“Many of the people that I get as followers on Twitter seem to offer nothing more than a continual stream of advertisements. It seems that a growing number of “Internet marketers” are taking over Twitter, trying to get business in teaching people how to grow their follower counts and sell advertising.”

He is right, but only to a point. What he does not seem to grasp is that Social Media is “self-policing;” that is, there exist far more tools to kill spammers and other pests than there ever have been for email, which is far less spam-proof. But it takes a bit of diligence to keep one’s social media streams clear of unwanted spam.

I use Socialoomph.com one or two times a week to vet my Twitter followers. There I can “ignore” – not reciprocate follows of troublesome new followers. I can also block them so that they can’t see me and I can’t see them.  If the spammer is particularly bothersome, posting nothing but ads or links to “how to make money on Twitter” or “come see my pictures,” there’s button that reports them to Twitter as a spammer.  You can’t do that with email if some unscrupulous actor gets your email address and sells it to others causing a tidal wave of unwanted garbage.

If anyone with nothing useful to offer has multiple thousands of followers, I don’t want to be on their follower list either.  Except for users who are doing company branding or are celebrities in their own right, it just isn’t reasonable to expect that having 10 thousand or more followers or reciprocated friends might be useful in any sense.  I like the concept of “Dunbar’s Number,” first featured in the book The Tipping Point, that theorizes most people can only manage about 150 meaningful social relationships.  Back in 2007, Tobias Escher wrote a good piece on this social brain hypothesis.

Most social media tools, and especially the ones that are popular, offer options to help users eliminate just about any content they don’t want.  FaceBook’s recent change, broadening permissions to a default “everyone,” can easily be throttled back if only you take a couple minutes to dictate specifically what content you want to see and what content of yours that you want to share only among close friends.

So, Mike Schaffner has valid complaints, but he is just dead wrong about the ramifications of them.  As people become more proficient in managing their social media spaces, and as companies like FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others devise ways to make their user experiences less spam-susceptible, this issue is likely to become moot.

It makes no sense to conflate social media’s growing pains with mortal flaws.

The lesson Kipling wrote of is one of the first things they teach you about writing if you attend a college of journalism (and I suppose any other college of writing discipline).  I remember going over the “Five W’s and H” in Journalism 101, or 1001, or whatever they called it back when the writing instrument in front of us was an IBM Selectric. What I wonder now is that when this was first presented to me, did I think to ask, or even ask myself, just why these six things are important to a news story? After all, these are taught as more than just important “rule of thumb” items; we were cautioned that without these six items our stories would be deemed incomplete. Today we might say they would “FAIL!”

Perhaps asking why would have led to broader discussions about human nature that were not necessary for beginning writers.  If I’d thought about it then, why these six things are vital to all human communication, would I have found an answer? I don’t know. What I do know is that explosive growth in social media is making me revisit everything about my old assumptions.  I’m taking the time to challenge the fundamentals and hold them up to the new light afforded by technology.

In tinkering with the model a bit, I noticed that the six elements can be neatly fit into three groups.

This actually gives me an answer my question as to “why’ these items are important.  When people communicate, whether it is in journalism, in literature, in conversations or now on the Internet or in Social Media, they need to be given enough information to draw mental pictures of what is being communicated.  The better the information, the clearer the picture.  Great literature and all great writing soars when it conjures vivid things in the imagination.  People need to have ideas about objects and subjects upon which they can impose other the other elements.  And, perhaps because we exist in time and space, we need to be able to place the objects and subjects of our communication in time and space.

Digging into this a little deeper, it occurred to me that so far as “coordinates” are concerned, the old “Five W’s and an H” model is incomplete when it comes to what I’ve now recast as “coordinates.”

It seems to me that the “where” part of “coordinates” should refer to a particular geographic place whether it is specified, imaginary or assumed.  It also seems to me that the “when” should refer to a particular time whether it is specified, implied or assumed.  It also occurs to me that some things are still missing if we’re really going to understand what elements are necessary for “successful” communication (and I’m not sure if this is comprehensive) to occur.

These elements seem necessary, though not all of them and not always, to enable people to draw clear mental pictures that lead to understanding.  But when I got to here with my thought process, it still seemed incomplete on a go-forward basis.  Perhaps there is something that has fundamentally changed about human communication that actually cleaves us between the generations that inherently understand and are pre-adapted and those generations that will always struggle with the change.  And I think it can be summed up with this:

I think there are people – mostly Baby Boomers and Gen Xer’s – who will always struggle to keep up and have difficulty  succeeding in the age of the new communication paradigm.    And it’s probably because they their minds can’t cope well with the things that are virtual.  For some it is already natural to grasp that each item in the contents of Google’s database is a proxy for a virtual time/space coordinate.  For others, it will always be awkward.   I’m trying to figure out ways to help the awkward communicate better in this new landscape.

“No, the ‘www’ isn’t part of my email address.  But you have to have the ‘@’ in there to send it.”

News travelled slowly for centuries, going only as fast as human messengers could travel, whether by foot, horse or ship. It also tended to be specific – from individual to individual – and controlled. The people received only the news the authorities, church or monarch, deemed fit to release.

That changed in various European countries from the mid-17th century with the foundation of newspapers. Though they had a long struggle to secure the freedom to publish, they did impart “unauthorised” knowledge.

I think this may reveal one of the biggest disconnects that today’s “Old Media” professionals and purveyors have about people in general: when information is shared between two or more people it is seldom kept “specific;” rather, it immediately becomes nuanced byindividual biases, perceptions and interpretations. Information, as is transmitted from one person to another, is necessarily “seasoned” by the unique experience of each party in a conversation coupled with whatever historical or shared understandings the “transmitter” and the “receivers” might share.  When I think about the way people shared “news’ in the past, I’m reminded of this picture of my dad in a general store in 1909 (he’s the one on the stool).

How did these people share "news?"

Had Prof. Greenslade made his argument about the impact of “public illiteracy” on a ruling power’s ability to control the message and, thus, the masses, he’d have had a better point.

While it may be true that rulers, leaders, monarchs, priests and/or other “authorities” have always and will always seek to control how information is disseminated they cannot ever succeed completely in managing how it is received, or, more importantly, how people change it through social interaction and conversation.  This is something the “journalists” or “advertisers” or “marketers” or “PR Pros”of 2010 must come to terms with, and soon, or they will find themselves without a source of income in 2012 or surely by 2015.  In a sense, social media is freeing us to be more like the way we used to be… or perhaps it is just putting us back in touch with the way we are.

There are other parts of the article with which i disagree, but I don’t want to be too hard on Prof. Greenslade.  His Op Ed piece is important to read if you care about the future of the “business of communication,” particularly if you hold a reasonable distrust of people with power and the lengths they will go to keep it.

Before I get into that, and before you view the video below, I want to explain a few things about what I currently do to manage business relationships and stay informed about what is happening with my friends, prospects, and clients:

1.)  I have a Google Alert set up for each of my most important key contacts. Every day I get a summary e-mail for each alert that has shown activity that details what has been said or written in the news, blogs and social media sites. It’s helpful information, but it is a very inelegant solution. Also, it isn’t practical to have alerts set up for all of the 500+ people in my Outlook address books.

2.) On LinkedIn, I have several key word searches set up to scan for activity within the groups I follow and participate in.  It is a quick way for me to identify trends and learn new stuff without a lot of effort beyond setting it all up.

3.) I use Xobni,  my favorite Outlook add-in, to check all of my incoming e-mail, paying particular attention to new contacts, and matching it all up with both Facebook and LinkedIn.  It also helps me find hidden relationships that I don’t think I’d find any other way.

4.) I use TweetBeep to scan and report on the full Twitter stream, using keyword and phrase searches to identify contacts that I might be interested in following and establishing relationships.

As a result of my desire to be plugged in, my passion for finding the holy grail to fully-leverage social media for business, I have  so much information coming at me  that I routinely dial it back — killing or altering streams of information that are too rich — so that I don’t spend too much time with it.  I also end up deleting a lot of incoming information without ever reading it.

Why do I do all this? Well, I have known for a couple of years now that all of these things that I want to do, all of the things that I want to help others learn to do because I can help them bring business relationships to a new level, will soon be made routine… which brings me back to Gist.

Watch this video.  It is genuinely amazing.

Not to beg, or plead, or grovel… but I hope the folks at Gist see this and bump me higher in their beta testing queue.  I wrote this post while on my knees bowing in the direction of Seattle!

In closing I got to give a shout out to Robert Scoble for doing such a good job on this video.