The Next Trend: One-on-One Social Media
If you’re like me, you get dozens of e-mails, newsletters and notices in your Inbox every day. You’re on every social media vehicle, from LinkedIn to Plaxo to Twitter and Facebook. I have at least three e-mail accounts, and I write three blogs. Does it ever get to you? I mean, all the “keeping up with” you have to do?
Well, it gets to me.
You can’t not be on these things, but dang, they’re time-suckers. A person has to have time to do paying work, not just check the Inbox every 20 minutes to delete messages to avoid being buried in e-mail. And these are messages I WANTED. Like the NY Times twice-daily news update. Twitter messages (If Guy Kawasaki doesn’t quit tweeting, I’m dropping him.). Minutes from a meeting. Stuff I need to pay attention to.
But as I was saying, if you’re like me, you may be fed up with social media. I’m a Boomer, so I figure there must be millions of other Boomers who are fed up, too.
Here’s my prediction for 2011: Enough people will be fed up with social media that they’ll start meeting face-to-face with friends, family and clients. Yes. It will come to that.
Remember that old out-of-fashion thing called “conversation?” Not tweets or e-mails or Facebook blurbs? but an ongoing exchange of verbal messages, accompanied by real facial expressions instead of emoticons, conducted while the parties thereto are in the same room?
I have hundreds of “friends” on all these social media, but how often do I do friend things with them? Almost never. Unless I go to a Meetup, another social media-driven thing. I joined a Board Games Meetup, and if I ever go, it should be real person-to-person fun.
In 2011, when social media dies and F2F becomes the new thing, remember you heard it here first.
