I was inspired to write about this topic by a recent exchange with a friend, which concerned the use of Twitter and various blogging practices for educators. My friend is a new educator in a very tech-centric district in California, and they have a fairly limited tech background and an even more limited social media background. When I came to isteconnects to fill the role of NECC 2009 Community Manager,  I was extremely excited at the prospect of involving my friend (the educator), as it would have obvious benefits for their career. I invited this friend to guest post on ISTE Connects so they could cut their teeth in the blogosphere and meet some new people, and I also attempted to school them on the best use of Twitter. To make a long story shorter, this friend decided Twitter was not for them and that blogging was a hassle. I couldn't help but feel like a #failure.

Since my teenage years, I have been consistently concerned about my friends that lacked a basic understanding of technology. Back in the old days, it was skills like connecting a printer to a computer, creating a basic WIFI network, and running basic maintenance on their home computers; skills which they neglected to learn. Now that we are older, I look at my friends with even more concern. They not only still have to pay for their computers to be repaired every single time something minor goes wrong, but they are now missing the social media wave which I believe will have serious implications for how competitive they will be in the future workplace. Why, then, do I lack the ability to explain to them how important social media is? As a teacher, being tech savvy and keeping up with the social media wave often translates directly into being a more effective educator. So why wouldn't you keep up on these things?

One reason why people might be turned off to the social media revolution is because of the overload, and overlap, of services that are "the next best thing" or "the next level" in social media creation. Just check out these pictures; the first is one depicting social media services as a busy city. It is easy to feel the congestion and overall chaos of the social media world when you view it this way. (pic from jacobtyler.com)

The next image is a picture you've probably seen in plenty of keynotes over the last year, which may have included an explanation of how social media has exploded recently. I'm sure this picture is now totally out-of-date and probably has twice the amount of new social media portals with a third of the old ones now being irrelevant.

So how do you convince your friends or co-workers to jump into this social media world and start creating content? How do you explain to them that owning your online identity, by sharing unique ideas via blogs and Twitter, is important to their future? I fully believe that being the creator of valuable content, that is freely-accessible by the rest of the world, is crucial to being both competitive and relevant across all future industries. I care about my friends, so I'm going to keep trying to help them along and show them specific examples of the positive impact social media has had in my life and in people lives across the globe; I hope that at least a few of them will understand. It will be difficult for many of them to make this transition when they are busy watching satirical videos about social media; I honestly can't blame them, considering how quickly social media services come and go, not to mention this video is hillarious. Personally I think Flutter is going to be the next big thing ;-)

I fear that many of my friends will become casualties of this social media revolution, and they'll be at the mercy of an elitist class of content creators and aggregators (that includes us). I'm not sure this is an absolutely terrible fate, but I'd like to know how they feel about it... Unfortunately, I can't query them via Twitter, and you can be certain they won't be taking the time to read their good friend's most recent blog post.

As the old saying goes, "You can lead a horse to Twitter, but you can't make it tweet." ...Or something like that.