Actually, Kids Don’t Hate Twitter Anymore! – Chart of The Day

I knew it! Of course those yung-uns want to be as cool and hip as us. I knew this because in the past couple of months the youth in my family have been dabbling in Twitter. My family is how I measure world trends. My nearly-eighty father is facebooking…in two languages!

Social networking is quickly becoming just part of the fabric of our lives. Not too surprising. How we communicate has been evolving for millions of years. Remember ‘dialing’ a telephone and talking to your friend for more than an hour, catching-up on all the things that were happening in your lives? Now your friend already knows. They saw when you posted it in your Facebook or tweeted about it on Twitter. Heck, my own husband keeps up with my Twittering just so he’s informed about what I’m reading or doing. And remember before dialing a telephone, when people ‘wrote’ letters. Pages and pages telling all the things they had been doing. (Actually, this one is something I miss).

Communication is evolving fast, just like everything else in our modern world. And working in the communications industry we are all challenged to find the most effective, current way to reach our audiences. This more often than not requires more than one method of distribution. You have to ask where your audience is. Do they all use tools like Facebook and Twitter? Probably not, unless you’re targeting twitterers and people who use FB, so then you have to consider traditional methods of message delivery as well.

As for the youth in my family, an SMS or Facebook message is still the easiest way to reach them. I’ve noticed that if their smart phones actually ring they seem confused, so I avoid that awkwardness. As they become more adept with Twitter I will start DMing them about when to show up for family dinners.