Your Professional Paradox
November 20, 2024
We Came to the Social Media Party Late. But We Have The Beer.
Until this month, I had no use for social media.
Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Discord, oh my. Whenever someone encouraged me to open an account, I found the same disappointment. Everyone was broadcasting and not listening. I would close the account within the month.
I can get that same one-way with television. They broadcast, but you can’t talk back. There’s no conversation with tv. There’s only content, not conversation. News, movies, sports, documentaries, and such—all one way, from them to you. There’s no two way about it. You can talk to your television but nobody hears you or cares.
Today, you can talk with me on Bluesky —@GeorgiaPatrick or use the Bluesky search function to locate Georgia Patrick.
Many Substack authors I admire and subscribe to, such as Robert B. Hubble, Dan Rather, Heather Cox Richardson, Sari Botton, Walter Rhein, and Jay Kuo have opened accounts on Bluesky and made clear how to find them and have a conversation.
I’m a substack author and that attracted me because a community of other professional writers recognized me, welcomed me, and showed me how the engagements, conversations, chats, comments, and community building are thriving in each of their publications. Each person who starts a publication is the owner. You don’t have to ask another writer or editor to publish you, as it happens in Medium.
Twitter was a social media tool for people much younger than me and the world I lived in—business, leadership, and critical thinkers, did the pioneering work with LinkedIn and kept that going as a safe place for private business conversations, with high guardrails to keep the shameless self-promoters out. My LinkedIn account has a well-defined professional purpose and guardrails; meanwhile, Bluesky has a different, preferred culture and settings that amplify me and connect me with people actively seeking the wisdom and connections I’ve gained for 50 years.
Credit Grand Scient from Pixabay
Boomers Understand Television
Boomers understand television. It’s all we had growing up. The keyword is broadcast. It’s a one-way relationship with you on the receiving end and the television industry casting its net of information, advertisements, news, advertisements, sports, advertisements, and movies over you, like the same kind of net used to capture and kill fish. Did I mention advertising? There’s no conversation or two-way relationship in television.
Email came in around 1990 and that seemed like an extension of letter writing with stamps or phone calls. There was an opportunity for questions, answers, and some conversation, but not the same as meeting for coffee, touching your hand, looking you in the eye, and sharing some laughter.
Email worked until some fool created broadcast email, which goes by the name Mass Irritation. The inventors of email lists call it mass marketing, but we know an advertisement and broadcast when the net drops on our heads and tries to reel us out of the water and into the boat.
Along comes Twitter, Instagram, and other schemes to capture us and reel you into the boat, along with all the other struggling and stinking fish. It’s still broadcasting. Oh, there are “likes” and other tools created by the software people to try to make it seem like a more equitable relationship. It’s still broadcasting. It’s still no better than television, which we’ve had in our house since 1950.
Credit Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Where Did Social Media Lose The Magic?
The main difference is we’ve gone from a few major channels, such as NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and PBS to millions of channels, which creates massive noise. Every individual with a social media account becomes the entire production team. At the beginning and end of a movie or television show, did you notice all of the names, titles, and jobs that roll past your eyes? We call those “the credits” and it takes all of those people and companies to produce the show you just watched.
In social media, it’s just you, doing all of those jobs—from writer to star to supporting cast, plus producer, art director, casting director, musical composer, costume designer, editor, executive producer, and director. No wonder the quality of the channel fails to engage.
You might wonder, after 70 years of this if anyone would figure out a social platform that is more like a conversation, a personal letter, a comfy conversation in a coffeehouse, or a creative session at a restaurant where you sketch out your most exciting ideas and possibilities on a napkin with your gel pen.
That’s the Bluesky experience. That’s why they are the fastest-growing social platform ever. It looks like 21 million and still climbing. That’s why the Boomers and a whole lot of others who never cared about social media are now creating accounts and dialing into each other. It’s all in the intentions and strategies for communication. Whoever invented Bluesky, learned lessons from decades of broadcasting and why that’s not real, not authentic, and temporary.
Where is the Genius? Is It You or Bluesky?
While it seems obvious to “go where the person is” to create communication, that is not how the software industry thinks. They create a tool and it’s up to you to change your life, change your business processes, and change the way you communicate to accommodate their technology and profits. Until now, it seemed financially impossible to “go to where the person is” to create a new order of connections, like billions of stars in the sky, but without the fishing net.
What is the Bluesky experience like, then? First of all, if a Boomer can understand it, create an account, and adjust all of the settings to prevent people who are mean, stupid, hateful, or self-serving from ever coming near me, then others with some kind of social media experience might like it, too.
It’s exactly like your decision whether or not to make a phone call or receive a call. You know the name and number of who you want to talk with. At the same time, the magic is in the trusted relationship so that you experience proper introductions to others, through people you already trust and may have experienced with in-person conversations.
The other great feature of Bluesky is they are not full of themselves. They don’t talk down to people and they don’t say “If you have experienced Twitter, you’ll understand this.” Maybe they have Boomers on the design team. Maybe they have Gen X and Millenials involved in design and testing because all of those individuals were alive and learning in the world before email ever showed up as a thing. Instead of using someone else’s templates or codes, maybe they started with one question—How do we go to where they are? Maybe they were intentional and strategic and asked, who has the money, experience, plus professional achievements already and found those are 70 million Boomers, 65 million Gen X people, and 72 million Millenials.
Let’s start with the older professionals, the ones we could always count on to bring the beer to the party. Let’s start with the Boomers. They know more about two-way relationships and building communities with neighbors than anyone else. They can go for years without ever looking at a computer and still make a living and serve others in meaningful, impactful ways.
Credit Evgeni Tcherkasski from Pixabay
If You Build It, Will They Come?
Who is coming into my constellation of shining stars and international communicators? You just have to search for their name and if they have a Bluesky account, tap on the connection buttons and invite them into your community. It’s a two-way relationship. Not one-sided like television, Twitter, Instagram, TicTok, Facebook, My Space, Flickr, Tumblr, Snapchat, and more.
Who am I chatting it up with? Gifted professionals and communicators, which includes everyone in my Substack community. Most of them are 40 or older and have a lot of wisdom and lived experiences they share with others. All of them are famous, interesting, accomplished, confident, exceptionally talented, and insist on healthy boundaries. That’s why they seem more private and more interested in you than anyone you “friended” on Twitter or Facebook.
If this seems like you, then I encourage you to set up your Bluesky account and knock on my door by putting Georgia Patrick in the search bar. There’s nothing about me that’s weird or tricky like an obtuse handle. You will find the never-boring, always-curious me, just as I have been since television was invented.
