Channeling comedian Jerry Seinfeld and former Paramount producer Robert Evans, social media/PR guru Peter Shankman took a rambling, frenetic and interesting stroll through the social media landscape at a fund raiser for Fight SMA held this morning at the Community Idea Stations' Studio A.
Organized by The Hodges Partnership, the event solidified a couple of notions that have been rolling about my head for years now. The first is that the public relations industry tends to draw from an attractive, stylish and somewhat put-together gene pool; I almost felt frumpy. The second builds on a painful stereotype of PR professionals that I never can entirely shake -- they've got more free time to use a lint brush than the rest of us.
And while Shankman's talk was both entertaining and thought-provoking, I was left with one consuming fear -- that I was going to get an awful lot of birthday greetings from people come March.
Shankman took the idea of social media by the horns right off the bat this morning.
"Social media does not exist. I dare any of you to define what it is," exclaimed the man who was winding up to spent the next hour talking about the phenomenon of social networking. "Well, if we cant define what social media is we can figure out where it's going and what we can do with it."
After all, he added, "we don't know what Play-do is, but we all know what to do with it."
Hopping from topic to topic, navigating his way through a series of stories, Shankman pulled his audience into the Facebook versus Linked In debate. Is one more professional than the other, he asked?
"Facebook tells me more about you than your resume does," he said, which raises tough questions about privacy and trust in an age of technologically driven social transparency. Raises tough questions for people over 30, that is.
"We have to be more aware in this day and age of what we trust, because everything is out there," he said. "The people I worry about are the people our age because we don't get that there is no privacy anymore."
But if you can't escape the lack of privacy in the public space, he said, maybe there's an opportunity to manage it better.
"You are going to be able to control what they know and what they find," he said. But he added that having access to tools doesn't equal the ability to use those tools well. "This just gives us the opportunity to screw up on a much larger stage."
Shankman spent much of his time fleshing out what he called four items that make up a formul for success for operating in this new environment -- transparency, relevance, brevity and top-of-mind presence.
"The new mentality is transparency," Shankman said, "and people are going to demand transparency from their companies and anyone else they do business with."
But, he said, being open isn't enough. You have to be relevant, too. Part of relevance is giving people what they want in a format they want.
The good news? Writing did not die along with privacy.
"Press releases will be dead in 36 months," he said, and thousands of news reporters across the country breathed a sigh of relief. "But writing is never going to go away. In fact, there is going to be a premium on it. LOL-speak is not going to cut it."
A demand for relevancy is driving the news industry to the brink, he suggested. "The average age of the people watching the daily, evening news is dead," he said. "Newspapers are not going away as quickly as we think, though."
The smart newspapers, Shankman noted, will be the ones who find ways to maximize new and different ways for readers to access information.
Shankman's third item -- brevity -- obviously made me shudder.
"Back in the 1980s," he said, "MTV showed something they called videos. They were like little stories set to music that lasted about three minutes."
Those music videos created a nationwide educational panic -- as the "MTV Generation" developed a three minute attention span.
"The new attention span is 140 characters," Shankman said.
Top-of-mind presence almost sent me out of the room screaming, even though Shankman is essentially talking about the age-old importance of relationships.
He told the story of Barry Diller, who gave us Fox Broadcasting and the Home Shopping Network. Every morning, Diller allegedly sets aside time and randomly picks 10 names from his Roladex (or Outlook or recipe box). He picks up the phone and calls each person -- just to say hello, or that he's thinking of them, or to ask about the kids.
Shankman's modern take? Every morning, he dashes off a quick email or Wall-to-Wall note to everyone on his Facebook page who has a birthday that day.
In the end, it is all about making the connection -- as genuinely as possible.
The future for social networking is bright, he predicts. The next big opportunity in Shankman's book is creating the ability to differentiate between friends.
"Right now, Facebook does not differentiate between my mom, my boss, you, my girlfriend, my other girlfriend," he said. "Imagine every one of your friends in a bubble that grows or shrinks as you interact more or less with them."
He wrapped up with questions, but I'd already bolted for my next relationship-building opportunity. This time, face-to-face.
Posted by: Jon Newman | January 27, 2009 at 14:27
Posted by: Jason | January 27, 2009 at 14:42
Posted by: Peter Shankman | January 27, 2009 at 15:38
Posted by: Steve Mullen | January 27, 2009 at 16:16
Posted by: thecheckoutgirl | January 27, 2009 at 20:09
Posted by: Tim Griles | January 28, 2009 at 11:10