Tech geeks can make the social media space a really boring place to be

I love being online.  I adore reading blogs, catching up on comments on Twitter and Friendfeed … it’s all good stuff.  But, if you are working out how to use social media for ‘non-tech’ PR purposes, I sometimes questions how far ahead of the curve one needs to be.

Let’s look, for example, at some of the most widely read blogs and twitterers. From the top of my head I think of Scoble on Twitter along with Techcrunch and Techmeme … if you’ve got a tech client, then these are your big influencers.  They are people you need to follow, understand, and to work with to promote your clients.  But a vast amount of people online are not particularly techie (I don’t consider myself techie – but I run a couple of blogs(here and here), twitter, use friendfeed, and consume my news via RSS) and many of them are online ready to be influenced – by you.

And this is my concern, to get a following of merit on any of the up-and-coming social media/microblogging sites it really does help if you are a technie.  Lot’s of the info out there is from techie’s to techies … so I’m of little interest to them.  I don’t break techie news BUT I do have interesting things to say (I think).  In fact even our own industry magazine has a ‘best of the tech blogs’ … well what does that mean, blogs aren’t worthswhile if they aren’t techie (after all the industry mag is a PR magazine).

PR people undoubtedly need to include themselves in a hazy ‘never-world’ of friendship/professional connections in the social media world.  But the temptation is to get wrapped up in a Tomorrow’s World style situation where the only people who are reading your online messages are other PR people or techies – frankly neither of those are very useful to all but one of our clients.

Robert Scoble did a very interesting analysis of all of the tech news on ONE DAY on techmeme and he worked out how much could actually be used TODAY.  In other words, what news could we act on today and make purchasing decisions based upon?

Here’s the top 10 of his list

1.       Next-gen MacBook, MacBookPro spotted in matching outfits. Can’t use. (They aren’t out yet).
2. Apple’s iPhone Developer NDA Kills Book for iPhone Developers. Can’t use. (I haven’t signed the NDA).
3. Initial Thoughts on MySpace Music. (CAN use!)
4. SDK shoot-out: Android vs. iPhone. Can’t use. (Android now out yet).
5. Eee PC to Feature 3.75G for Internet Access Anywhere. (Can’t use. Not out yet.)
6. Hands on with the Slingbox PRO-HD. Can use. Units just started shipping. I want one.
7. Adobe Talks Open Source, Innovation and the Future of Flash. (Can’t use.)
8. Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads. Can use, but not for consumers, so earns an asterisk.
9. Is Chrome a security risk? (Can use.)
10. China Mobile Seeking Cut-Down Version of Apple’s iPhone. (Can’t use.)

The majority of bloggers with large followings aren’t actually telling us anything that will make our lives better TODAY.  They are very keen to try and ‘break’ stories on what might, just might, make life easier in the future.  The problem is, to get thousands of visits one needs something eyewateringly new, it gets your story Dugg and onto Google news.  Either that or you need to be quite outrageous.

We run the risk of being caught in a cycle of tech news taking over the social media space.  Because techies are more adept at gaming the systems, invariably tech stories become the ‘days top story’ or the ‘days to read’.  If PR consultants with consumer clients try to compete then, frankly, they are fighting battle.  Instead of trying to get the techies to mention our non tech stories we should be less future gazing and more accepting of the fact that, this morning alone, three of my friends from the BBC only just joined Facebook – and they think they are ‘with it’.  Your client’s customers (like ours) could be just the same.

Well hello again!