Lucy, you got some ’splaining to do!

My friend Mark Schaefer posted this Sunday evening. Will an economic recovery pummel social media? It’s a thought provoking post to be sure. It was re-tweeted quite a bit yesterday by people who I don’t normally see re-tweeting Mark’s posts. Even some of our marketing, pr and social media folks in the Triangle area picked up on it. Almost to a person, everyone thought it to be something worth pondering. And it is.

As I read it for the first time I found myself nodding in agreement. But, it was one of those posts that wanted to be read more than once. As I read it for a second, and then a third time, I found myself asking a lot of questions. Can there possibly be a better blog post than one that will make you read it a few times and then sit back and think about it? Mark’s have a way of doing that. So, with all of that in mind, I’m going to go through some of what he got me thinking about. He’s seen me do this once before to a webinar he did. It’s how we first got better acquainted. For those of you who might read this and think I’m picking on him, no way. I have too much respect for him, what he says, and the work that he does to do that. Here we go.

This, I think, is the crux of his post. “As the economy heats up, unemployed, or under-employed, individuals spending vast amounts of time on the social web and networking will have to make new choices as they return to work.” I don’t disagree with that totally, but, I think there’s an assumption in the statement that might bear further examination. It makes it seem that under-employed and unemployed people make up the bulk of social media contributors. I don’t think that’s the case at all and I’m almost certain that Mark didn’t intend that. Too, the statement assumes that the economy heating up is going to reduce unemployment. Almost everything I read on the subject runs counter to that. This is shaping up to be a jobless recovery. We may wish otherwise but it doesn’t look that way. While there have been some intermittent rays of sunshine in the unemployment numbers, most who study and report on those things think it will get worse still. I was reading one report two weeks ago that pointed to the fact that if we measured unemployment today as we did in the 70s and before, the unemployment percentages would actually be in the 20s instead of the 10s.

So, I think that there will still be a lot of unemployed people out there, and while a great many are making use of social tools to find work, I don’t think that those without work are driving social media in terms of time spent.

Mark cites three other possible implications on social media usage as people return to teh work force. Here’s the first one.”As people return to work, the prime activity level on social media will be more heavily-weighted to the evening hours, since many companies restrict social media usage in the workplace.”

Leaving aside the issue of how many remain unemployed, or how many more join their ranks over the coming year, a number of people will almost certainly rejoin the workforce. For those, I suspect that Mark is right on target. For a little while anyway. I have a feeling that companies will be forced into relaxing that restrictive attitude on social media usage in the workplace as we go through the next few years.

The next implication he points to is this. “The number of channels in which people participate will narrow. This may hasten the decline of some platforms like MySpace.” For sure, but, I think that will happen regardless of employment status. I would point out though that we are still in the early early stages of all of this social media stuff and we will likely see more platforms emerge as other platforms diminish or die.

The last implication he sees is this. “There may even be a slight shift in advertising budgets BACK to traditional media (drive-time radio?) since access to Internet-based impressions will be limited in a workplace. How do you see a Facebook ad when you’re working a construction job?” Well, if you’re in construction, you see the Facebook ad while you’re standing in line at the “break truck” checking your iPhone, Droid or what have you. You see them on your lunch break when you’re checking those same devices. That said, I think Mark has a point about ad budgets and traditional media. I’m not certain that they have ever left traditional media behind. Mark would know more about that than I. What I have seen though is a rise in buzz, or noise, around billboard advertising. Can there be anything more traditional?

Here’s what he closed the post with. “I believe that use of the social web will still grow overall as people and companies find clever new ways to make the underlying technologies more useful and fun. But I think it is unavoidable that an improving economy will temper this growth. The best environment for social media growth is when people have a lot of time on their hands and a shift is in our future. Do you agree?”

Well, if you’ve read this far, you know that I do and I don’t. The social web will certainly grow. I am not so sure that an improving economy will temper that growth. I am almost certain that people having a lot of time on their hands has little to do with that growth and I think that the “shift” is just getting started rather than ramping down. Having said all of this I don’t guess I can just leave it here so, getting back to this post’s headline, “Lucy, you got some ’splaining to do!”

We are, I think, only ten years or so into the “shift.” The groundwork, or foundation, for that shift goes a bit further back, as it would have to, but let’s leave that for another time and start in 1999. With the publication of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Let’s extract from that, this, “markets are conversations.” They certainly weren’t that at the time but they are getting there, aren’t they? What’s facilitating that? The Internet, the social web, social media and/or tools. Couple that with the fact that our trust in institutions is crumbling, as well as a number of other indicators, and you’ve got a “shift.” A big one too that isn’t coming to an end, it’s one that’s just getting started. I don’t think we’ve seen anything on this magnitude for five hundred years plus, since Gutenberg’s time, but we’ll leave that for another time as well.

I think that the social web (or media, if you like) and the networks that we are building are coming together to help us through that transition or shift. I think that they will only grow stronger as the years progress. One of the more powerful needs we have as humans is the one of belonging. Where we once fulfilled that sense of belonging through any number of institutions, those are now disintegrating around us, and in their place we are starting to belong to smaller communities and networks. Tribes, as Seth Godin has called them. Maybe even markets, as The Cluetrain Manifesto called them. Those networks and communities, like Mark’s {grow} site, are powered and connected by social media. It’s what makes the go and thrive. Add to this the value we humans attach to being “known” or “acknowledged” or “seen”, and I don’t see how social media does anything but continue to grow and expand. It will likely take on some other name as time goes by but the shift is just getting started and people will make the time to participate to satisfy those needs for belonging and being known.

I could work story and its importance to all of this in here as well, but I’ll leave that for another post too. What are your thoughts on the matter? Will social media be slowed by the economic recovery?