Just in case you were under the impression that everyone in the UK with a degree and an internet connection must surely ‘get’ social media, I had a very enlightening conversation with a bunch of (normal, female, early thirties) accountants at a dinner party last Saturday night.
They asked me to explain what ‘blogging’ was, what did a ‘blog’ look like and what was twitter? Was twitter the same as a blog?
I did my best, but it was a real wakeup call. On the basis of this (admittedly small) sample, social technologies have NOT gone mainstream properly yet.
On Forrester’s Social Techographics Ladder these ladies would be classed as ‘joiners’ as they use facebook – but they’re really ‘inactives’ – not only do they don’t know about blogging, twittering and uploading, they don’t care much either.