My love/hate relationship with Facebook

I love you! I hate you! I can't live without you! I wish you'd go away forever!

Much like a tempestuous love affair, I have conflicted feelings about Facebook. I hate their business practices, but I love finding old friends and being able to keep up with the day-to-day of people I don't see often.  


Yesterday I got a friend request from my cousin whom I haven't seen in over 10 years and I friended both she and her mom, my 88 year old aunt. Without Facebook, I wouldn't be able to easily re-attach these family ties; too much time and distance stand in the way. But I was thrilled to find them and to see photos of my niece who has somehow become an adult while I wasn't watching. This makes me feel good, and is worth the trade-off of my possible loss of privacy. 


This morning I saw this piece of research that confirms that Facebook users have a richer social life than non-users. It confirms my experience, which is always affirming, and counters the objection that I hear from my boomer contemporaries -- who needs it? Feh! Not worth the time and trouble to get involved. But wait -- now we have scientific proof that there are health benefits of having friends. 


So, for better or for worse, I've committed myself

My friends, the skeptics

I went to a wedding in Virginia this weekend and got to catch up with some old friends. Anyone who lives in LA needs to leave town once in a while to remember that the rest of the world isn't like us, and I had that experience in spades.

The wedding was of a son of long-time friends, a son whose parents I knew even before they were married. This is the first wedding of the next generation, and it was an emotional event for so many reasons. I really felt the generation gap that I wrote about in a previous post, but I was surprised by the vehemence with which social media is held in contempt by a few people I talked to.

There were mixed reactions when I talked about being back in school to study how new media is being used in marketing. "You always were ahead of things," a friend told me, and I just don't see it that way. (But thanks for the compliment anyway.) I see social media as a given, ubiquitous, and as essential to master in order to be current in my marketing career. Clearly, many of my contemporaries think that social media is for someone else, someone young who has lost their "real" social skills, and prefers to stay in touch via keyboard, whether on the computer or, even more amazing! by phone. I was met with grudging admiration for taking on something so huge, or with snorts of disgust for wasting my time on something so worthless. "It has no redeeming qualities" said a friend who had never used any social media.

Part of it is that I was out in the country, where people move to get away from things like traffic and texting. Part of it is that I was with people in their sixties, seventies and eighties. (BTW, when did I get to be the old one?) And part of it is the inevitable skepticism that new technologies have to overcome to reach the mainstream. When I told fellow guests at the wedding about having seen a video where the bride and groom update their Facebook status at the altar, there was a mix of amusement and horror. The horror was uniformly from people close to my age, and the guests of my parents' generation were curious and enthusiastic. I realize that this is not a statistically sound sampling of opinions, but it was definitely trending.

 I clearly remember a Sunday dinner conversation between my female relatives when microwave ovens first came out. NO! they didn't want a microwave, who wants all that radiation in your house? and who is in that much of a hurry anyway? I don't care if it will cook a potato in 6 minutes, baking potatoes in the "real" oven is fine, and why spend money on something you don't need? In a small town in Michigan like where I grew up, anything new was viewed with distrust and doubt. What I didn't expect to find was that some of  my friends, who I think of as very cool, had similar reservations. I was surprised at the heat of a few of the conversations.

Meanwhile, I was trying out Foursquare for the first time, practicing checking in wherever I went. I've already earned two badges, and I have the high score among my friends by a mile (that would be my digital friends.) Once I got the mechanics down, I had fun seeing what would come up as locations for a possible check-in at any given moment. My favorite was the Penis Station Vent that was apparently around the corner from where I was staying. Who could resist sharing that? That should get a few skeptics intrigued.

Women and the recovery -- it's not good news

As I was stuck in traffic on the 405 and feeling grumpy, I saw the signs touting that the construction is a project of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. 


Sure, I thought cynically, putting Americans back to work -- at minimum wage. Just how does that help me? Even the trickle-down economics of the Reagan era made more sense to me, and that made NO sense. I keep hearing that the recession is over and the job market is improving, and I do see an uptick in the number of job listings on the job boards. I just don't see an uptick in my own results.

Later, still stuck in traffic, I heard a report on NPR that while unemployment overall is down, unemployment among women is increasing. So it's not just me, a small comfort. This sent my mood-o-meter back into the yellow zone, a zone I'm trying to avoid.  Some days I win the battle for a good attitude, some days not so much. Guess which kind of day this is.

I'm interested in knowing how others in my boat are coping. It's become clear that The American Dream that I grew up with is obsolete, but there isn't a switch I can throw to turn off my expectations.  I know life isn't fair, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it to be. What I want most of all is Opportunity, and it seems to be in short supply. I feel like a plant that doesn't get enough sun to thrive. I am alive, but my limbs are spindly and fragile. If I could just find myself a place in the sun, I know I'd be ok. Unfortunately, the weather report predicts continued clouds.

The Need To Be Heard

One of the things I learned fairly early in my client service career is that when someone is unhappy, sometimes all they need is a chance to vent. This was a revelation. I grew up in an environment where children were meant to be seen and not heard, so I never felt the gratification of being able to say my piece. If I was unhappy about the way I had been treated, I was supposed to suck it up.

"No one wants to hear you griping. Life's not fair. Keep it to yourself and get over it."

I believed it, as kids do. And I hated complainers, even myself when my internal chatter was about how my brother had it easier than me.When I went into therapy, I experienced the profound relief of telling my stories to someone who cared. More simply, I felt better when I got things off my chest and got some sympathy. Much to my surprise, I learned that this desire to be heard and acknowledged is a basic human need. None of my psychology or sociology or anthropology classes ever covered this. Or maybe I was absent that day.

My first boss was a genius at dealing with people. One of the many things he taught me as a young Account Coordinator was to listen to complaints, and reply with something like "I'm sorry that happened." or "That must have been hard." Don't interrupt and don't make excuses, just listen until they are done. Not everything needs to be solved. Sometimes an attentive listener is enough. This is one of the best pieces of advice I ever got, personally and professionally.

When I started listening in on Twitter, I was amazed at the banality of some of what was said. "Bananas for breakfast, need to get more at the market." Really, who cares? And why use up bandwidth to post something so trivial? All those haters on-line, complaining about the people who talk in the library or who don't start to fill out their check at the grocery store until the clerk is done with their order. Why all the vitriol?

Then it clicked -- the need to be heard. Who do you complain to about the state of the economy? There isn't one person responsible for the mess we're in, and there isn't much satisfaction in sending hate mail to Alan Greenspan. But posting a comment on Facebook and getting a thumbs up can be salve on the wound. I'm not alone, someone else gets it. I'm not in a world where I chat with my neighbors while I'm picking up my mail, and there just isn't much idle conversation in my day-to-day, but that idle conversation fills something in us. Social media gives us an outlet for those thoughts that press on us, or excite us, or scare us.

Now I get it. Social media is here to stay.

The Generation Gap

There's always been a generation gap, it's human nature. My great-grandfather grew up in the country with no electricity. When my grandparents had his former home wired for electricity, he was amazed and annoyed. Why did they need that? He'd gotten along without it just fine.

My grandparents grew up on a farm, and moved to the city. They always had a huge backyard garden. When my parents took over the house, the garden went away and a lawn went in. My grandparents were scandalized. Why buy vegetables when you could grow your own? What were they thinking?

My parents grew up in the Depression. They saved waxed paper and aluminum foil and string, because they might need it someday. I thought it was insane. Why keep all that old crummy stuff around? If you need something, you can buy it.

Now I find myself on the other side of the gap. Recently I was in a meeting and a question came up about profit margins. I figured it quickly in my head while everyone else in the room was reaching for their calculator. When I announced the number, and their calculators confirmed my results, people were surprised. How did I do that so fast? When I told them that calculators hadn't been invented when I learned math, there was a very quiet moment while people tried to figure out just how old I was. For the thirty-somethings in the room it was inconceivable.

Now I face the gap between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants; and I see others struggling with the gap between themselves and digital anything. This has to be the biggest gap yet, a chasm that separates generations so profoundly that it confounds understanding. I'm in the middle between my mother, who was shocked to find out that there is more than one dot-com, and my nephew who recently asked why schools have libraries since you can find everything on the internet. I've worked in technology for more than 20 years, so I'm technology-fluent, or at least I was until a few years ago. Then I found myself on the wrong side of the digital divide, trying to catch up. Thank goodness for UCLA Extension and the great line-up of classes on technology so new that there aren't even textbooks to use. I'm working my way over to the other side of the divide, and it's no easy journey. Many of my contemporaries, especially friends with no children, have given up trying to keep up and are puzzled why I find the digital world so fascinating, and I don't even play video games. This week I sent a link to this blog out to a number of people, and I had a couple of responses along the lines of  "I've never read a blog before, what I am supposed to do?" These are not cave-dwellers or uneducated people, just friends my age who don't use anything more complicated than email and their ipod. It made me realize how much I've learned in the past six months, and how much more territory there is to cover. Now I know how much I don't know. What a burden.

I can't even imagine what kind of generation gap my nieces and nephews are going to face with their kids. The rate of change has gotten so fast. I can envision my nephew telling his kids that when he grew up there were big buildings all over the country that housed books. How could it be?

I'll never be a Digital Native (nor speak fluent French) but at least I can have an intelligent conversation, and stay relevant enough to relate. That makes it worth the effort.

It's not a firehose, it's Victoria Falls

The flow of content in the online world has been described as a firehose. I beg to differ -- it feels more like the world's biggest waterfall to me. It's overwhelming in its vastness, and that's where I am today. Overwhelmed.

When I was learning to swim, I didn't spend time thinking about which Olympic event I was going to enter, I concentrated on getting across the pool in one piece. When I was learning accounting, I wasn't worried about How Am I Ever Going to Write an Annual Report, I worked on understanding credits and debits, and went on from there. And the idea of writing an annual report is still daunting, but it's not on my life list of things to accomplish.  I don't need that level of mastery to do what I do.

I remember now, one of the first steps in learning something new is discovering how much you don't know. That's the stage when overwhelm can set in and knock me off track. The same thing is true about this new world I'm trying to embrace. So many blogs to read, so many twitterers to follow, so much material to ingest, I have to give myself a pep talk to just start somewhere. I'm so anxious to take it all in, that it's easy to forget about baby steps, and about celebrating a sense of accomplishment for what I am learning.

I see so many companies and organizations struggling to get their arms around social media and how it should be used. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to help them do that, a natural extension of my marketing know-how. I am experiencing how overwhelming and confusing it can be to enter this arena, and I'm realizing that dealing with those mis-givings is one of the major challenges that companies face, too. That's actually where you have to start -- decide to start. Even getting consensus on that can stretch already thin resources to the breaking point. I can see that part of my role with my clients is to act as a facilitator of the internal dialog needed to make the commitment to start. That I know how to do, and it is a skill that takes years to develop. Digital Natives have the know-how of the technology and Immigrants have the knowledge of the journey to adoption. That's where I can make a contribution.

So I go on reading my Google Reader every morning, and having a TweetDeck window open all the time to easily check in on what's going on online. I heard about the Japan earthquake on Facebook, and about Osama Bin Laden's demise on Twitter. A few months ago that would have been completely foreign to me, so I can see progress. I just have to be patient and diligent in this undertaking.

I had a client in the early 90's who refused to dedicate any resource toward a website because senior management thought it was a passing fad, like CB radio. Their delay has cost them millions of dollars of revenue and lost opportunities in market share that are incalculable. They didn't know how to start, so they just didn't. A Twitter account is not a strategy. An intern doing daily Facebook posts is not an start, it's a bandaid on Victoria Falls. I'm paying close attention to my learning curve so I can help others with theirs. That seems like the most important step to starting.

Gardening and Social Media

When I first started gardening there was a pretty high plant mortality rate. I'd forget to water, and who knew plants could die overnight? This would be followed by a cycle of self-recrimination, guilt and regret. This was not enjoyable.

When I got my first crop of tomatoes and my petunias were going strong, I got the payoff of my efforts,  uneven as they were. Since then I've never looked back. My first garden filled me with anxiety about being able to take care of it. Now my garden is gorgeous and the anxiety is gone, I trust myself to do what is needed to keep it thriving, and it is a constant source of pleasure.

I'm trying to think of social media as a garden -- it takes consistent effort before you see the payoff.  I know it will be the same for my clients. It's hard to know where to fit it into the day already full of priorities. It's easy to forget until it becomes second nature, and it can be a source of worry and regret. The turning point with gardening came when I started to enjoy the process. I can see a glimmer of the same thing happening with my conversations on Facebook and Twitter -- the process is becoming enjoyable and is starting to be a regular feature of my day.

The Decorah eagles have had more than a little to do with this. I want to see what the eagles are doing and how their feathers are coming along. Checking in on them every day is not a chore, it's genuine interest and involvement in their well-being. And I find that I enjoy the chat almost as much as I enjoy the growth of the babies; when the chat room is down it isn't as much fun watching the babies flap their wings and huddle up together. It's the difference between traveling alone and marveling at the scenery and traveling with someone else and marveling together. I've gotten very adept at traveling by myself and enjoying it. Now I'm re-discovering the pleasures of sharing the trip.

Realtors talk about working their farm -- consistent effort towards a goal they believe in. Participating in the conversations of social media are a farm, too, or a garden if you prefer. The results are incremental at first. Some days you just don't feel like it but it is constancy that yields results, and the effect is cumulative. I'm trying to cultivate the same habit with Facebook and Twitter, and I look forward to the harvest.