Business Week updated their May 2005 article about blogging to talk about how “Social Media will Change Your Business.” Back in 2005, blogs were the focus. Now blogs are an older method of online communication and marketing, operating alongside photo sites like Flickr, video megalopoli like YouTube, and my personal addiction, microblogging options like Twitter.
What I found neat about the article is that, even though I knew about much of the software, I didn’t know about the business adventures that created the blogs of the companies we know of now.
Also, I’ve passed this link on to a few dozen people after I tweeted about it: What the F is Social Media is a slideshow that decodes what social media is, and why old marketing approaches on new social don’t work.
I think the next big trend will be innovative marketing that blends three or more of the new/old modes of communication, while simultaneously avoiding the much loathed (by me and many others) hard-sell marketing techniques.
And what, you haven’t had enough books to laugh at? Thanks to Rosemary Laurey, here’s more: Awful Library Books. You, like Rosemary, will laugh until you cry. Imagine the marketing potential if romance had bad cover art. I mean, what a missed opportunity.
Umm, okay: social media are Tremendously and Fantastically Important in this day and age, and we ignore them at our peril, etc., etc. I get that. I even believe it.
But I have to say that the explanatory slideshow was wall-to-wall boredom, and I gave up half-way through because I was falling asleep. The alternative was to keep flicking through the slides while thinking about something more interesting, like what to make for dinner tonight, or how to deal with italicised (Latin) words in headings that are already set in italics (I know the standard answer is to set them in regular font, but they look wrong).
I digress. Back in the dark ages, when I was first doing public lectures, I was assured that zapping people with statistic after statistic, however wittily illustrated, was a sure way of encouraging their minds to wander. Maybe people have changed, and all these madly proliferating social media have made their brains work differently?
Slideshow worked for me—it was like a collage with captions with a witty, slightly snarky overlay of chatter (informed chatter!). Thanks for all the links too.
Best part for me: that it’s a CONVO, not a monologue. And that all the parts of a company should be talking to each other too.
To AgTigress – Your comment about social media changing the way peoples minds work reminds me of a book, um, title may be Beyond ADD by somebody Hoffman? It’s buried upstairs – got it when my DD was possessed with ADHD –
The bok theory is that the way people’s brains are hardwired HAS actually changed owing to first the radio (that generation has a higher percentage of auditory learners), to TV (high percentage of visual/mixed with auditory learners) and then finally to the first computer generation, where the variable became speed versus sound or vision.
Authors theory is that there’s nothing wrong with ADD ADHD kids – they’ve just become hardwired to learn/act/take in and spew info at a much higher speed. They are the next link. To me, the birth of texting and twitter bears that out. Faster, in smaller bits, all the time.
But it’s jst a theory. Got to run – ADD DD is snorting at the
start line….
captcha – usually 54 – and I am – all year
CaroleM: that’s an interesting theory. I suspect that the balance of different learning modes in the human population hasn’t really changed all that much, but the changing environmental factors change the advantage/disadvantage level of various modes. This would mean that individuals with aptitudes that happen to work well with currently fashionable methods of information dissemination do better than those whose aptitudes were better suited to the methods of an earlier generation, so they become more prominent and better recognised in the public consciousness.
As a child, I totally failed to learn mathematical multiplication tables in primary school because we had to chant them aloud. For me, that is a recipe for instant oblivion. I have to SEE somethingin order to learn it. I find numbers hard to learn at the best of times, because they all seem much the same to me (no visual associations), but just hearing them is hopeless. But at that time, visual thinkers and learners were not defined. Didn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of us about, though.
If modern brains are being developed to understand data:
“Faster, in smaller bits, all the time.”
THEN…what happens to our ability to understand complex thoughts?
I think one of the reasons that reading is so important, is that one can read a long complex idea – and the reader can go back and re-read and double-check sentences, until that reader has a more complete and complex understanding of what is being written. From their reading, the person now has a more informed way to think through issues and make decisions.
There are so many modern political and social ideas that really can not be summed up in “small bits”.
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BTW, there is a museum nearby that has made it a policy that every exhibit is described by using all sensory modes of learning: they have a written piece; then a music piece, than a visual piece, then a hands-on tactile piece.
This museum’s current philosophy is that each person has their own dominant way to learn, which might be different from each other.
What kind of collections in the museum, Lucy? I ask because, in the case of antiquities, it is often impossible, for security or conservation reasons, or both, to permit visitors to handle most exhibits. This is unfortunate in the case of some sculpture, for example, because tactile perception can be very helpful, but damage to or even destruction of the collections is not a wise strategy in the long term.
‘Hands-on’ special collections are now widely used in many museums, and it is often possible to allow the public to handle broken sherds of, say, Greek black-figure, even if you cannot permit them to handle a unique, perfect and complete example worth several hundred thousand pounds.
The museum is for state history and natural sciences.
For example, they have an exhibit about miners during the Gold Rush. They have pans and equipment used for panning in rivers, which you can handle. They play banjo music, with ‘storytelling’ lyrics, that was actually from that era. They have a picture panorama display of someone panning in a river. They have a write-up explaining that era, and what they were doing, and how that activity affected the USA.
Then, they do the same multi-formats for one about American Indians, etc.
Overall this museum is interactive in many ways, and it popular with school groups that come through. The kids do not get bored, and they get more of a feeling for that past era.
Just because I’m pimping out Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, there’s a section in there where he talks about why Asians, and specifically people from rice-growing cultures, do so much better than Westerners in math, and it comes down to this very point. Sort of.
To mangle his explanation: because of the work ethic developed by rice-growers (as opposed to traditional European farming methods), Asians don’t give up on math problems as quickly as Westerners. They plug away until the problem becomes meaningful, and therefore understandable to them.
Seriously, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s mind-bogglingly awesome.
Lucy: thanks for the museum info. Yes, I am familiar with that type of museological approach, and it works well for younger visitors.
It isn’t too hard to do that kind of highly interactive, hands-on display when dealing with modern material (by which I mean anything from the last two or three centuries), but of course there are very different problems involved where the display items are unique, irreplaceable, and often of extremely high value, as in art galleries and museums with collections of ancient archaeological material—and, indeed, some ethnographic collections too. The use of replica objects can be useful