Mastering the social media geek on a party

As your company does Social Media now you have to face the fact that a lot of geeks and social media evangelists don't like you. Normally you don't have to care about that but as this group growth quickly chances are high you meet them on parties sooner or later. So you better learn how to cope with them in such a situation.

We've all experienced that: You are at party, it ain't that much fun (as in "fun party with friends") but it is okay-ish. At some point one of these geeks pulls out his new iphone/android/whatever, complains ten minutes about the bad reception but eventually is able to show the group surrounding him the thing he was looking for...To understand what happens and how to deal with it let's skip back 12 minutes. That is when it all began.



At some point the geek ain't able to do normal small talk any more. As a result he crawls through his memory and finds some slightly funny video/viral thing he has seen that day (or sometimes even the day before) and says: "Oh, have you seen this...?". Interrupting someone else or even a conversion about a totally different topic doesn't mean much to him at this point. He found a way to make himself the centre of the party again. So he'll rant about how funny/amazing/whatever his discovery of the day is. With this he can show how geeky he really is: doing nothing all day than searching the internet for these kinda of data or being so well connected that it just flies to him.

God, don't you hate those guys, too? Man, they are annoying. You are connected to the internet, too, you've seen amazing things as well, but you use it as tool, you use it for something useful. It ain't an end in itself. Gosh, these guys are annoying. No big deal. But it can become one easily. As your company is now doing social media you will talk about that on parties as well. And if any geek hears the word "twitter" he'll probably interrupt you to show you that he knows much more about it than you do. Normally with the words "oh, have you seen this on twitter..?".

Chances are you haven't. Embarrassing. He seems to know so much more about social media than you do. And your company actually does it professionally. But he knows it better because "you are a company" and you "don't seriously mean it", you "don't understand what it actually is about". At least that is what they thinking and if you don't react accordingly that is also what they are saying. Now that would be really embarrassing. But there is a cure to that. And it is actually easy. It doesn't even take much time to prepare for said situation: The only thing you can say after he showed you his new discovery is: "Oh. Nice! But it ain't as good as..". and then you show him something better. And changes are good yours actually is better.

Because you have the better strategy: While he has soooo many-friends on soo many social networks and sooo much stuff to watch each day you have a circle of good friends on a couple of networks. And you have a better memory (you should have!). While most geeks are not able to remember a video they have seen the day before, you are. You don't need to find  a new video each day, it is enough if there is one a week or a month. And as your friends act like a filters these videos are probably much better anyway. If you just memorize what the title of the video was, you are easily able to find it or tell the geek what he should google for.

At the beginning you probably don't know many cool things. But behold, that is easy to fix, too. There are two really good pages: http://youshouldhaveseenthis.com/ and http://www.youshouldhavealsoseenthis.com/ . Each one containing 99 more or less funny, amazing or interesting memes and virals. That sounds much, but if you just make it your daily task to watch ten of them right before lunch you'll be through in no-time. Watch them with care, memorize which ones you liked and how to find them (keyword, titles, actor names, companies, etc). You don't want to show everyone that you just found it on this list.

Now you have a lot of ammo against those geeks. And when the others see that you were able to react on what that cool geek said and it might even be more funny, they are for sure listen to what you have to say about social media and what your company is doing with it.