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.

What else might we find and use in following and conversing in the future?  Well, just off the top of my head:

• Participatory legislative processes – you will be able to follow and converse with elected officials during debate in committees and on the floor with legislators retweeting the most persuasive arguments
• Pizza delivery – your favorite pizza place will automate tweets during the process from order to door, or even deliver to wherever you are, based on your mobile phone coordinates
• Purchasing ninjas- a service will notify you when a hard-to-find item becomes available for purchase or when something on your favorites list goes on sale (Amazon.com, are you listening? Why don’t you have a place for me to put my twitter username in my profile?)
• Targeted benefits – businesses will market directly to you based upon your pre-set preferences and/or a tag-cloud generated from your on-line behavior
• Slow-time incentivism – restaurants and retailers will offer ‘for followers only” discounts and incentives via twitter to increase traffic during non-peak hours
• Prescription meds – pharmacies will provide direct-message reminders when to take your medication, to refill your prescriptions,  allow you to refill by reply and notify you when your prescription is ready for pick-up
• Way out there – Google maps will correspond with your calendar and your mobile device to send you alerts when you may be too far away to make it to that meeting on  time

We’re not quite the Jetsons yet, but it isn’t for a lack of trying.

Yes, Journalism As We Know It Is Dying

You’d have to have been living under a rock over the past few years to have been insulated from the stream of stories and much bemoaning about the fact that newspapers are folding and the ranks of employed professional journalists is shrinking. A crashing economy is only facilitating the inevitable.

I found an excellent blog post discussing the current situation in more depth than I’ll go into here:

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

When I read stuff like this, I do feel a bit glum because I know that many of my classmates went on to mainstream media jobs and are now facing and fearing very uncertain futures. Clearly, a profession that evolved from some 15th century innovations is dying.  In fact, it probably is already dead but the flat-line has yet to register on the monitor. But beyond commiserating with my friends I feel incredibly invigorated because I sense that what is to come of this will be very good.

So, I hope you’ll forgive me if I seem more than a bit impatient: Can we please finish having this wake for Gutenberg’s descendants and get on with it?

Fear of What’s Happening Inside the Cocoon

The new communication truth that social media puts on the table is, to paraphrase an awful, recent Newsweek headline, “We Are All Journalists Now.” The fact of the matter is that humans still need news and many of us consume more of it today than ever before; I know I do. But I don’t read four or five newspapers a day any more to get it.  In fact, I stopped subscribing to any newspaper when I moved to Tallahassee six years ago, ending a daily fact of my life that began when I was about six years old.  I made the shift to using RSS news readers and Google Alerts to keep me informed and engaged. If anything, I read more news and a broader range of opinion now than I ever have. The demand remains, so I have no doubt that there will be careers for those with old-school journalism skills who are willing to adapt as new models are hashed out.  The market for their skills isn’t disappearing, it is just morphing from caterpillar to butterfly very quickly and it’s hard to see inside the cocoon.

When I think about this stuff, I inevitably break the history of human communication down into phases: Communication 1.0 was the path from grunts and gestures to formal spoken language; the advent of written symbols, alphabets and words, usually shared among the elites of various cultures, was Communication 2.0; Gutenberg’s invention ushered in Communication 3.0 and it’s logo, the printing press. In this perspective, the original Internet, Version 1.0, wasn’t really much of an advance over the printing press or over the old overhead projector presentations we suffered when I was in school (for all you youngsters, it’s what we did before PowerPoint).

Fulfilling the Human Need for News

I find it interesting to note that the pathway from Communication 1.0 to Communication 3.0 led to less broad participation in defining and less dependence on interchange between people to create “the news.” The unfulfilled human need for broader interchange in reaching understandings, and I believe it is indeed a “need,” was somewhat ameliorated by the telephone, but as a tool phones offer mostly limited exchanges between two individuals. They generally lack the power to define “news.”

I contend that Communication 4.0, including “Web 2.0” and “Social Media,” is defined by mediums with more distributive freedom than what was offered by the two previous phases of human knowledge exchange; it re-interjects a key element that was made less vital to “news” by them: Conversations in the public square. And the public square is suddenly a heck of a lot larger than it was when tribes were painting on cave walls and carving “news” into rocks. The big idea that unites my Communication Versions model is that in each case an exciting innovation led to epistemological change ; that is, something radically altered the very nature and methods of human knowledge itself. Placed in this framework, social media becomes far more than faddish or trivial.

Ignore at Your Own Risk

So, go ahead and mock Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter if you like, but do not ignore them or think they’ll just go away. What they all are telling you, or, rather, what you should be getting from them so far, is one very important message that includes and goes beyond “news” and promises to be a rule for the future of communication for all organizations: Converse or die.

The old rules no longer apply.

Read more >> Options >>

]]> http://whatsnextnow.net/2009/03/communication-40-we-are-all-journalists-now/feed/ 0 http://whatsnextnow.net/2009/03/lets-get-some-perspective-people/ http://whatsnextnow.net/2009/03/lets-get-some-perspective-people/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:09:09 +0000 Bob Finch http://whatsnextnow.net/?p=334 Okay.  So I’m pretty much ready to again tend to this “social media for the reluctant” project again.  I’ve unearthed my now seemingly ancient editorial calendar from last summer and find that it is, indeed, ancient.  About half the topics I had planned to write about before Tropical Storm Fay threw us its nasty curve ball are now irrelevant.  Too much has changed in the landscape I survey for the old list to be of much help. So, I’ll be starting mostly from scratch. As it is with all discussions of innovation, it is important for me to provide you with a little perspective.  This comes courtesy a blog post by Clayton Bell, a fellow Tallahassee Blogger and Twitterphile.  It made me laugh. Click here to view the embedded video. Sometimes we forget that we should be gobsmacked by how amazing the times in which we live in actually are. What I’m trying to do with Whatsnextnow.net is get those of you who grew up in my era, those who can remember the time of rotary phones, no microwave ovens, having to get off your butt to change the channel, etc., to realize that all of the new communication tools offered within the realm of  “social media”  should be considered and approached just like all the other innovations you have adopted in your lifetimes.  Didn’t you crave a TV with a remote once you knew they were available?  Of course you did. Know this: If you have more than a couple years left before retirement,  this  social media stuff almost certainly is going to matter to your workplace and career in a very big way.  Yes, much of it is now going through the same sort of shake-out period that those of us who bought Betamax TV recorders learned was risky.  But I can guarantee you that several social media platforms are going to become standardized and widely adopted by business for and become part of routine communication functions. Why I’m here is because I want you to be ready for it.   Conversational social media platforms are to “Business Communications 2009″ as the fax machine was to “Business Communications 1984″ and email was to “Business Communications 1994.”  A recent Pew Adult Social Media Use Study suggests that fewer than 15% of us online adults 45 and older have taken even the first baby steps into establishing a presence, a “social media footprint” so to speak, by creating their first on-line profile.  I’ll wager that more than half of us who have created profiles have done nothing with them.  It may be too soon for many to see the value in it, but unbeknownst to them “too soon” is heading past them like an Airbus (would have used “locomotive” but it’s just too danged old an analogy). When I write here, I’ll try to keep in mind any age-related disconnects you might have. ]]> http://whatsnextnow.net/2009/03/lets-get-some-perspective-people/feed/ 0