Ten Most Common Complaints to Social Media Adoption

January 11, 2008 at 2:06 pm (Social Media) (, , , , , , )

I read an interesting article in ReadWriteWeb today on common objections to the use of Social Media.

Link to Article 

While reading this I was constantly comparing what the author was saying to the world of education. Although the article is set up for the business world I hear many of these same objections when I try to convince teachers to use social media to enhance instruction. Below is a brief overview of the ten common objections to social media. Read through them. Do you feel they apply to education? Do you think social media is a good tool to integrate into the curriculum or is it just a waste of time?

1. I suffer from information overload already.

2. So much of what’s discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do

3. I don’t have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.

4. Our customers don’t use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.

5. Communicators [bloggers, tweeters] are so fickle, better to stay unengaged than risk random brand damage. We don’t want hostile comments left about us on any forum we’ve legitimized.6. Traditional media and audiences are still bigger, we’ll do new stuff when they do.       

7. Upper management won’t support it/dedicate resources for it.

8. These startups can’t offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I’ll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality

9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can’t tell where to invest my time so I don’t use any of it at all.

10. That stuff’s fine for sexy brands, but we sell [insert boring B2B brand] and are known for stability more than chasing the flavor-of-the-month. We’re doing just fine with the tools we’ve got, thanks.

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