e-liz

Yikes. Yesterday, Valleywag issued a sweeping dismissal of a reverse-mentorship program at Edelman that has gotten a bit of press lately.

The unfortunately-headlined Chicago Tribune story on Edelman's program explains how it works: the company pairs social-media-savvy 20-something "rotnems" ("mentor" spelled backwards, obvs) with senior-level executives, in order to help them "unlock [the] social media mystery." Junior account executives help their bosses' bosses create Facebook profiles and collect recipes online; in return, the younger set gets access and exposure to their older colleagues.

Valleywag, never huge Edelman fans in the past, had a field day with this, sniping as follows:

Edelman, like many of its peers, is a PR firm that will charge your company a hefty fee for all the digital insight that its 23-year-old account executives can deliver. Because the people in charge aren't really so good on this "internet" thing. Which would be fine if they were not the same people in charge of convincing you, the client, to spend tens (or hundreds!) of thousands of dollars with Edelman for their expert strategic online influencing services. Their mentoring program for the olds is called "Rotnem" because that's "mentor" backwards and you must be a backwards-ass fool to pay money to a bunch of 23-year-olds to teach you how to make a Facebook page and shit at an Edelman markup, when you could get them off Craigslist for much, much cheaper.

Ugh.

So who's right here? I'm inclined to say there's a little misunderstanding at play on both sides of people's evaluation of this program. It's a small but important misunderstanding both about who "gets" social media and what it takes to engage effectively online for a client (hint: not this).

Let's get one thing straight: younger people have no natural technological knowledge advantage over older people. There was no magical field guide issued to everyone born after 1980 that taught them how to understand Twitter better than their parents can.

Is there an experiential advantage? Maybe. Discussions of young people and technology always seem to open with the assertion that "these kids have been e-mailing since they were 5!"... to which I say, so what? E-mail has been available to most people for the same length of time, regardless of age.* What were you doing while your younger colleagues were 5 years old and e-mailing? Were you refusing to use e-mail because you had decided you were old enough to stop learning new things? Did it just seem too hard? Did you give up?

Being good at what you do, in any business, requires a willingness not to give up when things change. Because things do change - technology, laws, economics, world politics, science... And if you're lucky, you will be around much longer than the tools you use to do your job today. The trouble is, people do give up. They reach a point in their careers, and in their lives, where they decide that they are done learning. These people will lose their business - to younger competitors, but also to their peers who have decided to continue paying attention and have the experience to integrate new ideas effectively.

So I have to hand this one to Edelman. Despite the mutual mischaracterization of senior executives as clueless and decrepit, and 20-somethings as headstrong, naive wunderkinds, their program is at least aimed toward learning, toward sharing, and toward building relationships between two groups who have come to faithfully believe that they have nothing in common - so that they might ultimately encourage each other not to give up.

* The real disparity in ability to learn about technology is, of course, one of class - not age. It's hard to "get" social media if you've spent the last 20 years unable to afford a home computer. But that's a story for another day, and another Tribune.