Get your creativity hats on folks ’cause I have a feeling some changes are on the horizon for how you get the word out about your cause, or business on social media.
As an early adopter of social media for social change, I’ve watched these crazy-named tools evolve from cutting edge to mainstream, inspiring to exhausting, collaborative to commercial, and user-friendly to user-overwhelming.
Can social media still be used to bring people together and spread good messages? Absolutely. But as the Netflix documentary, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened demonstrated, it can also be used to deceive.
On the Facebook front, in September 2018, an Inc. article reported that, “40-percent of U.S. users have taken a break from checking the app for several weeks on end. Additionally, 44-percent of younger users in the United States have deleted the app off of their phone entirely.” And just last week Facebook announced that it will be changing the platform’s focus to be more about private sharing with small groups of people you know.
We’ve also discovered over the last couple years that social media use increases depression and loneliness, and cell phone addiction is real. Books like How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life, and Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World are popping up. I predict we’ll see more like them along with a rise in “digital detoxing,” “digital sabbaths,” and “dumb phones.”
So what does this mean if you want to get the word out about your Big Vision for your work in the world?
If I had to guess, I would say that the marketing pendulum will begin to swing back the other way and we’ll need to do outreach more evenly online and offline, in-person and virtually, in print and digitally. “Trust,” “privacy,” “transparency,” and “human” could become the new buzzwords.
But those are just guesses. Honestly, the path isn’t clear to me yet, which is why it’s time to cultivate your creativity. If we do go through another shift in how we communicate as a culture, we’ll need to generate new ways to share our Big Vision with the world — online and offline.
I’m excited to see how this change might manifest. Howabout you?
For one, I put FB in the past. It is one of the least trusted companies in the country and deserves that description. Their ethics are abysmal. Their sense of civic responsibility is at zero. I use LinkedIn, Twitter and watch Instagram.
Hi Britt, great post! I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot as well – in fact, I wrote an article on it last month. Check it out if you like: https://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/digital-detox-breaking-your-phone-addiction/Content?oid=7450322
Thanks, Wendy! And great article. I love the idea of a phone box. There are cute ones on Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/listing/594164637/unplug-box-rustic-wood-planter