eBuddy, Technorati, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Topix, Flickr, MedHead, PollGenius……

The list of weird and misspelt names never seems to end, continually changes, and you think you’ll never keep up.  Is this all just Greasy Kid Stuff, or is there something about Social Media that means something to you?

We only have to look to recent history to discover similarities between today’s explosion of social technologies, and other technologies your organization has implemented.

I’ll lay odds, for example, that a few of you remember staring at your first Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and wondering how it was going to improve a business function, much less make your life any easier.  Could your organization function as well without a spreadsheet now?

Or how about email?  You may have even been one of the few who had an assistant print them off for you to read.  Or at least been resistant to this new inundation of messages from people.  Hands up if you now carry a smart phone and access email anywhere, anytime to communicate with individuals and small groups of people.

Many of the people you do business with started asking for the address of your web site.  So you finally gave in and created one to communicate with larger groups of people you didn’t even know.  Would you take down that site and give up your domain name now?

Organizations exist for many different reasons, but for-profit or not, still share common operational requirements:  make more money than you spend, do that as productively as possible with the best people you can find, through relationships with many different groups.

Social media doesn’t change that.  But as many are discovering now, it can help the people in your organization communicate, collaborate, and be more effective at what you need them to do.

Technology will continue to evolve, as humankind desires to create better tools to help us do things in better ways.  As a race, we tinker with things that exist to improve them and innovate to conceive whole new approaches to things.  We are always looking for that better mouse trap.

Social media is the “how”; a reflection of what people do:  they communicate, work together, ask questions, help each other, achieve things.   It’s the next iteration of a continual technology evolution that parallels human behaviour.  But if you are finding the tools are too hard to use, or too hard to understand, it’s not really your fault.  It’s because the technology has not yet caught up to how smart people really are.

But that won’t last for very long.  Just watch any teenager send a text message, while surfing the web, listening to music, and playing a game.  The pace of change is accelerating.  The next consumer and workforce generation demands it.  And that tomorrow is not far off.

This blog is here to raise awareness of the many aspects of Social Media, and provide a venue to discuss what that means to Atlantic Canadian businesses.

So what does it mean to you?