Complete Fulfillment

The other day I saw the update Did You Know Video and the main stat that stuck out to me was this.

Years it took to reach a market audience of 50 Million.

 

This was a  pretty amazing stat.  I am just truly learning about social media and it’s power over the last few months .  I just got my Facebook account set up about 3 months ago.  I now am getting addicted to Twitter – once the tools get better I sure it will be hard for me to find anything else to do.  The power of social media is apparent to me so the stat does not seem unreal to me but it still made me think – Why?

The interesting thing about this list is that they are all technologies.  They are all technologies that enable communication.  They are all technologies that enable human behavior they don’t really create it.  So I had to ask the question what would be on the list before radio?  Before the radio technology gets pretty weak.  I am not a marketer by trade but it would seem the most powerful form of marketing is word of mouth and before Radio that was the main form of communication.

Mayberry

Did you ever watch the Andy Griffith show?   It was small town USA – made for television of course – but what it showed was how things happened in small communities back in the day.  People found out about things from people in their community.  People would use something and not matter what the result others heard the review from the people they knew and that was powerful.  This could have also been spread by letters via snail mail but the real impact was how things were spread at the barber shop, at the diner or on the street.  But over time all that changed.

Madison Ave.

Along came Radio and then Television.  They did not come along at the same time but had roughly the same result.  People could now broadcast out the message they wanted to spread to anyone with a receiving piece of technology on the other end.  This message did not care who you were or your relationship to the person on the other end.  It was designed to reach as many eyes and ears as possible.  The birth of true mass media.  For years we have lived in this space.  It has gotten much more complex over the years.  Brand experts have made a science and an art out of building brands.  For years the public has been told what to think about brands and how that brand should be perceived.  But times are changing…

Social Media

In many ways Social media takes us back to the days of Mayberry.  We can now hear from the people that we know and trust about things that we care about – or they care about – or no one cares about – ?  But the point is that now in an instant on Twitter I can learn about someone's experience with something or something they find of interest – via word of mouth or tweet.

The difference now is that I am not restricted to the people in Mayberry.  I can find interesting people all over the globe that have something to say that I want to hear.  The tools on how to find these people, how you interact and filter the noise are still maturing but these are rule changing times.  I’m sure that brand managers are starting to figure out, if they have not already, that things are moving in a new direction.  The powerful thing is that Joe Public has no real idea what is coming.  People on Twitter and Friendfeed and all the like may not realize this but the average person has no idea what all this is.

The next few years are going to be very interesting because as the data at the beginning of this post shows things are moving fast.  The infrastructure is there – no longer do you have to buy a radio or TV or wait for the infrastructure to be built.  It is here – many people have internet access and millions more every year.  Developers now just layer the software on what is there already. 

So what do you think?  Are you ready?  Do you realize the power you have?

I started this blog on June 22, 2007.  Not exactly early to the game of blogging but I was after what many early blogger were after – understanding.  I was not early to blogging as a technology but blogging was in its early stages to me.  My objective was to learn, as it is today with all of the emerging social tools – this time I am not as behind the curve. 

I decided that my blog was to be about finding my passion.  I had no idea what it was.  At the time I was the Director of Finance at Tripwire in Portland, Oregon.  I was bored with my job and was searching for my passion.  I had no idea what it was so I decided this blog would be about whatever I felt like at the time.   The name was derived from my search of my passion which is explained in my second post.  I was not concerned about readers as I figured my only regulars would be my Mom, Dad and a few others.  That assumption has turned out to be mostly true which has resulted in sporadic readership which is most likely because of my lack of focus. 

Over the past year I have graduated from an MBA program and started working in Business Development.  This has been a great switch for me.  My job has evolved at breakneck pace over the past 5 months and has lead me to social media.  I have always found interest in two main things over the years – people/relationships and technology.  I realized over the past few months that this revolution is taking place around technologies like Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed.  The exciting part to me is that these technologies are not even close to fleshed out and are still evolving.

Because of the emergence of all these things in my life I have decided that this blog will be focused around social media and how it is where relationships and technology meet.  With this focus and the desire to start developing a regular group of readers on this site I am working through the rest of the site redesign and an abbreviation to the name – so stay tuned.  This is a step in the direction of my riddle. 

I came across this video interview of Tim O'Reilly by Robert Scoble.  I have been watching both of these people on Twitter recently.  They both are very connected and are looked at as leaders in social media.  Tim O'Reilly is the person that coined the term Web 2.0.  This is part one of a two part series.  For me this gets interesting about 17 minutes in where they start talking social media.  There are many other great interviews on ScobleizerTV.

LinkedIn recently launched a new application called LinkedIn Events.  It is a cool concept but we will see if people use it.  So many people use LinkedIn but most of them - including myself - use it as a rolidex and not much more.  It will be interesting to see how they engage thier users to use some of these great applications that they are coming out with.  

As I said in my last post my job at work is heavily involved in social media. I find the subject very fasinating and I am learning as much as I can as fast as I can. I cam across a report early last week - FEED - The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report. It is a very cool report that you should check out even if you never read a page. The graphics and the experience of the report is very cool. Every page is very engaging and has some writing. It is not heavy on the text but very heavy on keeping your attention. It covers all sorts of subjects such as mobile devices, how to design a customer experience - not just a web page, twitter, widgets, games and business, wisdom of the crowd, visualizing data, and more. If these subjects or cool graphics are not your thing you should check out how they present the report online - this is nothing new but it is one of the better applications of it I have seen. Good stuff.