Social Media for Business

17 Gapingvoid Cartoons That Will Change Your Business from gapingvoid

I've followed Brian Solis for a long time and have read both his books: What's the Future of Business and The End of Business as Usual. If you are in any way shape or form interested how Social Media impacts EVERYTHING - not just business - both are a must-read and well worth your time.

The cartoon above links to slide share and shows a quick summary of some of Brian's and his design collaborator, Hugh MacLeod aka @gapingvoid comments on social media insights.  My favorite is slide 20.... the prosa summary is:  

ignorance + arrogance = irrelevance.  (Nuf said)

Remember that for all eternity!

The Importance of Local

As I am sloshing through “Within the Context of no Context” by Georges Trow I find myself torn between total awe for his insights and alienation for his fragmented writing style and the realization that it is the style that makes the reading so thought provoking and painful but also beautiful.  I’m a fast reader and this is a slim volume, but this book is one paragraph, often just one sentence, at a time reading. I’ve been digesting “Within the Context of no Context”, morsel by morsel for well over a year. 

Today I came across ChrisBrogan’s latest blog entry about how “local” will become more and more important, and I immediately had to think of “Within the Context of no Context”.  It made me realize just how much more we feel disconnected the bigger our virtual reach becomes and that a need for immediate connectedness and belonging to a smaller subset that is ‘manageable’ might not be filled in the physical world, especially where business is concerned. 

Trow talks about those opposing forces as quadrants. The quadrant of man alone and the quadrant of all (in this case all Americans). Trow writes about the loneliness of man in terms of one person looking for a connectedness in a one-way relationship with the TV (Trow’s essay was originally published in the New Yorker and as a book in 1981) and how we personalize and ‘make our own’ the stars and TV personalities we watch every day in an effort to shrink the distance between our quadrant of physical living and experiencing and the quadrant of the rest of America. Trow might as well have been talking about the internet 2.0. 

I would that that a step further and say, that the larger our network becomes the more we become a group of one in the physical world.  In an effort to manage our growing reach, we create an “us”, which in our own eyes encompasses “all”, but really only means an “us”; a group who’s sentiments, or geography, or political views we share. Everything beyond “us” is foreign and out of our reach, sic understanding. This, also a powerful explanation for any ‘club-yness’ to the exclusion of ‘the other’ (another favorite topic of mine). 

The internet has made the stakes higher and the distance between man and the ‘rest of the world’ more distant. Trow’s quadrants have moved even further apart.  Any business who understands to fill the void between the quadrants has a lottery ticket in hand.  

If a business can reach out and have a meaningful two-way interaction with its customers on a global, virtual, all-connected platform, AND can give them their local 'heroes’ on the ground (as Chris Brogan calls them) – it will have a very powerful brand and a very strong relationship with its customers and consumers indeed.

Taking off the Gloves

I’ve been writing for my blog over a year now – my audience, I imagine are a few friends and people who happen across my blog on the website to my documentary film Abraham’s Children. I’ve been keeping the blog on topic mostly writing about experiences in the independent documentary world and about Muslims in America and “Fear of the Other” – topics that interest me deeply and that I’m learning about as I go.

Each time I write I wonder how the reader will respond and how much of my personal self I should or should not reveal and how much of what I write is properly researched. “Properly” researched? I’m not writing for The New Yorker, it’s my blog with my name on it and it’s my opinion. Still, I’m not espousing my opinion as much as I carefully (more or less) write AN opinion slanted towards MY opinion.

I am part of a group of people who will – soon – publish blog entries about the future of the film business. It’s actually about a heck more: Quo Vadis: staying ahead of hindsight; our mission: Quo Vadis thinks ahead by asking the right questions about creation, distribution and monetization of media. Our members come from across the creative and professional spectrum. We think, we explore, we blog and we meet.

The questions we ask, other than the obvious: where are we headed? How do we stay ahead of the curve? How does content evolve on the internet? How do we monetize the internet? Where are the lines drawn between consumers, content providers, creators, producer, distributors and advertisers? Is there a need to draw those lines? What happens to copyright, licensing fees and royalties?

Why am I part of this group? Because I can. Because the paradigm shift we have seen in our business in the past 15 years is great and leaves some of us – me – with the uneasy feeling of a middle aged person about to miss the connecting train. The train of course, has left the station a long time ago – and I would like to think I’m on board – for now in the freight haul – I’d like to make it to 1st class – no, correction, I’d like to make it to the conductor’s cabin. And I know I can. Quo Vadis is one of many ways to get there with the help of my friends.

I’m not a natural writer – I’m a hands-on production person with an opinion. It’s my opinion – not researched, but lived. And it is that opinion I will have to learn to put forward. The gloves have to come off.

They will and this blog will be my exercise for the next few months until we go ‘live’. I want to know: how much do you hold back, research, evaluate and weigh your voice before YOU publish your blog entries?

The Future of Storytelling

Chris Brogan’s series of posts on the future of media, work, marketplaces and community got me thinking about the future of storytelling. Something we are thinking about a lot in the Quo Vadis Think Tank (more on that later).

The future of storytelling is non-linear (sadly, as far as I’m concerned), media centric and for that reason flexible, I would venture to guess also more fragmented and modular. Storytelling will be increasingly interactive, in cases even crowd-sourced, free and digital. Copyright will get a run for its money and need to reinvent itself… I also think the message of the story will become more important.

The message has always been the core for documentaries; and maybe I’m co-mingling message with truth. As documentaries will have to adapt to non-linear, media centric, flexible, interactive and free – how does that change the story? Is the story the message and the medium?

Which brings us to Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message”. McLuhan says that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the medium by which people communicate than by the content of the communication. To which I would add: there are about three (maybe five, ok, no more than ten) original plot lines in the world, any other narrative is a derivative or embellishment thereof.

Where IS the message today? Where IS the story? What story does the medium itself give us and how will it shape us into the future? How will Romeo and Juliet, Pygmalion and the Iliad come to us? IS the internet the medium or the meta-medium ultimately?

The Future of Media

Chris Brogan posted a thoughtful and thought provoking post today:  Make sure to read the comments too.

A few thoughts in random order:

I agree with Chris a 100% on "first" and "full" news, there will be no doubt a lot more immediate news that will hit us as soon as it happens. As I don't think that most consumers will have the time, ability or inclination to verify validity of news, curation will be paramount. There is more raw data (see Wikileaks), but there is also much more possibility for misinformation.

And yes, content will be serial, shorter, interactive, on more touch points (venues), linked (data rich), mobile, and subscriber based.

Two things Chris does not address here are, first the unwillingness of the general heavy-internet users (younger generation) to pay for any content. So with the entire talk about monetization on the internet is a big question mark and a huge one not to be dismissed. I'd love to hear any thoughts about that.

And secondly, we assume that we all have access to the internet 24/7 and at broadband speed. There are entire sections of this country that have NO internet access and rely on dial-up phone lines. This creates a very dangerous vacuum. As we move more and more into a virtual world - the knowledge gap (i.e. socio-economic gab) will widen exponentially.

What is your take on this?