they will for Facebook as well, but not as long). Facebook preempted the problem by joining in looking like they were being proactive to take care of their audience, where MySpace looked reactive.
To address demonization I usually go into how sensationalist the press is to build out an audience. You can usually compare this off to the finest of sensationalist press like the Weekly World News, the Drudge report, the Huffington Post, and other in print or on line news systems that rely on sensationalist press to get a point across and build audience. This turns into an interesting discussion on how sensationalism works to grab an audience, and how it can be used to drive an agenda in the press, both on line and in print. Students usually love this discussion, because it gives them an opportunity to discuss the number of advertising systems they see, and how they relate to blogs and to the press. After a while, students realize that just about anything in print or on line carries some form of spin, the key to that spin is to work out how much the student agrees with it. Demonization usually falls off the map after addressing the issues and talking openly and frankly about the things they see on line and in print.
Friending and Unfriending – amazingly enough, people are scared of unfriending preferring that an arbitrary higher authority ban the account. They will flag an account as inappropriate long before they will unfriend someone. As profy and myself have talked about, friend with care and caution, and we use MySpace as the example, where we go into many of porn/adult friend finder profiles on MySpace and talk about the negative influence they have on people’s experience with MySpace. While MySpace will usually snag and delete the profile on average in 72 hours, there is still time to be exposed to things that many people just do not want to be exposed to. Facebook is better at snagging these kinds of accounts, but they do happen and they do exist. The idea of unfriending a person somehow carries with it a connotation of dislike, where you might not really dislike them, you just might want to see less of what they are doing, or they are going in a direction that you do not want to go in. Unfriending is ok, but a majority of students that I work with see unfriending as a very negative action, somehow carrying a near pariah status for those that have been unfriended.
To address the fear of unfriending – I have had to address the idea of growing apart, there are just some people who do grow apart, you stop following them actively, everything goes passive, and when you clean out your social networking account, unfriending just means that you have grown apart. Like many relationships and conversations, it takes two. When someone stops listening there is no longer a conversation, social networking is like that, you unfriend because the conversation stopped. While some might want to know why you unfriended them, be nice, say that you are going in a different direction or are doing something different. Most people understand this and when you explain it as a normal social function, something that people already do every day and take the negative “I hate you, thus I unfriend you” viewpoint, it works out that people are more willing to unfriend, and explain that act of unfriending rather than deal with things they don’t want to deal with.
Trolls – this is the hardest one to teach, but have found that the book the “Sociopath in the Cube Next Door” helps me here with this one. We can get clinical and academic on this one. If 1 in 25 people are really sociopaths, and the numbers vary from 1 to 4% of any given population including on line, the people involved with the Troll can defer their own reaction to this and throw it back onto the Troll. Most people take Troll attacks personally, if you can address it as the Troll’s problem, they are a sociopath, or they are just not in control of themselves, the process of anger management on the part of the attacked becomes easier.
To address this – Once someone realizes that it is not personal, that the troll is more interested in power and control than the person personally, this gets much easier to address in the classroom and in the board room. This also alleviates fear, it is ok not to answer back to people, it is ok to ban a troll, and it is ok to remove comments from people who are just being hateful and argumentative not adding anything to the conversation.
These are the biggest things that I will spend days and weeks on in the classroom and in the board room. When I advise students or clients how to manage some of the reasons that they do not social network, and you can then show off the wonderful process that is social networking companies are more likely to work out how to adopt the social networking system. While most of this is fear based, if students and corporations have a way to understand the darker nature of the internet, and internalize it into risks they take every day already, social networking becomes a much easier sale.
Tags: social networks, demonization, press, sales, corporate, board room, student, troll
