For those of you who shop online, EGF has also set up an online mall through my company, We-Care.com. When you click through their mall before shopping online, they receive a percentage of what you spend at 800+ merchants — at no extra cost to you. You can find their mall at http://egf.we-care.com.

Thanks for helping out!

— Bill

I'm curious. How has social media changed our social demographics? Do you find yourself connecting with people who are more like you in ideas, but are less like you in age, race, culture, gender, sexual orientation, income, and all the other things people use to size each other up?

Traditionally, people tend to "hang" and share interests with those who are outwardly similar to them. In a sense, that's the reason that a marketing effort targets a certain group. Social groups are generally not as interracial, multicultural, or intergenerational, as we like to pretend they are. Even non-romantic socializing between men and women has only become common over the last few decades — especially married people having single friends of the (oh, I hate this phrase) "opposite sex."

Before I get off any farther in my social critique, I'll get back to social media. Though I tend to be a person who has a fairly diverse analog social network, by default, I am more likely to meet people similar in age and skin color. Digitally speaking, though, it's a different game. Through social blogging and Twitter, I put out ideas and read other people's ideas. I find myself engaging in an exchange of thoughts and feelings before exchanging knowledge of skin color, gender, or age.

This is pretty significant. My online network includes people young enough to be my kids and people significantly older than me (though, granted, not many my parents' age). I hear from my friends' teenage kids on Vox and Facebook. I trade thoughts, respectfully, with Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, agnostics, and atheists. They're all there: male, female, black, white, Asian, living in this country, immigrated to this country, living in other countries.

Pretty much every college student in the country is on Facebook. But I wasn't surprised when the October 2007 issue of Wired reported that "the fastest growing segment of Facebook users is over 35, a group that represents 11 percent of all users." Pretty impressive, given that Facebook registration started with a limited number of colleges and, though it expanded greatly, has only been open to everyone since September 2006.

So, here's where my mind led me before finishing the café miel:

I haven't seen any research to show how social media has changed the demographics of socializing. I've also been a bad blogger. Yes, I have not been very prolific, and here I am hoping that I'm still in your RSS feeds and you still care enough to give me some feedback.

Has social media changed your social demographics? Do you find yourself connecting with a broader range of people, and if so, how?

Then there is the second question: Assuming I'm not a freak of demographics and social media is changing the make up of our social groups, how does this change marketing? A lot of marketing efforts have very clear demographics. An editor I wrote for once told me that the magazine's target audience was women over 60 making well into the six figures. (The editor, incidentally, was a 29-year-old woman making $40k.) In contrast, look at Facebook. Its biggest demographic, I believe, is still college students, and its fastest growing demographic is people over the age of 35.

If you have something that a lot of well-to-do women over 60 want, well just take out an ad in the damn magazine. If you're dealing with something that crosses demographics, it will take a lot more creativity than simply taking out an ad, but the ability to use social networks to reach people who really care about what you are offering make social media a far more powerful tool.

Update 10-23-07

First of all, thanks to all of you who have shared your experiences. I don't think this will pass as a random sampling, but it is interesting to see that — for many but not all of you — it has changed your social network.

@Debtink: I think you're story, your husband, and your son, are pretty telling example of how the internet can change social demographics. Part of what got me thinking about this topic was the way Aaron (Deb's son) and Annabelle (Patty's daughter) stay in contact with me in a way that I never stayed in contact with my parents' friends. I think that facebook, AIM, and Vox have changed the way I interact with teenagers. I also think it's a very possitive thing for teenagers. About a year ago, the organization I work for was doing some work with Harris Interactive. Some of the research they did, pointed to the number of "caring adults" a young person has in his or her life as important for a good transition to adulthood. I'm curious as to the internets ability to increase the number of those relationships, so if anybody has read anything interesting or seen any research along those lines, please let me know.

@Kitty: I think your point of not looking at social sites as places to sell stuff is exactly what I'm talking about. Allow me to quote you:

As far as marketing strategies... I don't consider the social realm as a venue for selling product. It is, of course, but I will avoid any attempt to turn my personal life into a marketplace. I'm one of those problem people who is cynical and resistant to any form of marketing - not least because I work in marketing. I think the public in general is becoming more inured to marketing strategies and the future of marketing lies in interactive consumer choice. If advertising is not thrown at people, they will seek it out and choose to engage.

I don't come from an advertising background, and when I think of marketing, advertising is not very high on my list. I also don't think of "marketing" as "selling things." I think the great potential for interactive marketing is relationship building — whether it's groups of insanely loyal consumer sharing information, companies sponsoring online events and services that people use, making useful information (not sales information) available easly and for free, or interacting directly with consumers on the web. In other words, I agree that it's all about "interactive consumer choice." I don't think consumers have ever wanted to be told what they wanted. The moment there was a mute button on the remote, they stopped listening to commercials. When DVRs came along, they started skipping them altogether.

Though some are still hiding their heads in the sand, I like to think that most people in marketing have accepted that the rules have changed. What I'm wondering, though, is whether the demographic game has diminished with it. If I'm Audi, and my fantaical users are all bonding on my new MyAudiSpace (sorry, I couldn't resist), my prime demographic isn't successful professionals in their mid-30s but, rather, Audi fans. That's something the magazine I wrote for, with it's narrow demographic, could never offer.

Fresh content is coming soon. (I promise.) In the meantime, some of my discussions have drifted from this blog over to a couple of other blogs. I just wanted to point you toward those postings.

Swing by Web 3.0 Dead Already? on Jeffro 2.0 and Bill Snyder and David Brain on Our Digital Coming of Age on Amanda Mooney's American Shelf Life.

I should put my cards on the table: I'm a communications guy, and interactive is my medium of choice. In other words, I can geek out like the best of you, but my concern isn't the technologies themselves but the ways people use them. My best work pairs me with someone who loves the technology and wants it to communicate. My friend Nate is like that. This is a guy who can write JavaScript (or XHTML, Flex, Java, PHP, CFM, and so on) the same way a native Frenchman uses his language to seduce an American tourist. Fortunately for Nate's wife, few women have undressed under the influence of JavaScript. But my point here isn't seduction; simply that I'm the communications part of the equation and quite aware that the other parts of the equation must be in place for everything to work.

Today, everyone is obsessed with Web 2.0. Yes, if you work in "the field," you may say the term is falling out of use. If you take a walk outside of the industry, however, it's actually gathering steam. Organizations are asking to Web 2.0-ify their sites — not quite knowing what they're asking for, but well aware that everyone else is doing it.

As someone who has to communicate with nontech people, I'm tired of explaining that Web 2.0 doesn't require a special browser. I'm tired of explaining it's not a thing but a concept … well, a bunch of concepts, even though people don't always agree about which concepts are included in the bunch.

Yes, we widely agree that "social media" is a big part of it. Many people include tools like AJAX and Flex, which allow for more dynamic presentations of content and make websites look and feel more like a desktop application. Others include XML and open APIs, which set content free from form and allow us to mix and mash content from different sources in ways the original creators may never have dreamed.

The problem with using the term Web 2.0 (and the burgeoning 3.0) is that it's applying software syntax to communications issues. Software developers carefully track versions to mark distinct changes in the technology. (Developers out there may argue that it's not that clear, but that's another debate.) The web doesn't have a development team to decide when the next release is. More to the point, when we talk about Web 2.0, we're not talking about a change of technologies. We are talking about changes in the ways people use the web, changes that have been facilitated by many new technologies.

The web also differs from software in that what is new does not necessarily replace what came before it. Often it augments it. Adobe Creative Suite 3 was intended to replace CS 2. Windows Vista is intended to replace XP. Web 2.0 did not replace 1.0.

The ramifications of this are significant. I can't count the times I've seen organizations that are heavily invested in Web 2.0 but have missed the Web 1.0 boat. Their information architecture is awful. Their user interfaces are unusable, and their web presence is completely out of brand. They have blogs, but are missing the true fundamentals.

If you're a company that's using social media to drive potential customers to your site, hopefully leading to purchases or other conversions, this is disastrous. If you are an information-rich site and nobody can find that information, what's the point of compiling all the data? If you look clunky to an increasingly interface-savvy population, you've lost your credibility — whether you've got an e-commerce site or online magazine.

About a year or so back, I was talking with my friend El, a usability analyst. Some of my earliest web projects were writing functional copy to improve the usability of sites her company was developing. When we were working in the late 1990s, she recalled, you really needed to test everything. Different companies' users could have radically different responses to a web interfaces. That's changed. Though usability testing is often critical, there's been significant codification of the language. People have expectations, some of them quite simple; if there's a company logo in the top left of the screen, users will assume it's a link back to the homepage. (I still see Web 2.0-invested companies that have their logos at the top of their site but don't use it as a link.) That language was developed in the retroactively named Web 1.0, and it hasn't gone away, though it does continue to evolve. The belief that we are in a Web 2.0 world has caused some to overlook the basics we learned during the web's first decade.

I also wonder if all this versioning is limiting our accomplishments by narrowing our view. Communications 101 tells us that language shapes the way we think; we are more likely to make our reality fit our words than the other way around. By defining what Web 2.0 is, have we stifled other applications of interactive technology? Well intentioned though it may be, the struggle to define Web 3.0 is a struggle that could stuff innovation into the confines of a box.

If our obsessive labeling doesn’t get in the way, there won't be a Web 3.0. Instead, there will be thousands of Web 3.0s. The technologies that fuel interactive media and the ways they are implemented are going in as many directions as there are creative minds to push them. The web is breaking out of its mold in every possible direction — from internet-enabled applications to mobile devices, from mash-ups to customized homepages to applications that function in browsers but feel like they're on your desktop.

With open APIs, XML, and a host of related technologies, people are creating tools whose real purpose is to allow others to find a purpose for them. Yes, Flickr is cool and so is Google Maps, but they're a whole lot cooler when you find they can be mashed together. What is Twitter for? Depends on who uses it. Don't like Twitter's web interface? Download a desktop application. Is MySpace a social site or a marketer's new frontier? Both. I SMS to my blog and receive IMs on my phone. In short, we are creating a web that is truly worldwide, one that stretches beyond computers and beyond information.

The whole point of defining Web 2.0 was to figure out where we are. Unfortunately for those who like buzzwords, we are everywhere. The whole point of discussing Web 3.0 is to figure out where we are going. Well, here's the news: We're not all going to the same place, and that is the beauty of this medium (or perhaps these mediums). The possibilities are endless and will continue to defy labels. We are just at the beginning of this "internet thing," and what comes next is going to be many things — some will die anonymous deaths and others will change the very nature of the way we communicate.

The process continued in that manner. I wrote in journals and on scraps of paper whenever something struck me. Then I'd sit down and type up the scraps. If the words felt like they belonged, I'd look through the evolving script — though I didn't know for a few years that it was a script — to see where it fit in. The chronology of the writing had nothing to do with chronology of the script.

As pieces emerged, I emailed them off to my college roommate, Tom. I was in Minneapolis and he was in Boston. As he wrote back in response to my thoughts, our emails worked their way into the script. When it was finally finished, I was amazed that it made sense. Not because I didn't trust my writing skills, but because I never intended to write a script. Once things started to fit together, I applied craft to make it work, but the creation itself lacked intent.

This was the perfect way for me to create. I had honed my writing style while I was in college. By that time, a Mac had replaced my typewriter. I developed my writing style by letting words gush onto the screen and then cutting and pasting. It was as much about rhythm as it was content. "If I shift that over there, and move this here, and change that word, and cut that phrase, well it just feels right."

I am a digital writer. Yes, I keep a journal, and I start short poems on paper. But I write by shifting fragments around, and that style, my style, shows the impact of the tools I used to develop it.

I won't bore you arguing whether technology has improved or harmed the way we communicate. I'm sick to death of that conversation. The simple truth is that — for better and for worse — technology has shaped our communications for a long time, whether it was the Gutenberg press, the telephone, or the iPhone. If the CD had been developed in the mid-sixties, we wouldn't have Abby Road side two. It was composed and created to fit on one side of an album. OK Computer, on the other hand, would fall apart if you had to stop and flip the album. Read Ginsberg's "HOWL," and you can taste the typewriter. It's a taste that leaves me wondering how I would write if that were my tool of choice. These days, I rarely pick up my 35 mm SLR, because I can now snap hundreds of digital photographs at no cost, shooting until I get things right. But I dearly miss the intentionality involved in setting up a shot and then going into the darkroom to decide how to print it. I miss the feel of the enlarger and the paper in my hands.

I'm tired of hearing people moan that kids are losing the art of communication. Sure, "how r u?" isn't poetry, but you know what it means. And it's a good way to make something fit on a tiny phone screen — especially when you're typing with your thumbs. We text and Twitter and communicate in fragments now. I miss paragraphs, but love the fact that we communicate with more frequency. I love that email keeps me in touch with more people than I ever imagined, but I miss the well-thought-out, carefully penned letter. I love that my personal blog lets my dad know things about my life that I'd never think to tell him, and that a mix of Vox, IM, Skype, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter keeps my friend Patty in my day-to-day life, even though she left Minnesota for the Bay Area several years ago. I love the fact that Vox allowed me to meet people through her, and that I got to know them in such a real way that meeting them in person seemed more like a reunion than an introduction. I love that online connections allow Patty's daughter Annabelle and Deb's son Aaron to know me as more than someone who visits their parents every couple of years. Indeed, they communicate with their parents' friends more than I ever did with any of my parents' friends.

I love my iPod, because it carries my podcasts along with my music. On a short bus ride to work or a walk down the street, I can catch up on tech news or website usability best practices. But I sometimes wonder if the person sitting across the aisle or walking past me might be someone who could have made a major impact in my life if we weren't both wired.

And please, don't tell me kids are spending so much time online that they don't have real friends. I not only believe that's untrue; there's research to prove it. Online relationships extend into the real world. Twenty years ago, teenagers spent hours on the phone, but they still met in person. Now they spend hours online, but they still meet in person. My college roommate and I don't have the epic phone calls we had for years after college. I miss them. But we also communicate more frequently than we used to. MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LiveJournal, WordPress, and the other millions of new technologies that have been so pathetically lumped together as Web 2.0 don't isolate us; they connect us. And if it sometimes lacks the intimacy of a coffee shop, well, it certainly increases the frequency of contact. And I do love the fact that two time zones don't prevent me from seeing what Laurel had for lunch yesterday or what her cats were up to this morning.

And let’s finish with social blogs, perhaps the most important writing platform today. People share their thoughts, ideas, and inner lives in ways they have rarely been able to in the past. This is a form of writing that is unconcerned with grammar or spelling, one that is simply about sharing what's inside of you with people who are willing to "listen." Most of us don't corner acquaintances in coffee shops to tell them what's going on in our hearts. We know nobody wants to be forced to listen. We save these things for close friends and family, and then, only when we have the time to sit down alone. It seems like that time keeps getting harder and harder to find. But blogs are a chance to say it and let people choose to read it. And people do read, and through this exchange we learn that our inner lives have a lot in common — more than we would have otherwise thought. We also learn that there is value in sharing even the mundane parts of our lives, which means there must be value in our lives.

I emailed Em yesterday, because I knew, through her blog, that her mother had gone through surgery recently. I was worried about her mother. What was odd about this was that I've never met her mother. For that matter, I've never met Em. But both my parents and one of my stepparents have had treatment for potentially serious health issues over the years. I'm lucky. Not only are both my parents alive and healthy, but I have two wonderful stepparents as well, also healthy. I'm not ready to lose any of them (and never will be), so I know what kind of worrying you do when one of them is sick.

I'm not going to take a populist stand here about how Web 2.0 has brought mass media to the common man; how DV has opened the door for filmmakers, how digital audio has brought the studio into every musician's basement. Big corporations still control big distribution channels, hold big promotional budgets, and are even using to use the tools of new media. (Remember who owns MySpace.) We have not entered a digital Utopia any more than we've entered a digital nightmare.

I'm simply saying that the media makes the message. It changes how we create art. It changes how we keep in touch. It changes how we meet people. It changes how we express ourselves. It changes how we play. It changes how we shop. It changes how we market. There will never be another Abby Road side 2. You'll never know what OK Computer would have sounded like if it had been composed for two 20-minute sides. Then again, you never know what Abby Road would have been if John had said to Paul, "Screw the bloody individual songs. We have 90 unbroken minutes to play with here."