Get More from Search - Trends in Search & Social Media

I’m a Gen X-er and I spend most of my days and some of my evenings on my computer. My job is in technology so I have to live online most of the time. I also have an iPhone and carry it with me so I can stay connected wherever I go. But I’m not a wholesale technophile:  I deeply value “off time” and the authentic relationships in my life and when I’m too connected, those I am “connected to” suffer and so do I.

Apparently, others feel the same way. New research exposes evidence that our digital interconnectedness does not generally produce authentic relationships. Rather, people are becoming increasingly alienated and dissatisfied with their relationships.

A recent book by MIT science professor Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” discusses the ubiquity and usefulness of technology in contrast to the quality of our human relationships. Technology holds a major role in most people’s work lives and its high value in our society is merited. But while the casual observation is that the age of social networks is improving our interconnectedness, the reality may be that technology is failing to facilitate real communication, making people more closely tied to machines than each other. In short, too much technology is exacting an increasingly apparent toll on our relationships and health.

The fact is, humans are hard-wired to connect with other people. But we’re starting to prefer technology over people: “Our relationships with robots are ramping up; our relationships with people are ramping down.”  (Excerpt from “Alone Together”).

Sadly, many teens now gather their self-identity from what their online network says about them instead of discovering who they really are. As Susan Maushart, author of the just-released “The Winter of our Disconnect” reported, her digitally connected teen girls had become “accessories of their own social-networking profile, as if real life were simply a dress rehearsal (or more accurately, a photo op) for the next status update.”

Perhaps some parents are driving the trend, with digital addictions birthed out of the necessity to be always accessible to work then slithering into their home lives. Parents are gravitating toward texting their children because they think that they’re connecting more with their kids when in reality, the medium only allows shallow connections.

As chronicled in “The Winter of our Disconnect,” Maushart’s solution was a season of unplugging. She admits that her gadget addiction was as serious as her teenage children. She went so far as to disconnect the electricity for three weeks to begin the experiment and coax the teens into appreciating electricity, much less the internet. Instead of texting, being tethered to the iPhone, playing video games, watching TV, chatting on Facebook and listening to iPods independently, the single mom of three spent time with her children playing board games, looking at photos, enjoying family meals and listening to music collectively. Time could be spent in rest, community and introspection:  Maushart writes that her kids “awoke slowly from the state of cognitus interruptus that had characterized many of their waking hours to become more focused logical thinkers.”

While this experiment represents an extreme, the point is to listen to the positive changes wrought in their lives as a result of connecting with themselves and each other, in real life (RL for you texters). It’s a good reminder that we have a choice to turn off when we want to.

We can consciously allow time to disconnect and stop the obsessive-compulsive check-ins, email scans, Facebook updates, Twitter posts and general connectedness that drives many people. It’s about rediscovering the very real face-to-face relationships that satisfy deep-seated human needs and even connecting with ourselves for greater mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health.

Maybe you’ll choose to disconnect daily, weekly, or less frequently, but when you do, know that you’re taking a positive step to staying grounded with yourself and the relationships you value most.

Side note – the picture chosen for this blog is not my favorite. I wanted a positive image of a modern family, with teens, having dinner. But it was not to be. At iStockPhoto, there are 1100 photos in the search results for “family dinner” but add “teens” to the criteria and you are left with 20 photos, most of them old school (no offense). Perhaps something is wrong with our society when you can’t find 1 decent modern family picture in 1100.

Social media isn’t just for students anymore. Some schools are utilizing Facebook, Twitter and blogs to keep in touch with parents, community members and alumni. Since it is easier to reach these constituents where they are instead of getting them to visit the school websites, schools are realizing that the simplicity of social media status updates and opening up two-way communication are additional benefits that social media platforms provide.

In an interview for the Washington Post, Adrian Murphy, a teacher at Green Acres in Rockville, MD that is responsible for the school’s new blog stated: “If you can read a blog and can see pictures and watch video clips, all of a sudden you have some insight into what’s going on. You’ve been invited to the conversation, and you can participate on your time.”

Reading a blog about interesting goings-on with the students and school can take as little as a minute or two, but getting parents to visit the school for a parent-teacher conference is very time-consuming. The instant and always-on nature of social media enables better, more consistent communication while preserving the precious commodity of time.

“It’s what the kids and parents are at home with, and it’s really important to be able to meet them where they are,” says Marlene Nesary, a spokeswoman International Society for Technology in Education, an Eugene, OR based nonprofit group that supports the use of information technology in learning.

The social media hype continues and is enticing companies of every shape and size to dabble in creating new networks. To facilitate the craze, dozens of open source social networking platforms have launched. Jeremiah Owyyang’s blog lists over 60 brandable software platforms that can plug into your existing domain, allowing you to create your very own social network.  But should any company build a social network?

In a Deloitte study of 100 businesses with online communities, Ed Moran found that 35% of these communities have less than 100 members and less than 25% have 1000 members. 6% of the businesses studied spent over $1 million on their social networks. Sadly, all too many fail at their attempts to connect customers to their brand because instead of focusing on the community itself, businesses are focusing on the value that social community could provide for their business.

Despite the failures, there are definitely industries that DO have ready-made communities with well-established brand alliance, and have a greater chance of building successful online communities. These verticals might include: local television networks (daily news watchers), radio (listening audiences), niche local communities (apartment renters, child-safe search) and education (school districts, private schools, universities).

Clark County School District, the 5th largest school district in the nation with nearly 300,000 students, was a few years back, reportedly the largest user of bandwidth in the Las Vegas valley. Schools are instant communities – not just in the “will you be my friend” sense of students, but in the student to teacher, student to parent and teacher to parent and relationships. Because they already have distinguishable groups in these necessary and long-standing relationships, Clark County can foster those relationships through a community network, which they’ve begun to explore with the CCSD website.  Feedback mechanisms aren’t yet extant, but Homework Hotline, a public television program, gives students an outlet during the week to call in and ask teachers their tough homework assignment questions. Their content management system, my.CCSD.net reach the three main constituents in these ways: 1) teachers can create personalized websites to communicate with students and parents; 2) students can access to homework resources and assignments; 3) parents can locate their children’s classroom and assignment information online without involving the child or teachers. A cursory look at some teacher sites didn’t provide a lot in the way of content or personalization, but it is summer after all; the start of the school year should light this online community back up.

Another example where community exists is the multifamily industry. Most multifamily companies have a couple clear-cut missions in life (e.g. collecting rents and driving occupancy rates), and one of those is to establish and promote their brand for longer-term connection with an increasingly transient population.  Before signing a rental contract, an individual needs to identify with what that apartment provides. Thus, the rental market is now driven by amenities. “Lifestyle” is the buzzword for providing more than a roof over people’s heads at the right price and location. Now, apartment companies need to provide online services ranging from rent pay to pet sitting to VIP concierge services and customized local search while hosting real live social activities such as community pool parties, golf instruction classes and more. While it may sound exhausting (and it probably is), apartment companies are finally optimizing their built-in community of residents and finding creative ways to connect the residents together, along with meaningful lifestyle amenities that cement the value of their brand, while gaining loyalty in the minds of renters.

Riverstone Residential, the nation’s third largest apartment management company representing around 340,000 residents, offers a moving program, Riverstone-to-Riverstone. This amenity helps transfer residents to another Riverstone community within a metro or across the country, sans application process and deposit fees. Combined with their Living Made Easy features, including “Your Neighborhood Directory,” a local search engine launched in three metros, where users can find just-down-the-street local businesses via a true search results format (e.g. not just Yellow Page data), residents benefit from buying into the Riverstone community and the value it provides to their daily lives.

Morals of the story:

• If you don’t have a pre-existing community, don’t assume that you can create one (and don’t spend a lot of money trying to create one).
• If you do have a pre-existing community (and they already visit your website regularly), focus on the value that your social network will provide to your users.