A presentation slide by Marta Kagan (mzkagan) on Slideshare

The two D’s – Devin and Daphne launched our first team “Lunch & Learn” session last Wednesday with a two-hour talk on Social Media. Although social media is not alien to all of us in the room, there are people like me who have barely scratched the surface so the topic, needless to say, was for our benefit.

My social media habit consists of checking Facebook once or twice a day and changing my status regularly, oftentimes tracking my mood swings, for a few close friends from a network of 302 people to see. I cannot be bothered to connect more on LinkedIn or share updates on Twitter. In fact with just a twinge of embarrassment and no regret whatsoever, I confess to not having accessed my Twitter account in about 3-4 months now. (*Daphne slaps forehead; Sonya mutters “oh she’s just hopeless!”)

A presentation slide by Marta Kagan (mzkagan) on Slideshare

So when Devin said that social media engagement is fundamentally “social conversations online”, I wondered whether my lukewarm participation and sporadic use of the medium can be linked back to personality traits.

I do not particularly enjoy “socializing” in the real world. Does this explain or justify my indifference? Am I not thrilled to fully join the social media crowd because online or offline crowds are crowds and I just don’t like them?

Could be. Or simply because I do not know how to start and keep a conversation going.

Anyway, whatever the reason may be, I do recognize though that the medium is powerful. I still doubt it would replace broadcast or print media, but it will be, if it isn’t already, as influential as its predecessors in shaping world views and trends.

The one thing I would be very interested to do in the future when I finally get over my lagging adoption and perhaps when there’s time to be an armchair thinker again is to go deeply into the nature of conversations that are happening online.

While I have “partially read” The World is Flat and some other books on the changing communications landscape, I have yet to encounter social media communication theories.

If there are such theories, are they any different from existing interaction theories like Social Penetration, Agenda Setting, Dialectics or Elaboration Likelihood models?

If it’s all very similar to social conversations in the real world, could conventional theories sufficiently spell out the dynamics of online interactions?

Is Social Media Studies more anchored on a “medium” rather than a “content” -slanted analysis? Are we more interested to know about users habits and what they get out of the experience of using the medium rather than the quality and “depth” of the information they are sharing within their networks?

Is it really a democratic, no-holds-barred dialogue or are we just dealing with a new breed of better trained, more subtle gatekeepers?

When we say, we’d like to reach out to bloggers and other e-fluentials to create awareness or change perceptions, are we choosing on the basis of who is “popular” online or do we gauge based on expertise and influential in the real world?

For controlled communications (as in PR, Advertising, Marketing), where do the lines of online and offline communications outreach blur, intentionally or otherwise?

Some presentation slides were shared during our “Lunch and Learn” sessions, courtesy of Marta Kagan on Slideshare – do check them out here and here and see what you make out of Social Media.