Julia Angwin at the WSJ has a short story up looking at the disconnect between status updates from friends via social networking sites and the reality she discovered when she talked to them. Not surprisingly (I don’t think), there was little emotional correlation between tweets and FB updates and what people were actually experiencing.
There are a couple of good points to make about this. First, communicators should not be confused about the difference between what happens online in a growing but still relatively small and techy echochamber. Twitter does NOT equal consumer, FB does NOT equal a mirror of the broader world. As denizens of online, it’s easy for many of us to mistakenly believe there is something close to a 1:1 map. So, ignore the real world at your own peril, and don’t assume that because you tweeted your customers care/heard.
Second, I will bet that this gap between real/virtual will continue to shrink. To some extent, it’s a generational thing – digital natives are much more likely to lay it out online more readily than digital immigrants.