JediMom Blog

Last week, I attended SMX Social in New York. The first day of the conference my computer actually functioned — the second day it blue screened and “lost” the OS. This little computer glitch gave me a chance to rediscover pen and paper, but it also allowed me to take note of the behaviors of some of my fellow marketers.

The conference was itself a social event with well-known social marketers like Neil Patel and Tamar Weinberg. Bloggers, search marketers, journalists and corporate in-house marketers balanced laptops on their knees and deliberately positioned themselves to stake a claim on scarce electrical outlets.

During the speakers’ presentations many audience members were listening while simultaneously live blogging the session, crafting linkbait, pinging their network for social votes, and using Twitter, Flickr, FaceBook and Sphinn. The very fact that the event was about social media seemed to give the entire audience the freedom to embrace the short attention span.

The nature of social media seems to reward hard-core multi-taskers. To be successful in the social media space you have to be adept at growing and maintaining your network across different platforms and quickly finding and submitting quality content that appeals to each network’s core audience.

As a 30-something, I wonder if my brain can be trained to function well in this new environment. In elementary school, I learned speed reading. Perhaps those same scanning and processing techniques will serve me well in social media?

As I watch my tween daughter’s online habits, I see her naturally bounce between her online accounts at Club Penguin, Imbee and WebKinz and then pick up her Nintendo DS to attend to her virtual character on Animal Crossing. Today’s kids seem to be growing up much more capable of processing a multitude of signals and noise at once. Perhaps I should give her a break next time I catch her watching TV while doing her homework? Nah! It’s a mom thing.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 2:28 am and is filed under Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.