November 2008

Baguettes, anyone?

In a post on his excellent and always fresh blog on social media for business use, Chris Brogan discusses how social media resembles a French cafe.  Something you notice right away about Chris’s blog is his great skill for creating vivid word pictures – this is no exception, so go check out the post!

I find less distinction than Chris does between the two types of media / marketing that he has identified.  “Social Media” is a relatively recent term, and “mass media” was a college major when I was entering school, but to me they both are ways to connect people together.  I liken the growth and change in the use of networked computers to the use of telegraph wires, and later, telephone wires (slowly, more people can communicate over longer distances and more directly, eventually bypassing the telegrapher).

While the medium certainly matters, and the message definitely matters, maybe the atmosphere matters most.  In the blogging world, the “A-List” is a pretty tight club, and as if on cue, Robert Scoble chimed in with a comment about Coke umbrellas in cafes in Paris (and in Mexico and China).  This comment is uncanny. If you read thru Coca Cola’s annual reports, both extreme localization and this pervasive branding – making Coke into the background music – are goals for them!  If Coke is the umbrella or it is the bench, or if it creates the neon glow that you’re basking in, well, just saying.

The evolution from telnet and CompuServe to today’s “communication connections cafeteria” also sort of resembles the evolution of broadcasting from monotone AM radios to satellite radio, from three broadcast TV networks in B&W to hundreds of channels of satellite HDTV, from reel to reel recordings in tin cans to MP3.  In each case, the end user gains more and more granular control of their information/entertainment “diet” (and the product itself is more perfectly replicated).

This doesn’t seem novel or surprising to me, it seems a natural part of an ongoing evolutionary and learning process. Mistakes and defects are reduced, six sigma style, bringing us a more useful and user-friendly system of connectedness, which in turn drives adoption rates higher.

Kudos to Chris Brogan for keeping vigilant about the humans on each end of the wires!

It seems the latest craze is to do less online, especially if you are an established and well-known “internet star”, for what that phrase is worth.  Some of my favorite bloggers are now in the process of reducing their frequency (or have recently done so).

I think it is cool that people finally have had enough of this slop that is peddled, where some so-called expert says “Blog at least 3 times per week, with anchor posts, and pillar posts, blah blah…”.  Oh, and this one,  “Be sure to write your posts so that they are optimized for search engines, with appropriate titles and blah blah”.  Finally, a favorite gem, “Be sure to reciprocate with link love, because links are the currency of the web!”

Links are the currency of the web?  What?!  Last I checked, I couldn’t give a link to Woot in return for a refurbished USB toaster.  Can you imagine the pointy-headed character that sat down one Saturday night and came up with these rules?  Was he trying to help you be effective in your outreach effort, or was he trying to assure that your Saturday night was just as uneventful as his Saturday night, by tethering you to your computer with rules to *help* you “Get things done” the same way he does (alone under the incessant hum of the fluorescent lights).

So, in the spirit of my theme for this post, I’m NOT linking to my favorite bloggers who have recently reduced their output in an attempt to restore sanity to their RT lives, I’m NOT blogging three times this week (I actually beat all of them to the punch on this one!), and I don’t give a rat’s whisker about SEO for my title.

Some of what we do here is for our enjoyment, for Fun, folks!

Goodnight from the Midnight Blogger, at well after midnight here in the beautiful middle west!