Condo Media - April 2014 - 26

by Michael Zimmer

HOMEOWNER COLUMN

Social Technology Shifts
Communicating in Today's Mobile Environment

A

t a time when many communities have just started to
embrace social technology,
expanding everyone's ability
to stay connected and communicate,
everything is about to get complicated
again. But perhaps, this may be an opportunity in disguise.
I recently read the post "I'm 13 and
None of My Friends Use Facebook"
on the Mashable website. This post
was created by an adolescent to share
how her generation is connecting
and communicating in today's social
mobile environment.
As you can gather by the title,
communication for this generation
isn't using a single public social site
like Facebook, which has become
crowded, complicated, and an uncool
place for teens to hangout and share
their coming-of-age stories with their
friends. We all remember being that
age and the last thing we wanted was
Mom, Dad, or worse - our grandparents - involved with our private life.
This is bad news for us grandparents
because we thought we had discovered a way to reconnect with our busy
families and share pictures, videos, and
an occasional "love you" posts. Today,
those pictures, videos, and connected
communications are ending up on
Snapchat, Instagram, or Vine.

Changing Times

Why is this important to associations?
So goes our youth, so goes the future
of communication. If communities are
developing a communication platform
where few are listening, it is a waste of
time and money.
It seems like just a few years ago I
was trying to connect our community
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Condo Media * April 2014

via a page on MySpace. At the time, it
was mainly a college crowd on social
media and only a few people opted-in
so the project was a bust. Today, more
than 1 billion people are connected
to social media, including our senior
population. Thus, it is totally possible to connect most, if not all, of our
members in a single place.

diffused that it is easy to get misdirected,
which works for a site that can profit
from the amount of time people spend
searching around, but it doesn't work
for most of us with limited time or in a
strict communication need. The nextgeneration social site is highly focused
on just one thing: There are a few buttons, and people know exactly why they

Today, more than 1 billion people are connected to
social media, including our senior population. Thus,
it is totally possible to connect most, if not all, of our
members in a single place.
While this shift away from sites like
Facebook isn't something you may
be seeing on the news yet, it has been
happening for nearly two years. This
may seem to be an overwhelming and
complicated situation, but in reality,
what we are starting to experience is a
wider acceptance and understanding of
virtual social communities.
But here is the challenge: If our
community is going to be scattered
over several different communications
tools and there is going to be a generational communication split, how do we
remain connected in a meaningful and
all-inclusive way?
Let's take a step back and look at
the bigger picture as to why people are
looking for alternatives to a single site.
The Mashable post was to the point:
Facebook's goal is to keep people
engaged as long as possible, and to
accomplish that, the site has become
complicated, scattered, and confusing.
Communication among members are so

are there and what they can accomplish.
The common theme here is people
are naturally gravitating to the tool that
best fits their need. Today, this may be
more than one site and all connected to
a mobile device. To me, this shift actually creates the possibility for greater
flexibility in communication and the
growth in adoption of a better opportunity to ensure communications when
the correct tools are applied.
For example, it wouldn't make
much sense for the association to share
pictures on Snapchat, just because it
is a popular picture-sharing tool. The
pictures shared are designed to convey
a thought, joke, quick visual, and then
disintegrate in a few seconds. (Then
again, our legal representatives may
offer a different opinion on the benefits
of the disappearing picture feature.)
Technology always works best with
an action plan and advanced notification. There are a number of older
technologies that are still highly effec-
Condo Media - April 2014

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