A funny thing happened at the Work Study job fair in the library last week. We put together our Marketing Office application and included a section to list computer skills, social media experience and a throwaway question "You're about to leave on a secret mission and have two minutes to pack; what five items do you bring with you?"
Students asked various questions about what we do and provided some entertaining responses to the secret agent question. But what really caught me off guard was how many students asked "what's social media?" When I gave them examples such as Facebook and Twitter they all replied something to the effect of "oh yeah, I know what that is."
It's not that they don't know what social media is. They've practically grown up with it. It's such a part of their daily lives that they never had to step back and label it. We were the ones that had to give it a name because we are outside the bubble. Let's face it, social media is a part of pop culture which is always driven by the youth.
That's why it's so hard to study social media and establish an effective marketing plan to young constituents. We're trying to put everything they do into a test tube and determine it's chemical make up. They don't see it that way. They are a part of a big youth culture with strong connections that only fragments as we get older. Meta thinking and reflection does not exist because they are reactive social animals. When we try to think like them, we are already thinking too hard. They are like a flock of birds, changing direction all at once without a leader. We can study the patterns of flight direction and try to determine when the flock will change direction or why. But the truth is that none of the individual birds knows, they just react.
I'm not saying that we should stop trying to study youth culture for marketing purposes. Just acknowledging that we are outside the bubble and therefore will always be a step behind.
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