07 June 2011

My wife is the typical Facebook user

Social media is about community, and not the platform. A social media platform or app accelerates a community coming together with a self interest based on mutual benefit.

Yet from my experience, everyone perceives this evolution towards forming online communities differently according to who they perceive to be the typical user of Facebook.

The current social media generation gap among my colleagues generally looks something like this:

• Those that conjure a picture of their teenage children tend to see Facebook as no more relevant to their daily lives as a Playstation.

• Those with older children (post or at university) while not appreciating that social media is becoming ubiquitous, at least see some value in sharing content such as updates and photos.

• Those with children under high school age are most likely to be already users of social media in their own personal, albeit passively.

• Those without children are probably the only people to actually have time to use it and cross multiple channels, probably including gaming and dating.

My typical Facebook user is my wife. Not just because women make up more active users than men, but because she is the best example of using social media to speak with and listen to her community that avidly checks in wherever we go.

The best example of this is using one of her iPhone nappy apps. (Nappies are diapers for my North American chums). When we recently had dinner with another family at the Pizza Express in Rochester, (again for my friends on the west side of the Atlantic, that’s Kent, not up state New York) I was so impressed with the baby changing facilities that she mandated me to post an entry for every other parent visiting the Medway towns and stranded for somewhere to change their baby.

This is community at its best. Sharing something that is good, not simply for our own benefit, but for the community to prosper. We all belong to different communities and therefore find different uses for the medium.

My communities include people I train with, friends I drink with, friends that live too far away to drink with, people I meet to talk about local politics, the people I speak to when I walk the dog (and a further subset that don’t just look at me strange and speak to me back).

It may seem to my colleagues that all this Facebook stuff is just for teenagers to gossip and parents to share photos, however, over the next ten years these tools will become central to how we live and do business, just as email and mobile telephones have.

Whether they are on Facebook or a iPhone apps, the typical social media user by 2020 will be however we percieve ourselves.