Lessons on Facebook -- from my wife

Working in social media and living in it are two different things. This became even more apparent to me a couple of weeks ago when my wife found Facebook.

People are surprised when they find out that, although I make my living in digital marketing, not everyone in my immediate family is as into it as I am. I guess after telling certain people about 'cool' things and getting that glassy eyed looked, I chose to only tell those who seemed to care.

These last few years I think having a spouse that is not necessarily on the cutting edge of social media and internet marketing has helped. It keeps me grounded in reality. In a lot of cases, she's the stereotypical target market. She serves as a great dose of reality.

So here's a list of things that I've learned from my wife when she joined and got active on Facebook:

1. It's about connecting with old fiends. Once she realized that she could find people she went to high school and college with, she spent literally hours looking up all kinds of old acquaintances.
2. It's about pictures. My wife is an amateur photographer but never really got into Flickr, Photobucket or even Snapfish. She's posted all kinds of photos on Facebook however because she knows her friends are logging on all the time. I guess that's why Facebook is the heaviest used photo site.
3. The best apps are the ones that allow her to connect with others in a clever way. There are a lot of apps that allow you to dress up your profile. The ones that are the most interesting to her are the ones that she help her engage with friends, give an excuse to say hi or share something about herself and encourage others to do the same.

- Paul Herring

Comments

[Lisa Braithwaite]

Same thing over here. My husband's eyes glaze over when I talk about a conversation I had on Twitter or Facebook. But this week, he joined Facebook and LinkedIn. First thing he did was load up a whole bunch of photos.

It's true; that's how we find out what our friends are up to.