Follow Your Passions

The February meeting of the Social Media Club was originally set to be a discussion of the tools that exist to implement and participate in social communities. To an extent that did occur, but the meat of the meeting ended up falling into two other categories.

There was an interesting debate begun around whether social media has a dehumanizing effect on us. When you build a community completely virtually, isn’t there a certain level of connectedness that is lacking which only being able to interact face-to-face can produce? The general consensus was that, as with so many other tools, it is up to the user who wields it to determine how to use it appropriately. It was pointed out that whether you are offline or on, you can affect a different version of yourself for different situations and put on personas as you desire – it may be more challenging to be a completely fake version of yourself in person, but it doesn’t take technological advancements to allow humans to put up different veneers. Additionally, some felt the web could have the opposite of a dehumanizing effect, wherein someone who feels socially inept in a crowd of people might be able to come out of his or her shell in a web-based environment, grow social skills, and apply those to be more able to connect to new people IRL (In Real Life).

My personal take on this discussion is that things like blogs, IM clients, discussion forums, and so on are simply additional ways to communicate, much like a telephone or writing a letter and sending it through the post office via “snail mail”. They each have their usefulness, they each have their limitations. For example, if you’re on a conference call and need to communicate something quickly to another person on the call, rather than interupt that call you can send them an instant message. Just yesterday I was on a call where we were both on AOL Instant Messenger too, and the conversation went “And then earlier I got an e-mail with this link,” I sent the link to the site via IM, paused, then continued “and as you can see on the left side of that web page, you could use that concept to…” and so on. The more you explore different ways to communicate, the easier it will be to get information out and the more powerfully that information can be delivered.

The other largest amount of time spent on a particular subject during the meeting was an around the table introduction of all of the attendees, what they did, and what they were there to hope to accomplish regarding social media. There were a few that had little knowledge and were just intrigued as to how the concept might enhance their business, life, or whatever they were trying to accomplish. As the discussion progressed however, I took note of some of the more intriguing personalities and social media efforts being shared.

• HOA Freedom dot com – a discussion forum to come discuss the good and bad aspects of HOA living (judging by the title, I suspect I can guess which side of the fence most people using the site will be on)
• Helloworld, a company focusing on video e-mail and other video-based social media tools.
• IT people from the Rich Dad company
• The VP of Jobing.com, which recently launched a blogging feature
• Business Blogging Pros, which helps businesses understand how blogging might enhance their efforts.
• An Account Executive from Business Wire
• A woman who takes old home movies and slides from the 40s – 60s (primarily) and transforms them to digital formats that can be shared over the web, e-mail, etc.
• A reporter from the Business Journal of Phoenix

The most interesting idea to me that someone was working on involved using social media to provide small businesses with a sort of virtual board of advisors/directors, bringing the possibility of expertise to them that larger businesses with bigger coffers normally can afford to obtain via an experienced board of directors.

A final thought – I shared with the Social Media Club that many moons ago I played Everquest, a big online game that many people find very addictive. I mentioned that what I thought made it so addictive was it gave you a false sense that you were accomplishing something, when in a sense you weren’t really accomplishing anything “real”. The discussion turned to Second Life, a similar game people have actually used to make a living by creating products and offering services within the game environment.

I think that Stagecoach Island, Wells Fargo’s venture into online gaming, is a great next step in this particular social media concept, because it creates an environment in which you actually are accomplishing something – increasing an individual’s knowledge of how to invest money and use it in different ways to increase wealth. I’m excited to see what other ways people come up with to provoke positive social change in different communities through the myriad of unique tools that make up social media.