Even the smallest of businesses understand that social media tools are here to stay. The social mindset is changing business, broadcast is not an option that people are responding too.
The last year we have all been talking about listening in social media, we have set up listening columns in Hootsuite and Tweetdeck and we have reached out. Some of us have gained business, others raving advocates of our business. Some of us have a pile of data and no idea how to process it, or what to learn from it.
What I have learned in the last year is men and women have different social media behaviors and expectations.
The women I have observed are all doers. They get things done, they are doing exactly what they tell others to do. The men on the other hand are fascinated by social media and share social media related items more than they share their own industry related items. Hmm. Rarely do they show the behaviour that they tell others to do. I have been told that to be an expert you just have to know stuff, you don’t actually have to do stuff…
This afternoon I asked a question on Twitter, I asked to be recommended a social media expert. I got back 8 responses and only two asked why I needed one. So 5 dealt with the request by responding directly to the question and two quantified the question. One person rang to see exactly what I was looking for and why.
Now we live in a complex world and people are confusing tabloids with broadsheets. Both essentially tell the same story, but communicate it in different ways. That is the difference between big business use on social media sites and SME use on social media sites. Both these types of user tend to ignore the radio, but the radio has advantages and works for a certain type of audience. Is your expert a tabloid journalist or a broadsheet hack?
This week I was due to attend two conferences. One on Entrepreneurs (<— I hate that word) and the other on monitoring social media. One has been cancelled and the online backlash about the organiser was huge. I doubt there will be a new event, as the social media tidal wave has engulfed it and spat out the remains leaving little trust. A fine example of tabloid journalism in effect.
The other event, monitoring social media is still happening. It is aimed at a different market place and has positioned itself as the broadsheet. 20 speakers, 19 of them men.
I wonder how many of them do as they say, I wonder how many listen, do they listen themselves in their own organisations? I wonder if next year we’ll see a more diverse range of speakers? Will we see the tabloids with the broadsheets? Will people understand they have to adapt their method of communication depending on where they are talking?
Lots of questions, some of which will be answered Monday.
Thoughts?
Sarah
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Some fascinating issues raised there, Sarah. I’ll have a thunk overnight and may contribute my two cents’ worth in the morning! In the meantime it will be very interesting to see what other Birds readers have to say about this one – a potential media hot potato.
Good morning! Just re-read your post and I think what you’ve identified here is another manifestation of the current chaos in the way we communicate, with older methods and technologies clashing and fighting with new ones, battling it out, smacking each other in the teeth and raping one another in one huge, sprawling media gangbang.
Traditional publishing businesses which have ruled their particular roosts for generations due to their control of production and distribution of hard copy communications, are getting their legs chopped off at the knees. Why?
Who needs hard copies being shipped to wholesalers’ premises and then being driven in vans to stores any more? With its powerbase effectively dissolved, the traditional communications industry is floundering – e.g. the thousands of journalists who have lost their jobs in the USA. The shift to electronic media (and online book sales) has given many of these control-freak media moguls the good spanking they’ve deserved for years, but I digress.
What all this really means is that the whole focus of media communications has shifted from the vehicles used, to the people who ride in them. The horse is finally being put before the cart, even though there’s a lot of kicking and screaming going on.
As a writer I am beginning to think I and my colleagues are one of the few groups of humans in this media orgy to stand a reasonable chance of coming out of it alive. No matter how clever the technology, it can’t think up ideas.
In what you say, Sarah, I can see a pattern emerging in which women flourish – contemporary (mostly online) communications require a knack for mutli-tasking and spinning lots of different plates, at which women are notoriously more talented than men.
Now I’ll stand back and watch the eSh*t hit the fan…
NB: Sarah, I think you’ve got a post of mine to come about the merging of blogging and journalism? That will be a useful small add-on to your post here.
I think it will ultimately be good for the writers and the publishers, the new forms of communication. A lot of the naysayers are people who cant see how they will adapt to the emerging technology. I should imagine Gutenburg lived in equally interesting times
As to thinking up ideas, that always has a place in the world, people are incredibly creative.
I do have a blog post on similar lines from you, will add it to the schedule
Do you think that men at the moment are still a little too fascinated by the gadgetry of social media, and are busy showing off all its nuts and bolts, while women are just getting on with making it work for them? I have a sneaking suspicion this may be the case. Men do seem to like meetings, I have found.
In a few years, the men will decide to actually make it work for them, but will find it’s one case where women got in first. Vive l’egalite (long live equality, for the non-francophones). And – as there is no single power base from which to control it – they can’t do the usual thing of knocking it down.
Yes, I’m sure it’s all about multi-tasking, as Suze says. Face it, boys. We’re just better at it than you are.