Social Media Shortens The Gap Of Opportunity

About Guest Poster, Susi O’Neill

Susi provides creative industries and digital media consultancy for project management, partnerships, research and business development for commercial companies and cultural organisations.

Social Media Shortens The Gap Of Opportunity

This July I was the guest speaker at the inaugural launch of Nottingham Girl Geek Dinners, part of a worldwide network of local events bringing together women technologists for chat, networking and – importantly – dinner.

My presentation was about social media for business – with a bit of girl geek and historic slant. Here’s the presentation.

Girl Geeks dinner nottingham, photo byPaintedGhost

I don’t really see myself as a social media evangelist – I’ve been too long in the web industries for that kind of bandwagon-jumping, back since the first dotcom wave and my days in the music biz when the rage was guerrilla marketing, us record exec minions seeded chatrooms, assuming aliases of teen skateboarders, tweenies and rock dads to sell the latest CD album (yes kids, people still bought CDs then).

Rather I see social media as a new name for an old thing – like chat boards, newsgroups or forums – it’s just a newer more technologically sophisticated means of using digital tools to communicate – socially or for business. Online video and audio – as eulogised by @documentally et al – is yet another exciting means of creating many direct one-to-one and one-to-many interactions. Although the technology may not save the world itself, the accelerated serendipity and increase in openness to communication (as much a society as technology phenomena) helps us all to address our own personal, social and business goals.

This is perhaps as closely related to the rise in the mobile phone as much as the growth in broadband. This can include political campaigning (like the MPs expenses Facebook campaign), creating your own news radar and bypassing corporation (see the decline in newspapers) and marketing a local micro-brand internationally.

But the interesting dinner discussion we ladies had was about how social media hasn’t so much changed everything as speeded it up. In the old days contacting A meant knowing B. Email made finding out who and where was easy (eliciting a response though, now, harder than ever). Social media means those who choose are open to conversations and ideas more readily and easily than before. Twitter and Facebook create small interaction which are less formal than a direct business contact by phone, letter or email. If you play it right, this small talk can more readily lead to medium talk (then to business). But don’t mistake small-talk for actual business or social networking replacing marketing (or even work itself).

Social media also enables people to create their own social graph, connecting users to scattered networks reflecting their own areas of practice or interest (in my case, I’m part of a world-wide network of theremin players) which may be globally dispersed, or hyper-local and may be for both commerce or leisure. Local blogs and community managed websites are hugely important, using online media to connect people to things happening in the real world and empowering them to make change, as the 4iP (Channel 4’s digital content investment fund) investment in Talk About Local testifies. Back in Nottingham I’m currently setting up a blog for Nottingham’s creative and digital communities to strengthen these ties between business and the community and between content creators and audiences.

I’m also fascinated with how different networks create their own identities, just as different newspaper have their ‘target market’; Twitter users tend to be proactive creators of content and participation, as the global, Twestival event shows, taking place for charity simultaneously in over 200 worldwide cities (don’t forget to sign up to Nottingham’s Twestival event this September!).

Creating your own support network is quick and easy; seeking answers to questions, finding a supplier or partner more rapid and robust than ever. Social media shortens and accelerates the gaps between people and links up opportunities. Sometimes it fills the gaps to with meaningless twitter and chat, so we need mechanisms for filter this out (not an information overload but a filter failure) which is the next big challenge for us users, aided by technology, to address.