On Social Media

So there was a social media conference in Seattle, and I was in attendance. There were classes and discussions for SMS, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogging. There were “intermediate” sessions and “advanced” sessions. 

I discovered that there needed to be a middle ground as the intermediate session was a little too basic, and too many people’s eyes got that deer in the headlights look in the advanced Facebook session. (They started talking about coding a Facebook app, source code, and Google Analytics, and I could hear the eyes glazing over. Seriously.) The same occurred in the YouTube session when there was a discussion of the Insight function for one’s channel. 

But sitting there got me to thinking. Never mind how much social media has changed how we do business, but how much computers and the internet has changed our lives just in the last sixteen years. 

As I sat there, thinking back to 1995...there was no Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or MySpace. (Some would say there’s no MySpace now.) There wasn’t really laptops as we know them now; it took Apple’s Powerbooks, Windows 95 (really), and Intel’s Pentium level chips to really kick things off. We will not discuss BBS’s or AOL (sometimes privately referred to as America Offline). Most of us had computers that sat on desks; cell phones were still a bit of a novelty-and we all had landlines. 

My, how times have changed. 

They wanted us to turn off our cell phones, but then realized that was counter to tweeting. (So they asked us to set them on vibrate.) It used to be that we weren’t reachable 24 hours a day; now we can be reached at all hours. Even beepers weren’t that bad as they could be turned off if need be. Computers were tools that aided productivity; now people produce reports that nobody reads simply because they can. Social media used to be a night home watching the TV with friends and family, or maybe taking that cute thing you were dating to a movie with friends. We used to call that a “double date.”

In the end, I’m glad I went to this seminar. I still have to write up the official reports and get them in the hands of those who sent me...but I do think about how all this technology has changed our lives, and how it will continue to change lives well into the future.

Enough for now.