Are the social networks becoming an Echo Chamber?
June 8, 2008 by Colleen Coplick
Filed under Guest Post, Mainstream Media, Opinon
Buzz Bishop, a local traditional journalist and budding social media advocate, has been thinking a lot about echo chamber feedback, and what happens when it’s all the same people at all the same conferences and on the same networks, talking about all the same things. Are we just talking to ourselves?
Buzz has kindly offered his thoughts on the this very possibility below:
Gary Vaynerchuk has been making the media rounds to hype up his book, 101 Wines – but it’s not your usual wine book tour.
He’s not all over the Food Network, or the lifestyle shows - he’s on MSNBC doing programs like Jim Cramer’s Mad Money and The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch.
Something he said on Deutsch stuck with me - the decision to stay away from the wine world is a conscious one.
“I’m a big fan of not playing in the playground you’re supposed to,” Gary says. “I’m a wine guy and I don’t go to wine events. I speak at technology conferences. I spoke at Facebook the other day. I want to be in different places where people are curious about wine.”
(Gary Vaynerchuk on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch)
It’s an idea I’ve repeated to many a broadcast colleague ever since. Yes, you need to swim in the waters of your own business, but if you want to grow it, you need to go outside your comfort zone.
“All these internet guys love to live just on the internet sometimes,” Vaynerchuk added. “You need to go out there and shake some hands and kiss some babies. That’s how you can spread it dramatically.”
I follow many of Vancouver’s digerati, but the message seems to constantly be the same. The same people who tweeted from Northern Voice at UBC are the ones who tweeted at VidFest on Granville Island and are now tweeting at nextMEDIA in Banff. The same faces are at XCamp or XParty each month.
Where are the fresh influences? Where are the new ideas coming from? If there are new influences and ideas, how are they being spread outside the clique?
While we’re busily leaping from Twitter to Plurk, there are legions of “straights” just discovering Facebook. The elite in social media are so busy flirting around looking for the next cool thing, they’re just spinning past the regular folks instead of taking these 2.0, and 3.0 ideas and making them mainstream.
It’s not just an echo chamber; it’s an echo chamber that is about to experience serious feedback as the message just continues to loop around the same group of people.
There are some very smart, fresh and exciting thinkers in this group. People with great ideas to help change the way things are done, but how is the message getting outside the loop?
I’m in mainstream media, a world that is begging and pleading to be led into the next generation of marketing and distribution. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I twitter, that’s why I blog, that’s why I follow you. I want to learn about what you’ve got to say. I want to bring it back to my business and make it better.
The Social Media world is a highschool dance with nervous shy people on the side while all the b-boys dance in the middle. It’s time the b-boys took the hand of the shy wannabes and taught them to dance.
***
I have to agree with Buzz for the most part. I’m part of the digerati, but I constantly forget that the mainstream crowd thinks I’m this uber-techy early adopter. I forget that many people don’t even know how blogging works.
So, how do we help the mainstreamers to get into the social media world?
I tweeted at nextMEDIA and I have never heard of those other events.
Good idea, Colleen, inviting Buzz to share his ideas, as he is in MSM. I wrote about a very similar topic a few weeks back. There is an increasing need for people who are in one field (MSM) to be able to talk the language of the “other” field (SM - social media). In my case, my PhD training is in environmental studies (sustainability), yet I am learning to speak the SM language in order to be able to harness these tools to expand my voice to a broader audience.
The way in which we try to bring our message back to what I call “the civilian” world is precisely by socializing, but in the other networks. That is, I can assure you that a lot of us who are frequent Twitterers (myself included) socialize with civilians in other fields, not only tech.
We help educate civilians by virtue of reaching to our non-techie folks. But, in order to gain a better understanding of how these social media networks work, we need to immerse ourselves in them. That’s why we are here. I am not a tech person, am an environmental expert. But right now, I can speak Web 2.0 with the techies because I have immersed myself head-on.
The trick is not to forget to reach out to the other networks (e.g. the civilians in their different fields). Nancy Zimmerman (aka moneycoach), for example, brings her Web 2.0 expertise to the field of socially-responsible banking. Al Pasternak (bokashiman) does the same to highlight issues of recycling, composting and organic consumption. Beth Snow has highlighted the importance of ‘knowledge translation’ (see her comment on my blog entry, quoted above). We all are trying to do our part in creating the linkages. As long as we don’t forget not to stay within the tech, social media realm ALL the time.
This comment should really be an entry on my blog, but I think it’s better to keep it here.
Good post, Buzz and Colleen.
Great post, Colleen. I think it’s extremely important to stay connected with other scenes, it’s healthy, it is professionally smart, and it lets you make better cocktail party conversation.