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SOCIAL MEDIA STILL A MYSTERY TO MANY Featured

Mystery.Holmes A Christmas open house during the recent holidays brought home the social media divide among adults. I was pondering the fact that in the last two months I hit 400 Facebook Friends, about 1,024 Twitter followers (it tends to fluctuate a bit) and 1,040 LinkedIn connections. But at the get together, I was confronted by several adults in their 50s and 60s who had no clue about how to get value from social media – and most of whom were IT professionals.

Two said they had gotten nothing out of Facebook. "I got deluged with requests for friendships." I was tempted to ask the precise measurements of a deluge, since it seemed unlikely to me that someone would get more friendship requests than they could sort through in 30 minutes or way less. Another said he had cancelled his Facebook account and was the usual complaint I've heard that about the triviality of posts. "I just baked a ham, oh boy," he said summarizing his view of topics. And many adults continue to be totally baffled by Twitter (It took me about two years to get it). The key is expectations. At church, where I get similar blank looks on the subject, I responded to a couple of complaints. When I mentioned LinkedIn, one friend said, "Have you met all those people?" "Not important," I replied. I explained I used Linkedin extensively for fact checking, that it gives me an instance icebreaker so I can approach contacts with questions, and its messaging system, and that of Facebook, often bypasses executive gatekeepers. Another complained about Facebook: "Can you read all the posts?" I answered this way. "When you go to church on Sunday do you expect to have a conversation with everyone you know in the organization? Of course, not. Who you talk with and how long you talk changes with each encounter. Facebook is the same."

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