Tonight, social media changed
Earlier tonight, I was wrestling with a problem my wife posed. She has developed a very complex series of interlinked excel spreadsheets, calculating across multiple workbooks, with a final export to a PDF. All was well until today, when she had a final review…
Loading the data, clicking to view a graph generated and looking at the data table associated with it was then I saw the horror in her face - the currency symbol changed from £ to $. The expression was similar to the first time I made her watch Saw.
No problem I thought, an easy fix, however, after an hour, we were still stumped.
I know - twitter. I’ll reach out to the twitterverse as there’s bound to an excel expert who could answer my simple question. I posted the question and what came back was …………nothing. A few people pointed to online resources (these were useful are now bookmarked for future reference), however I remember a time when you’d get messages back almost instantly with helpful comments and possible solutions.
What I began to realise is that the nature of engagement is changing. More people may have adopted social tools, however I feel they are engaging with them in a different way. The early adopters are the ones who drive the engagement through networking, often resulting in helping or connecting the right people together. I took a look back through others posts and realised the majority are just links. There appeared to be less collaboration and more link dropping. This could be cause users feel this is still collaboration, but social was meant to foster the discussion around them.
So what does this mean? Well it’s made me think about social media and the engagement behind it - the user motivation/behaviours and what will this translate to for business.
In this case though, I’ll wait until morning and call the excel genius I know for a catch up and to pick his brains. Old-school socialising.
