News flash: Facebook makes you smart, Twitter makes you dumb. Curious?
I thought so. PR lesson #1: social media + psychology = very sexy story. It’s not at all surprising that the likes of Mashable and the Telegraph covered a study suggesting that while Twitter harms working memory, Facebook may have a beneficial effect.
To be fair, news stories about scientific studies often strip away the nuances of the actual findings so take the above conclusion with a grain of salt. Fortunately, that’s unimportant for the more important PR lesson #2 (although, if the study is accurate, it may be more of a concern for my own well being).
If our social media consumption can go so far as to actively transform our memory, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that it can and does have a powerful effect on other mental faculties including communication capabilities. We can already pinpoint superficial changes to our communication style in the development of widely used Twitter and SMS lexicons quite unlike traditional classroom English.
Fast forward a couple years. As the Digital Native generation begins to enter the work force (take a look the Berkman Law Center’s Digital Natives project if you haven’t already), their prolonged exposure to social media with its emphasis on text-based, succinct, abbreviated, bare-bones messages is bound to fundamentally alter both their personal writing style and their expectations as to what constitutes eloquent written communication. And for those who see this as a slide into illiteracy, it’s not just me who disagrees; Stanford Professor Andrea Lunsford begs to differ in her study on the new era of literacy.
It follows that a shift in the acceptable standard of written communication will trickle down into just about everything we do in PR. Of course, PR agencies are (hopefully!) already adopting this new communication style in their social media work, but I would venture a very unscientific guess that we’ll begin to see a change in day-to-day personal writing styles as well as a shift in the look and feel of documents. Even more so than now, it’ll be game over if your audience detects a whiff of verbose and flowery. With formality also on the decline, you end up with a pool of concise communicators trained on 140 character bursts whose tone often feels buddy buddy right from the outset. Therein lies PR lesson #2: Any written outreach to younger audiences needs to be increasingly framed with this “social media” writing style in mind. While this may be applicable to older audiences too (after all, the largest growing demographic on Facebook is above 35), their traditional writing and communication styles are more deeply ingrained and less susceptible to change.
Yes I know, declaring that a paradigm shift is underway which stands to transform written communication seems, well, a bit extreme. But Professor Lunsford is confident that “we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” Which brings us to PR lesson #3: According to Wired’s Clive Thompson, Professor Lunsford found that the university students in her study were “remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos – assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.” This has important implications for PR. If your audience has grown up knowing how to tailor a message, then certainly they can instantly spot an irrelevant or ill-fitting one. PR is going to look a bit silly if we adopt a “social media” writing style without carefully personalizing the message in the process.
Welcome to the short attention span generation- it’s not us, it’s psychology.