What Do You Think

Dialogue. The lost art of same. Once upon a time, people gathered in community places – church, the general store, the quilting circle – to talk.

Then decades go by and we evolve to clubs and “networks” and coffee shops.

But as lives get busier and families get ever over-scheduled, conversation is a lost art. The social media scene in all its chaotic glory is a little something for everyone, and it’s sure as hell got people talking again. Through it, around it, about it.

And with it, the conversation brings new insights, new understandings, and a new found love for talking to people you never met. Even if it is a Tweet or two.

If social media can transcend generations and be relevant for everyone it will no doubt be a win. It seems the technology and tools are primarily being used by early adopters, at least most effectively. As more education ensues I think more professionals will identify specific pieces to integrate.

It’s already changing conversations around marketing at companies large and small, it’s only a matter of time before PR and Advertising are synonymous with social. As that happens, more money will be spent on supporting the channels.

I hear a lot how it’s all just “media” but it’s much more than that, it’s a new dynamic and it has to be thought of differently to be effective.

Conversation, relationships, community, connections, self-expressions… It’s all wonderful but can someone please build an all-in-one tool for monitoring and reporting that actually does everything I need it to do. Please.

Dabble = too slow
Radian 6 = not their yet
Blist = glitchy
Google Analytics = too slow

I can go on and on…

Yeah… we now have all these different feeds of activity which get generated from our lives and the lives of our friends.

It’d be great to have an easy to use tool that made sense of all the data coming at me from my network.

Humans are social animals. It’s in our instincts to interact. It’s what allowed us to survive.

I think what we must remember is that the value of the Internet is in its ability to connect people and ideas from across the globe – and “Web 2.0″ and social media has been such a big yet natural progress because it does this better than ever.

Business has evolved from product-oriented and consumers-oriented, and the internet has allowed product providers to service their consumers even better through mass-customization, instead of just sticking with a “mass” approach.

Any technology that allows people to connect and share both widely and effectively at the same time can only be a service to society as a whole.

It only feels like it’s “just media” because we’ve spent so long in a world of centralized media outlets with high barriers of entry for competition that we forget just how important “media” is and what it actually means to the human world.

I’ve been able to get a few kids to go back to college to finish their degrees.

No telling what they’ll do or become, but the podcast made it possible.

As usual with technology/practices, the hardcore proponents likely overestimate the effect. And just as usual, the detractors likely overly dismiss the “new” (for however new the principles we’re talking about here really are).

I think we are going to see a significant reshaping of how businesses operate towards customers and in general, but it’s just as much as a result of what we’re calling social media as other fundamental economic disruptions occurring.

1. Seamless collaboration
2. Secure transparency
3. Universal identity standards
4. Death of oligopolies

The four are also tools to achieve the wins, but I think these are some of the most important pillars that I hope social media achieves.

Most of how we conduct social media is currently limited to technology and vision. We’re also in a very experimental stage now (in a few years I think we’ll just laugh at all the widgets we plaster our blogs with).

Perhaps #4 is the most important. For all the democratization we’ve been seeing, I don’t think we can underestimate the power of cunning manipulators to usurp any technology. In fact, our social media optimism just might be making us complacent. Ironically, it may just be social media that saves the day.

A great question! One I don’t think has been focused on enough. It raises an other important question: what exactly are OUR goals in social media?

I just arrived back to SF from a biotechnology conference in New York City, which included arranging for a client to ring the opening bell for NASDAQ’s morning session. At the biotech conference, nobody there was talking about social media and Twitter, and that’s the same with other slow adopter industries I serve.

I also live in several social media communities – Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, and I write a blog and read blogs to follow what social media experts are saying.

Remember this: before the Internet, the social media platforms included the barber shop and the bar. Word of mouth happened at the water cooler. Isn’t that how Seinfeld became so popular?

Youth embraced social media platforms with passion and that caused us to take notice. Something was happening and nobdy quite knew what it was. Today, tech’s early adopters on Twitter are evolving something quite remarkable in terms of idea share, group think and presence. Watching that happen in real time blows my mind for sure.

Marketers are using technology to map and analyze all those conversations so brands can figure out what’s being said.

Social media was always here. The methodology is evolving for executing and analyzing what’s taking place on the larger platforms. However, the slow adopter industries will always be slow, so don’t expect guys selling meat products to Safeway to be hanging around the Twitter water cooler real soon.

Look how many people voted for Bush. Look at the unhealthy diet Americans embrace. Shows you how smart we are. So how long will it take for this crowd to adopt social media?

The wins here are already here. You’re writing about this and exploring and explaining it. We are participating and that’s a win.

Will these conversations matter? Well now we get into life philosophy. I think the things that matter most are love, goodness, kindness and self-giving. Mix those into social media and, yes, it will all matter.

I think the most interesting thing about social media tools is that the best ones create the “water cooler” sharing atmosphere mentioned above and allow people of like minds and interests to meet, connect and share information on an almost real time basis all over the world.

With energy costs continuing to skyrocket, I think we are going to see social media tools adopted by companies and people looking to connect and network out of the most simple need to cut travel and commuting costs.

Chris,

Perhaps it was intended to be so, but your question is somewhat ambiguous. What would you define as a “win” for the technology and practice? Why not the industry of social media? Is a win having a viable Twitter competitor? Is a win fully integrating social media (closed) in major institutions such as education? Or is a win break through technology like free city-wide wi-fi?

I’m confused on where this conversation *should* be going… but to speak on a couple of comments already out there:

I don’t know how much water-coolers are social media. There isn’t really any media directly involved. It is social and it is usually about some media, but I don’t know if I would call it “social media.”

Should “social media” be defined as the “water cooler” of media? Should social media a digital *copy* of a real-life occurrence or a translation?

I would love to hear anyone’s answers on those!

Yianni, try our SM2 tool- there’s a free trial.

I think there is an inevitable evolution going on from static content, which has its place, to a global conversation which will always be changing. I suspect that what we need is a personal tool, driven by keywords and preferences, that retrieves results from a lot of SM sources and delivers them to us. Obviously monitoring tools like ours, Radian6, Buzzlogic, etc., can do this (to some degree-it’s a constant upgrade cycle to keep up) but it’s not currently scalable to individual users for a variety of reasons.
This will change eventually and we might get the equivalent of an iGoogle for SM that does not rely on widgets. Who knows, maybe we’ll build it…

Chris:

Great, you always have to make me start thinking with your posts…don’t you!

I think a big win for social media right now would be moving beyond the view many people have of a “cure all” and translating into a tool on par with many others.

I think it would be big (and incredibly important) that people focus on determining what their offering is and deciding to use a blog/podcast/other social media to promote that message rather than, “Let’s start a blog…..ok, what do we talk about?”

It’s critical to all parts of marketing, but I think social media is especially susceptible to putting the cart before the horse. Getting people to understand the importance of standing for something and articulating their viewpoint clearly would be a big win and one I think that social media is in a unique position to get that message across.

Kevin

Social media “wins”

technology

1) it would be good if web 2.0 promoted more of a tim berners-lee approach to technology, not a proprietary one
2) it would be good if web 2.0 technology like patientslikeme meant people like me avoided falling ill because we interact with others, or self-medicate via contact and chat instead of taking medication

practice

1) humans will always need a mix of interactions ; I don’t think the dalai lama has to blog, but he still has a good reputation to most people
2) I do believe ( and am guilty of it myself ) that we might be spending too much time on-line. I would love it if being on-line helped me to burn off calories. Likewise, if I am on-line I am not with my family.
3) However, on-line connections made across wires invariably lead to rich new friendships when you meet face-to-face

Combining the two, why has a not-for-profit company stepped into the market to offer the following – an internet service where the price I pay goes to charity ( rather than aol, or BT in the UK ? Would there be take up in the USA ?

I think we are changing the way we all see each other. In some ways we are seeing how we are different, and in other ways we are seeing how we are the same.

Every few months it seems to me that my understanding of people changes and grows. Social media plays a major role in this.

I’m curious what the biggest “wins” would be for social media technology and practice. I’m wondering what we think these tools will really solve. I’m interested in knowing how these conversations will matter or not in a few years.