BT (before Twitter) I had been engaged in what has come to be known as “social media” through blogs and discussion groups for several years. I hand-coded my first blog (now defunct) in 2002, really before there was any server-side software for it – even before I was aware of the term “blog.”  Frequent posting of new content to a web index.htm page was a real challenge, but I enjoyed it a lot!

Since then, I’ve created and maintained several blogs at Blogger.com and using Wordpress (like this one). I’ve also helped  others create personal blogs.  Lately, I’ve been answering lots of questions and giving free advice to friends (and friends of friends) regarding what social media tools might work best for what they are trying to accomplish in business.  I’ve got 25 years experience in various PR, marketing and advocacy roles and I have some solid technical certifications, too.  I have a great mix of skills and experience to help folks with this stuff.

I had meant to go full-bore with developing this side of my business last summer, but Tropical Storm Fay got in the way.  Fortunately, most of that mess is past and I’m ready to offer my social media skills to clients.  Toward this end, I’m going to take on three demonstration projects at no cost to my customers.  I already have one commitment in hand, and I’m writing a plan for it.

I want to put two more demonstration projects under my belt before I’ll start formally soliciting business.  I see all the people out there using the “social media expert” banner who don’t have the track record to back it up.  That’s not the way I work.

This morning, I seized up an idea and as soon as I post this, I’m hitting the send button on an email to Madlibs‘ marketing department:

Hi [name of person who reads this],

You don’t know me from Adam, but I have a quickie idea for using social media to increase your sales.  I loved Mad Libs as a kid and think you have a real opportunity to become trendy for a new generation.

Here’s my idea in short form:

• Get a Twitter account (I don’t know if @madlibs is registered by you or not)
• Create an “official” Facebook Madlibs fan group (there are some, but none appear to be by your company)
• Create landing pages on your web site specific to Twitter and Facebook
• Use the Twitter and Facebook APIs on those pages to create interfaces to the services
• At those pages, allow visitors to fill in random blanks (just like Madlibs) and auto post their Madlib results
• Visitors can select a topic, but can’t see the results until after they have posted their results to Facebook or Twitter
• Every auto tweet should end in the hashtag #madlibs
• It seems like a no-brainer to me that you’ll get a ton of followers that you should follow back and connect with to build interest in your publications
• It seems to me that most social media users are in the age cohort that would be likely to engage with you (and develop/rekindle an affinity for Madlibs)
• I believe that if you [verb] this, Madlibs’ sales will [verb] [adverb] through the [noun]!

If you would like to discuss developing your social media presence, I’m available for calls – no charge.  I’m currently doing some demonstration projects for my services and would be happy have your product in my portfolio as proof of concept.

Thanks for taking the time to read this brief proposal.  I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Regards,

Bob Finch

Social media is in its infancy. Few have the depth of experience in this that I do.  I’ve built a successful business from my avocation before and regardless of the economic environment, I believe I can do it again!

Stay tuned.

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.

Twitter’s Constant Stream Of Update Messages Suddenly Grinds To A Halt

Lucky for Twitter this happened on a weekend during the night (at least U.S. time) so most users won’t have even noticed. But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for important communication.

This is just absurd.  Computer systems rarely go without glitches, particularly those that are scaling up. Think about all the times your paid services have been down.  If you spend any significant amount of time connected to the Internet, you’re familiar with outages.  The only time in recent years that I’ve found any outage to be unacceptable was when I was without my (former) main email account with Netidentity for two days.  And then a couple of months later it happened again. From what was reported, that the outages happened during upgrades, it was beyond unacceptable. That’s failing to plan ahead, plain and simple.  Inexcusable.

My point?  It is no more dangerous to rely on free services than it is to rely on paid services.  The only difference is that when it’s free, you don’t get to call customer service and complain.  That’s all.  In the case of Twitter, does anyone really think that its staff – and its investors – consider up-time any less important than the staff at your cable or telephone company?  Really?

When supposedly smart folks dole out horrible advice or commentary about anything to do with social media, I feel it’s important to point it out.

Steve Rubel, who is normally pretty savvy about these things, comes out today and says:

“So you heard it here first, folks. Twitter is peaking. Now I believe Twitter can get through “the dip” that stares them in the face, but it will need to adapt by: keeping its core users intact, remaining attractive to corporations and celebs and by becoming more organized. Search will help with the latter, but expect a battle as Facebook and Friendfeed both make a concerted push to become the place for all your social stuff.”

This is just nuts.   First of all, I’ve been on Friendfeed for at least 18 months now and don’t find much use in it, except that it helps feed my other social media streams to Facebook.  If it went away, I’d find and use other apps to do the same. Friendfeed has yet to break out beyond the more technically literate crowd.  Considering what Facebook is doing with developing its core product, I don’t think Friendfeed has much of a place beyond its existing niche going forward.

Twitter, on the other hand, I predict, is going to be ubiquitous.  Yes, it’s disorganized today, but it provides an information stream that can be sliced and diced in so many different ways that eventually everyone will be able to find an application of it that suits their needs.

The next big step, I think, is for Twitter, or some other programmer, to come up with an address book that allows people to categorize followers and followings by various relationship types.  I think TweetDeck may be the farthest along toward this.  But if the next generation MS Outlook includes the ability to add social media connections to its contacts data (and I believe it will), that may end up being the thing that locks Twitter into the same class as email as a permanent business and personal communication tool.

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.

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