Jon Newman at The Hodges Partnership inadvertently landed and missed a key point today in his post about the state of social media. And he did it all in the first paragraph:
An interesting thing happened to me as I was sitting in the darkness of Blog Potomac. I found myself, who is comparatively new to social media than others in the room that day, listening to the social media veterans in the room (you know who you are, I won’t rat you out).
Sitting in the dark... comparatively new...
Newman was attending the big Blog Potomac meeting, and it was clear from his vantage point that a shift was happening -- as various social media tools (Facebook, Twitter) have found themselves colliding with the mainstream, those early adopters are quickly adopting a "too cool for school" posture and looking for something edgier on which to hook their work and reputations.
The mood, Newman reports, is shifting. And the emerging meme is that "social media is dead".
It's dead, Newman suggests, in the same way that email is dead. That browsers are dead. It is dead in that several of the social media tools are quickly becoming standard, mainstream instruments of business.
That's not a terrible thing.
I remember how novel email was in 1992, when I convinced my boss at Virginia Commonwealth University's PR office to give a new tool called CompuServe a go. There was a group at the State University of New York Stony Brook that had started something called
Prof Net, which was totally groundbreaking at the time:
His idea doesn’t seen like a big deal now, but in the early 1990s, it was a radical one. Many campus PR officers were just starting to use email—and many journalists at newspapers didn’t even have email access at their desks.Dan’s plan was pretty simple: journalists would call or fax their requests for experts to ProfNet, which would distribute them via email to campus PR staff, who would then follow up on their own to pitch their own experts to journalists. At first, the daily emails were pretty lean; then, as journalists discovered that ProfNet yielded a wide range of qualified experts, they grew in size.
Four years later, I was working at Circuit City and became part of a off-the-books, "skunk works" team racing a dozen other informal groups to build a prototype website for the consumer electronics giant that would allow customers to download PDF support documents for their electronics, or potentially order products. Yes, 1995 was a groundbreaking year.
Guess which of the various elements described above has become standard fare? Right, everything but the fax machine which is dead to everyone except people organizing trips to the Bahamas for $199.
Geoff Livington at CRT/Tanaka is where Newman points his readers for some perspective on why social media is kaput to those on the technology edge.
Let me explain. The technology adoption cycle has been maturing for social media (and social media, web 2.0 whatever you want to call it is definitely inspired by technology) for some time. Widespread corporate adoption is happening as we speak, albeit with many stumbles. Based on conversations I’m having, even the most conservative organizations are adapting now.
The time when social media as a special or unique or “shiny and new” type of communication is rapidly ending. Does that mean it’s going away? Hardly.
But from an innovators standpoint, as someone who lives on the edge, who wants to be where new frontiers are being created, we’re at the end. For me, social media is dead… That means it’s future forward.
As I state in the headline for this post, dead depends on your vantage point. That, and I doubt social media tools are really dead to Livingston -- though it would be so awesome to see him completely walk from Facebook and Twitter the way I left my Pet Rock sitting in a ditch in Bon Air so many years ago.
But Livingstone and Newman both are making the point that we're at or nearing the early adopters plateau -- or the time when social media tools might actually begin to be supported by and integrated into the other tools and processes we use to run our business.
Livingstone calls that dead. I call it about time.
