Comments on: Are we ourselves stuck inside our own walled garden?

By: Michelle/chelpixie

Michelle/chelpixie — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 07:00:44 +0000

Chris Penn has been talking a bunch in the last few months about being stuck in the fishbowl. Same difference really.

If you pour the fishbowl into the ocean, will all the fish survive? Some will, some won’t. It’s more about expanding the fishbowl, making it bigger so more people can swim and learn.

This is why NewBCamp and those like it are so important to social media. Making an effort to introduce a blog to a friend or helping them get set up on iTunes and subscribe to a few podcasts, taking steps to teach others outside what it is we’re all hyped up about will allow the bowl to expand or the gate to the garden to open.

Your Metaphor May Vary. ;)

By: doug meacham

doug meacham — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:59:47 +0000

Hi Chris. Great post! Better late to the comment party than never. Following up on Jason’s comment about people not getting ideas when they first come out. The role that early adopters play is to take raw ideas and technological “seeds” and develop them onto tools, products and systems that are seen by the other 98% as useful or valuable. That role is not limited to marketers but rather innovators from all kinds of backgrounds (but we do tend to get really excited by shiny new stuff)

By: Grahm Johnson

Grahm Johnson — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:34:02 +0000

*head in hands* defense rests……twats

By: Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:20:53 +0000

I am eating pistachios.

By: Grahm Johnson

Grahm Johnson — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:17:50 +0000

Do you really need to tell everyone what you are eating at the moment? (just an example) Is it really that important?…..Stop blogging and go have a conversation with a real person. Call your mother, don’t post something for her to read. Social networking is great, I love it, but only to a certain degree.

Stop being web 2.0, new media twats!

StumbleUpon is one of the greatest things to ever happen to the internet, but every once in a while I have to set my laptop down, turn my iPhone off and go interact with actual humans. I know it sounds weird.

By: Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:43:26 +0000

Well, Saul, there are lots of people who will disagree with you, but they’re using new tools with old models. What *we* do is indeed completely new but what lots of other practitioners do isn’t new… same shit, new tools.

By: Saul Wainwright

Saul Wainwright — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:21:32 +0000

Another element that is important to recognize here is that what is going on in social media and forms of PR is truly new. It is a new arena that everyone is playing with. Some will fail and some will succeed and this will really depend on what theoretical ideas are most easily translated into actual useful tools or products.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:19:51 +0000

We’re just all early adopters. 95% of what we talk about isn’t understood by the public today, but in five years it is.

People did not understand SixDegrees (circa 1997) and Ryze (circa (2001), but they get MySpace and Facebook don’t they?

They didn’t understand blogging back in 2002, but they certainly understand TMZ, Autoblog, Joystiq, PerezHilton, and Engadget don’t they?

The real challenge for folks in our industry is to take the complicated and make it obvious. Blogs and social networks are obvious today, but were confounding five years ago.

Social search (Mahalo), social news (digg, propeller, reddit), and social bookmarking (stumbleupon and delicious) are going to be confounding to some for some period of time…. then they will be obvious.

That’s the fun part of what we all do isn’t it?

best j

By: Jonathan Trenn

Jonathan Trenn — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:07:37 +0000

Great response. And yes, yes, we in social media – no, strike that – in marketing overall MUST learn about this stuff.

But my concern is that many forget that others are not adopting (or may not ever adopt) a lot of the tools that we use. These tools may in actuality be very useful, and here to stay, but they may be more for us insiders. i.e. most highly ranked stories on Digg are related to technology.

A couple of weeks ago Target was getting reamed by the blogsphere…but were they really hurt? Many bloggers felt they would be, but it turned out to be a very small event.

By: Jen Zingsheim

Jen Zingsheim — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:50:29 +0000

The short answer is yes, we are in a sort of echo chamber when it comes to all of these tools. The majority of the public has no idea and use for them…yet.

A few points: one, I get the strong sense that many PR/marketing/communications firms use this as an excuse not to get into social media and really learn what it is about. Maybe it takes too much work, maybe they are waiting to see which tools survive an “attention crash” and maybe they are hoping it’s all just a fad that will go away if they ignore it. None of those reasons are valid for ignoring social media.

Two, the “not yet” matters. Social media isn’t going away. Just because your group of 20-somethings didn’t know what twitter was when you asked them, my guess is that a fair number of them are on Facebook and/or MySpace. It’s really just a matter of time before Twitter hits in a big way (a good thing too, maybe give it some time to scale up so it’s not so flaky).

The bottom line: it’s incumbent upon communications professionals to not only understand *how* people are currently communicating, but to also try and determine how the public *might* communicate in the future. I’m sure there were people who thought the telegraph/telephone/fax machine, etc. would not be relevant! There is nothing wrong with learning the tools on the bleeding edge, you just can’t lose sight of the here and now while you are learning.