Culture and Social Media Work

I believe pretty firmly in the subtle cultural differences within the regions of the US. As a person born and raised in the Midwest, I think there are a few key differences that I note (and other people seem to point out to me, too), and I think it’s interesting how they affect my work in public relations/social media.

1. An inherent necessity to at least pretend to be friendly : This one’s actually been pointed out to me by lots of people since I moved, that I ‘can’t be from California’ because I’m ‘too nice’
2. Over-apologizing (sorry for being sorry when you told me to stop saying ’sorry’!)
3. A need to act like I don’t have a life outside of work when I’m at work
4. A need to talk too much about work when I’m away from work
5. A tendency to overshare when dealing with any kind of service representative – waiters, valets, customer service people on the phone, etc.

So why do these things matter to my work?  Because they shape the way that I communicate to people who communicate to me!  I do a fair amount of customer service (as you’ll note from some prior posts here) in my communications role, and my responses tend to embody all of the characteristics I mentioned before.  When I learn of a customer service complaint, the super friendly, very apologetic tone.  And you know what?  It works.

People like that tone when they’re talking to a company.  They WANT you to be too friendly and too apologetic.  But on the other hand, I see the values of a West Coast lifestyle helping with social media in different ways – like the ability to take your work with you but still have fun!  All of these social media folks who live-Tweet events and photograph every attendee – that’s a great skill in social media!  Whereas my Midwestern work ethic means I focus on the moment and often forget to capture things that way, unless I’ve been assigned to take pictures or live-Tweet, but then I often miss the bulk of what’s being said and done!  lol

So what’s your take on cultural differences and work in social media?  Do you buy it?

Will your social become your work?

This is me doing a bit of crystal ball reading (the chai was a bit too murky for review of my tea leaves, so we had to find a fall back , but the more I read about companies taking formerly internal functions and ‘crowdsourcing‘ them, it makes me wonder about the function of ‘work’ in our future.

Reading a post by Todd Defren (PRSquared) on relinquishing control.  He opens with a discussion of Intuit moving to fully crowd-sourced customer support and Procter & Gamble canceling all internal efforts on R&D, relying instead on a pull economy in which they follow requests and produce based on tipping points of demand.  There are lots of other examples, growing quickly, such as Microsoft’s developer community.

Questions this causes me to ask:

• What jobs will be replaced by free crowd provided work? I think there will always be a place for hard goods and services (I don’t think you can use crowdsourcing to get food that no one’s taken the effort to actually grow or live in a house for which no one has produced building materials).  Perhaps more of the creative work of production will move to a pull model in which crowds request (or demand) and then support (post-purchase)?

• What will happen to the replaced jobs? Will we live in a world where you earn money by participating in crowdsourcing such that the creatives and communications types are all freelance, SAH(M/D)’s who earn a living by contributing to group projects in a digital space?  There are already places like CrowdSpring where you crowdsource a job proposal, though for the time being it leads to a hire at the end. (Tom Foremski asks these questions and then some in his article on Intuit’s crowd-sourcing move here at ZDNet)

• Will all work become production of some kind? Will everyone continue to participate in crowdsourcing as a past-time and have a job in which we are responsible for some aspect of the creation of an atom-based (or palpable) item? I could even see a movement like the ’slow food’ movement against crowdsourcing, in which people decide they’d rather have things that are produced nearer to them or in a way that values quality over quantity, again. Perhaps an anti-assembly-line movement? Or maybe a return to house calls? Who can say…
• Getting really crazy… What if no one had paying jobs or careers anymore?  What if our level of cohesion because of the internet grew so big that each person spent time doing things they liked doing and we reverted to a barter system for the things we need but didn’t produce ourselves, though on a more sophisticated and global scale?  Though the economics are hard to understand, but what if John Lennon was right?  “Imagine there’s no countries; imagine no possessions”

We’ll see what happens as the arguments for bits vs atoms become more apparent.