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.

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?

I’m starting to see more of these folks become curious about Social Media, but they’re afraid to do more than dip their toes in the water.  I’m still getting the “I have an account, but I don’t see LinkedIn or FaceBook as anything but a waste of time” argument.  I usually rely on a power of the crowd argument and a couple personal success stories to overcome that one, but the new kids on the block like Twitter and FriendFeed and SecondBrain and StumbleUpon are a bit harder talk through with them.

I’ve shared this site and it’s meager (so far) content with several people I had in mind when I came up with the idea and have gotten some encouraging email feedback, but so far only one friend has had the nerve to post a reply.

Thanks Jack!

Having been down the techno-evangelist road before, I know it will take  persistence for me to get through to some of these folks.  But I’ve noted through analyzing my traffic that I’m already getting some pretty savvy Web 2.0 aficionados stopping by.  So, I’m going to try to leverage your expertise.  After all, I’ve put this site out here as somewhat of a collaborative tone in hopes that the Chris Brogans and Coach Debs of the world will drop by from time to time and share their thoughts with some of my readers who might not be able to keep tempo with the tunes they are playing.

As I see it, the more diverse the perspectives that I get in reply to this,  the more likely I we are to bring some of the half-timers up to speed.  Is anybody out there game for taking this challenge on?

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

Permasations?

The mode that all this new stuff facilitates is really beyond what we usually consider to be “conversation” and may need a new term to adequately define it. We might as well call this new way of interpersonal engagement the “permasation mode,” a joining of permanent + conversation. I considered dubbing it “perversation mode” but I didn’t want to give the impression that all we are talking about is politicians’ fidelity patterns. So, what you “tweet” on Twitter, follow up with on FriendFeed and share at FaceBook or Del.ico.us or SecondBrain or Disqus can been viewed as accessing multiple channels of the same concept in “permasation mode” for entertainment, personal enrichment, business and, yes, profit.

From a broader perspective, what the advent of permasation means is that any entity that strives to maintain a public brand consciousness, from individuals to corporations to government departments to political campaigns, will have to learn to navigate on fresh intellectual turf. I don’t know that old adages like “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them” are going to work very well going forward. I believe our new mode is going to require more of a “tell them, then tell them again, and again, and again, etc.” approach. If you have a brand to manage, permasation mode communications about it will take place and have the potential to define it whether you decide to participate or not. I’m particularly impressed by the power of the permasation when I browse through a clever new site I discovered, BrandTags.net. I believe you’ll get a clearer picture of what I’m talking about if you take a look at the sort of virtual territory Comcast is navigating already.

Consistently Precise Semantics

In looking at the previous example link, I believe it proves that the semantic precision in how you repetitively tell your story is going to be vital. Because people are getting more and more attuned to using search engines to learn and internalize messages, it probably means that we not only need to have our web sites tweaked toward search word optimization, we also need to start being more consistent with our phrase and word choices when we communicate about ourselves. In essence this means that we will need to communicate in a way that helps optimize our tag clouds; that is, mindful of visual depictions that represent the prioritization of words, phrases and concepts that define us both in the search engines and in the spaces in which permasations take place.

What Might a Permasation Mode Communications Plan Look Like?

I’m going to put an idea out there for you that I’ve been toying with for several months to see if I can get some feedback, um, engage in a permasation about it: I believe that if we are going to manage our reputations and brands through permasational planning, we had better: 1) figure out what our optimal “tag clouds” (maybe we need a new term) should look like; 2) use these tag clouds to build rough structures (mind maps or outlines) for all communications planning; and, 3) strive to fit most of our communications activities within the parameters of these structures.

When I realized that tag clouds are a way of starting to to plan in this new mode communication process, I created one based on my resume. It wasn’t useful, or pretty:

Bob Finch Wordle.net Tag Cloud - Before

So, I decided I would build one that is more descriptive of my desired path and personal brand:

Bob Finch Wordle.net Tag Cloud - After

While this definitional freeze-frame still needs a few tweaks, when I look at it I see that it does a pretty good job of defining me.  In a greater sense, it is a picture of what fulfills me.  I envision organizations building these types of tag clouds and putting them up as artwork in their offices as aids for the internal reinforcement of messages and brands.

This tag cloud exercise is just the start of a whole new process I really want to engage my readers in creating. I’m not going to lay claim to whatever comes of it and would rather this be a public domain project. With that in mind, I have put this entire site under a Creative Commons License. You are free to take whatever text you like from here and publish it elsewhere, but please give proper attribution wherever you publish or post it.

Summing It All Up

I am completely convinced that we are all going to be affected by the advent of the permasation mode and the new, emerging vision of what constitutes effective communications. It will be easier for the younger generations to handle; they are growing up immersed in it.  People like me came of age in a world in which we had no true choice but to accept or dismiss messages being transmitted one-way from radio, TV, magazines and newspapers as “the way things are.” The only alternative we have had was to totally tune out of important cultural streams.   We’re not accustomed to interacting with or engaging mass messages or the messengers behind them, but we must learn to do so.  The new mode I’m describing is already working well right now, mostly within and among a small cadre of habitual permasators. These technology evangelists are on the cusp of a very cool revolution that I believe will inevitably affect us all, enhancing old relationships and fostering new ones.

Post Script

This is the sort of content you can expect if you frequent this site. You can subscribe to one of the feeds at the upper right corner of my site to keep up with what’s going on.   Of course, I’d rather you come a bit closer and engage me in the comments section. I promise that we will all learn stuff to make what we do easier to get done, and if time equals money… well, you do the math.