I've noticed that my 18-month-old grand-daughter already knows 'the swipe.' If you hand her an iPhone-like object, including her play telephone, she'll swipe her index finger across it, expecting it to respond.
This new technology, which I still find somewhat gee-whiz-ish and amazing, will be as ho-hum to her as television is to me, as radio was to my mom, and - I suspect - as the telegraph was to my grandmother.
It's possible to become proficient in the technologies that come into common usage when we're adults -- but they feel like a 'second language' to us. The main place I see this lately is in the realm of social media. For my daughter, and my assistant, and other people I know in their 20s and 30s, using social media is part of their native language. They built websites in college (or even high school); they explore and evolve their use of facebook and/or twitter and/or Pinterest and/or iGoogle as easily as they change clothes. I feel relatively comfortable in all these places - probably more comfortable and fluent than many people my age - but it's not native to me in the way it is to them.
And I notice the same lack of ease and fluency in my clients, most of whom are in their mid-forties to mid-sixties. Of course everybody uses email, and google or yahoo for search - it would be hard to function in daily business life otherwise - but most executives, at least those I know, think of social media as just one more thing people are telling them they ought to be doing.
In fact, I recently conducted a meeting where a 50-something media executive pooh-poohed the idea (which was coming from two 30ish folks in the room) that ratings for their TV shows could be driven significantly by including a simultaneous online interactive component. "I know people do stuff online while they watch TV," he said, "But I don't think the two are connected." His young colleagues simply stared at him in disbelief, as though he had just asserted that the earth is the center of the universe. I could tell they had no idea where or how to start explaining to him the depth of his wrongness, from their view of the world.
Fellow boomers: if we want to operate in today's business world, I believe we must learn enough social media to get by in a world of - increasingly - native speakers. If that's true, then the question is, given everything else we have to do, how do we make social media part of our toolkit?
My husband sent me this great article from the WSJ the other day. It's by Alexandra Samuel, an impressive young woman who is clearly a social media native. In the article, Dr. Samuel offers a number of excellent, practical suggestions for executives to use social media as a means to achieving their existing goals, vs. thinking about social media as simply one more big, time-wasting, irritating thing to have to 'get into.'
For example, executives I know often complain about how hard it is to stay up-to-date on industry trends or to keep their leadership and management skills fresh. Samuels suggests using iGoogle or Flipboard to create a daily, self-curated 'dashboard' of the things most interesting and useful to you: she recommends subscribing "to a range of blogs, columnists and news searches that offer insights into new leadership models, profiles of high-functioning executives, academic research...and summaries of the latest business books."
Another common complaint from executives I coach: they don't have the time or energy to connect with and learn from their peers. Samuels suggests selecting a handful of folks with whom you most want to stay in touch, whose insights and activities you find most inspiring and useful, and then to "make this list of people the first thing you look at when you catch up on any of your social networks, so that you know what they are thinking about, reading, and dealing with in their own working lives."
An even more practical suggestion for using social media to improve your effectiveness: use the many planning and organizing tools available online (Mindmeister, Basecamp) to make the complex, collaboration-based projects on your plate more doable.
As someone who is continually working on learning to speak social media more fluently, and to integrate its power into my life on a variety of levels, I found the article (and her website) extraordinarily helpful. For those of us who are in our forties, fifties or sixties (and beyond) and wanting to operate effectively in the world we live in, social media is no longer a nice-to-have - it's a must.
They say the best way to learn a language is total immersion -- so grab hold of some native speakers and take the plunge.
