Twitter and Social Media is like teenagers experimenting with sex
Thursday, December 10th, 2009I saw a quote this morning that proclaimed twitter and social media is like a bunch of teenagers experimenting with sex. Try as I might I can’t help but agree wholeheartedly with this. Every generation thinks they invented sex and cannot conceive of a time when anyone other than themselves were having sex. No amount of tales of copulation in the street at the end of the first world war or clandestine couplings in Green Park during the Second World war blackout will ever persuade the current generation that anything happened between couples for any other purpose except procreation before they worked out that they had genitals. Not even tales of the swinging sixties or pre aids 80s can do anything to dispel this view amongst the young that the multiple orgasm is something they invented.
(Yes I know I am going too far, but you get the point?)
So it is with social media. A generation of digital natives has come along and is now telling the fuddy duddy directors of companies that they do not know what they are doing and need to change the way they do business into some kind of hippy social media love in. I think the analogy stands up with everyone sitting around and talking about things they do not fully understand and have limited experience of but with a dogma that is born of idealism and against a backdrop of an uncertain world.
I could just as easily be writing about my own experiences of early adulthood in the 80s or my mother’s in the fifties or my grandfather’s in the 30s as I could be writing about the world of business today and in every example whilst the younger generation has something to say you wouldn’t take every word as gospel would you?
Marketing activity of any kind and specifically digital marketing needs to be part of an overall marketing strategy and needs to produce a return on investment. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
