I’m not trying to convert anyone who doesn’t want to engage in social media, but I am trying to connect to people who have been thinking about what’s possible in technology nowadays. I think the key concept here is “joining the conversation” – we need to make people who are unfamiliar to technology and what it can do for them feel welcome to make their voice heard about whatever they want to talk about. I’ve been taking a sort of informal poll of people I know who may be into media but don’t have a blog or aren’t on twitter and I find that they all have niches – one is into Myspace while another has a personal web page, then one is on Second Life, another on Skype. Then there are the people who are kind of mystified by technology but realize its potential – like the guy who runs a business but doesn’t have an e-mail address or a website but all of a sudden needs to get a digital photo to a guy in another state, or my mother who is working on a website and starting to join the social networks but is frustrated because she hasn’t found people who share her interests. The barriers to helping these folks come into the fold is (as @philcampbell and @loudmouthman helped me to understand on operator11’s the Gravity show) firstly the resistance and confusion that any sort of change can bring, and secondly the sheer number of different ways that one can participate. To reiterate Phil’s point, you can’t just pick one and say that’s the one I want for now, like buying a car. These people who have just started maintaining a presence on the web have so many avenues available to them that they figure what they’ve done already is enough. What I have come to understand and would like to preach from my little soapbox is that different social media gets different content from you and reaches different audiences, so it maximizes your output.
I hear more and more enthusiasm from techies who want to be mentors and who want to bring people into their community. The key is to get the word out to newbies that their individual voices are important and there are people out there who want to engage them in the conversation.
I refer to the operator 11 Gravity show – the url is http://operator11.com/shows/4992/episodes/28676