What’s Next Now

Every once in a while, I read something that kills any doubt I have about the need for me to help people find the best ways, based on their existing skills and interests, to employ Social Media tools in their businesses.

Here’s one:

A founding father of the web says it’s come a long way, but its potential for worldwide change can and will be greater still | Comment is free | The Observer.

We’re nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles’ windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas.

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About half this blog’s first week traffic has come from folks hitting me up from StumbleUpon.  Thanks folks!  Now, here’s my challenge for everyone, but particularly for you Stumblers.

What’s the Best Concise Way to Explain the Value of Social Media to My Audience?

One niche this blog is aimed at is very challenging.  I really want to help people that I describe as “half-timers;“ that is, they have roughly half their careers behind them and half still lie ahead. I see people in this group that have good to great communications skills that have taken them very far… until now.  But what got them where they are just isn’t going to get them where they expect to be 20 years from now.   I am certain that at some point soon they must employ some of the new stuff at least as a complement to their old stuff.  They’re going to have to make some half-time adjustments.

Am I making sense? (more…)

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Part of my job here is to convince you that we are at the start of a fundamental shift in the way we all communicate with each other. In launching this site, I’m finally embracing a part of me that I have too often suppressed, or that has required my being dragged kicking and screaming into it. My problem, if you can call it that, is that I’m always exploring the edges and looking for and finding things others can’t quite yet see. There’s a certain discomfort in constantly doing things that most of my friends and associates are not yet doing. I’m sure many of them see me as eccentric for what I see as just my natural inquisitiveness. After all, somebody had to be the first, second or third guy to use a parachute, right? I think a little history will help you better understand where I’m coming from.

How I Got Here

When I was younger, I was reluctant to deal with the ramifications of my idiosyncracies. At the University of Florida, after not picking a college until threatened with expulsion, I quickly switched course tracks from Journalism, to Public Relations, and, finally, to a PR sub-track for Magazine and Feature Writing. It was the newest program in the college and offered what I was unconsciously seeking: the fewest constraints on form and style. It was a great fit for me. For instance, I once conducted an interview with the vending machines at my fraternity house – the resulting story was used as an example of correct interview article form for several semesters. My graduating class in Magazines was only six people; as I recall, all of us were misfits.

My greatest passion is communications innovation. I love finding new ways to combine existing ideas, concepts and methods to leverage better results. I’ve created, managed and publicized strange-but-successful events; navigated around outdated policy to assure that my organization’s positions on issues got press; developed methods to analyze people’s past behavior to get wins in political and marketing campaigns; and, crafted off-beat business and project models when the “normal” ones provided no way to connect with important audiences.

I have always had an affinity for the biographies of people like P.T. Barnum and Bill Veeck. The advent of Web 2.0 and Social Media offers lots of opportunity for people like us. And so, here I am, awestruck by and giddy about the possibilities I see within a communications mode shift that rivals the the changes brought on by printing press, radio and television.

The Old, One-Way Street Gets Paved Over

Print, radio and television share a fundamental communications shortcoming in that they are all primarily one-way modes of communication. While feedback loops in these mediums do exist, i.e., people can write and have letters to the editor published, the exchanges do not usually foster conversation. Plus, anything approaching true conversation in the old media is short-lived, with the exception of talk radio. The same might have been said of the Internet until the concepts that make up Web 2.0 came along. Yes, discussion groups and on line chat have existed, but they were hard to find, ephemeral, unfriendly, cumbersome or too disparately situated from the original source messages to broadly be conversational.

Now things are different. With Web 2.0 and Social Media tools multiplying like rabbits, not only is personal and business communication moving more toward a two-way standard, it may be evolving into a multi-way standard. Not only are we seeing things become more conversational, we’re seeing conversations take place with a high level of permanence; an on line conversation about a hot topic that took place last year may have petered out, but it can be rejoined instantly when some event throws the issue back on the front-burner. New participants can engage conversations from their points and times of origin, wherever and whenever that may have been.

According to a just-published study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 13% of all web users are currently using at least one Social Media tool daily. While I’m not quite sure of the trend-line, based on my off-line conversations with friends and colleagues, I’m seeing an increased awareness that the tools exist, albeit ignorance regarding their practical application prevails.  Having been an evangelist in several past technology adoption curves, I’m convinced that we are not far from the tipping point at which these “secrets” go mainstream. I’m far from the only one betting on it; Social Media savvy folks in business are already leveraging it well. For instance, Comcast is using Twitter to respond to customer complaints and Dell is using it to interact with prospects and customers.

After the fold – Permasations (more…)

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Get Firefox

Here’s something that might have gone without saying, and probably goes without saying too often at sites frequented by people who live immersed in all this tech stuff.  After having several conversations in recent days with people I see as being in my target audience, I now know it needs to be said:  Firefox is the equivalent of a gateway drug for Social Media.

If you’re still out there reading this post in Internet Explorer, then, please, click on the icon to the right, download a copy and start using Firefox.

Just do it. Now.

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I like Isaac Hayes a lot and I’m sorry to see him go too young.  Here’s a quasi-viral video in tribute.

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