Lately I’m having a lot of challenging conversations about the tools of social media.
Some folks don’t understand things like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. They don’t understand why at any given moment you would want to know what your friends or colleagues are doing or saying. And vice versa, why would you want hundreds of virtual acquaintences to know what you were doing? Something just doesn’t compute.
Their response: “I just don’t get it.” Truth be told, they don’t want to get it.
People want to question the morality of social media. Is it “good” or “bad.” But that’s not worth arguing about. It just “is.” Our world has changed. Notice I said has changed, not is changing. We live in a world of sharing. Every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube and 55,000 tweets are posted on Twitter. Facebook has over 400 million users, that’s 93 million more than the U.S. population.
In a talk I did last week, I said the conversations we’re having now about social media will seem completely idiotic when we look back in 3 years. It will be like the whole Y2K thing (only much less climactic than waiting for midnight on 1/1/00, only to realize that the entire world wasn’t returning to the stone age).
The point is, we need to accept the reality that we live in a world of sharing. Sharing is a good thing, but it requires people who get it. We need you to share your ideas, share your talent, and share your unique perspective.
In the wise words of Seth Godin, “We need you to lead us.”
Twitter in 1935 (from Boing Boing)
Times are changing so much, I was just thinking how stupid it will seem to our kids someday to be writing a ‘blog’.
At the same time, all of this is feeding into the next big thing, and people should at least be familiar with where we are headed in order to have the ability to self-promote.
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