Socially challenged

Social media are a collection of internet-based software tools and services for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast messages opinions, thoughts and ideas, in the form of pictures, podcast, videoclips, and text.

Let me begin by saying clearly and loudly, I am not an expert.

What I am, though, is a student of the media and have been since my undergraduate days. I have been somewhat successful at trying out many of the products and services we call social media. 

You know them by their popular names. They include networking sites including Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. Most of you got to this post today via Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. These products and services have helped you and millions of others connect to friends, relatives, employees, customers, and potential customers, to use that term loosely.

Here is a great explaination.

In the olden days, most folks accessed social media the traditional way -- by using a computer connected to the internet. Now-a-days, all the cool kids are using cellphones to access social media. 


Anytime, anyplace, to anyone, including -- you guessed it -- even the person standing alongside. The one in the middle is my son, with his two best friends on either side.


I’d also like to point out that I consider texting a form of social media as well. The Pew Research center finds that 75% of all children between the ages of 12 and 17 have cell phones. Those of you that have younger children, I have three words for you:  unlimited texting plan. Save yourself a bunch of trouble. In addition, with my own son, I have noticed some distinct trends that I’ve taken the liberty to chart out for you.

You’ll notice that the amount of time spent texting varies by both time of day or night and correlates significantly with life circumstances. Notice if you will, that nearly 100% of a high school-aged child’s time will be spent sending and receiving text messages when a prospective girlfriend or boyfriend scenario is present. 


Of course, the texting is punctuated with Facebook status updates that mark the major milestones of the developing relationship.


Don't want to see someone? Call them. 
Don't want to call someone? E-mail them. 
Don't want to take the trouble to actually write sentences? Text them.


A true story:

My wife and I decided to get my son a cellphone as he started high school for the usual reasons, ease of contact and the ability to track his every move without his knowledge using available Global position triangulation technologies. We also subscribed to the text plan that allowed him some 200 messages per month. 


Given that he was not allowed to use a cell phone in school, my math went something like this:  


On weekdays, outside school hours, he has about six hours per day in which to text. There are five school days, times six hours a day, times four weeks in a month -- that’s 120 hours.


On weekends, of which there are eight days per month, I allotted roughly 12 hours in per day of awake/text time. That comes to an additional 96 hours. So all total, we have 216 "textable" hours per month. With the 200 texts per month plan, rounded up, comes to about one text message per hour every waking hour not spent in school.


That formula worked just fine for about two months and then something went terribly, terribly wrong. That something was the first school dance. My predictive texting formula changed from one text per hour every waking hour to 22.9 texts per hour, every waking hour. That comes to 4950 text messages in one month.


When your text plan charges you .10 cents for every text over the included 200, the result is an additional $475 dollars to your monthly bill. Three words. Really.


I just checked again. We are on the 27 day of a 30 day billing cycle and his message count is 4927. In the same time frame, he actually used his phone as a phone for a grand total of 18 actual minutes. My wife, on the other hand, has used 387 text messages and 547 telephone minutes. 


One other interesting note, within philanthropy circles, one of the major subtexts of the earthquake in Haiti was the phenomenal success of text-message fund-raising appeals. The Red Cross alone raised more than $30 million via text donations by the middle of February, more than 10% of the total funds raised. 


Let's get back to the definition. 


Sometimes it’s easier for comparison purposes, to understand what social media is not, and quite simply put, social media are separate and distinct from industrial or traditional media, such as newspapers, television, and film. They are relatively inexpensive and accessible to anyone including private individuals.

In general, they allow one to publish or access information cheaply or free as compared to industrial media, which generally require significant resources to publish information. One characteristic shared by both social media and industrial media is the capability to reach small or large audiences. For example, a blog post, a Facebook update, a twitter, or a television show all have the potential to reach anywhere from zero people to millions of people, as Jay Leno is well aware.


So let’s talk for a few minutes about where we might be headed.


I’ll start with the International Telecommunication Union, which is an agency of the United Nations, regulates information and communication technology. In other words, they are significant players indirectly with respect to social media. They have produced a report that takes a look at the next step in what is called “always on" communications. Their premise is that the same kind of connectedness that we human beings experience via social media and networking is also happening with non-human beings and inanimate objects.


And the best example I can use to illustrate my point is something called RFID or Radio Frequency Identification. This isn’t necessarily a new technology, but the new applications of RFID technology are quite interesting.

These tiny, silicon-based RFID tags have been in use for quite some and my guess is that each of you is carrying around a few at this very moment. 


Of course, they are in your cell phones, in library books and passports, and they cost just a couple pennies to embed them into a whole host of products. If you have one of these I-Pass "thingys" for the toll roads around Chicago, that uses RFID technology. RFID tags are beginning to replace the bar codes on groceries in stores.


 I found a video to illustrate.


The tags, which actually can be printed directly on grocery items, uses ink containing carbon nanotubes that instantly transmit information about the contents of your grocery cart to the checkout station. Think about the eventuality of running your full grocery cart by a detector that will instantly know what’s in the cart and ring you up in seconds. 


Yes, we are even implanting them into our bodies. We just had this discussion at Parkland, about move from traditional keys to swipe cards. I suggested implanting RFID chips, which met with some resistance. Well, really, you’ve already had the option to tag your cat or dog for years. 


We have all kinds of lapel pins that we give out. Why not embed RFID chips in them, so when you get close to the door, a sensor reads your tag and decides if you should be able to unlock the door? If you lose your pin or your security clearance changes, a couple of keystrokes are all it takes.


Think about a time when new technologies like RFID and smart computing promise a world of networked and interconnected devices that provide relevant content and information whatever the location of the user.

Click for an example….

So what does this all have to do with social media? We are well on our way toward the day in which the Internet of data and people gives way to tomorrow’s Internet of Things. A long story short, today we network with each other. 


Increasingly, we will begin to add things to our repertoire that enhance, guide, alter, and influence our daily lives. 

We will rely more and more on mobile devices. There were over 1.8 billion mobile phones in circulation by the end of 2004. At the end of 2009 there were 4.1 billion. 


More than half the global population now pays to use one. They’re everywhere and its getting more difficult to find areas of the world that don’t have cellphone coverage. In 2007 China Telecom installed a cell tower near the Mt. Everest base camp. Many developing countries have skipped the copper-based, hard-wired telephone lines that we grew up with completely and have jumped from nothing directly to cellphones.

Today, you can Twitter on an airplane, as more than ten air carriers are providing in-flight internet connections. 


I was on a flight about seven months ago, trying out the service. It was March 28th at 5:05 pm. 


I was pretty sure we were about to die. 


We ran into a patch of turbulence that was particularly nasty and our plane was rocked for what was probably only a minute but it seemed a whole lot longer. It was turbulence like I’ve never felt before. Drinks were thrown all over the place and at least one person was injured.

During this time, I took the opportunity to update my Facebook status. I’m still not sure why I did that; I suppose to leave some record and it was the best pre-death status update I could think of at the time. My point is that five people in different parts of the country -- my sister-in-law, my son’s girlfriend, a neighbor, my aunt, and a family friend all knew what happened to us within just a few seconds. 


That’s pretty cool all by itself. 


But it’s too much work (really?). I had to actively post that information. The next logical step in this technological revolution of connecting people anytime and anywhere is to connect inanimate objects a communication network.


Like airplanes. 


Software can tell me that my son just boarded flight 1537 to France and is sitting in seat 16c, and that it landed safely at DeGaulle eight hours and ten minutes later. It connects me with the people I choose to care about, with their permission, anytime and anywhere we choose. This is the vision underlying the Internet of things. The use of electronic tags (e.g. RFID) and sensors will, I guarantee, extend the communication and monitoring potential of the network of networks, as will the introduction of computing power in everyday items such as appliances, shoes and packaging. 

What Mark was talking about is the increasing “availability” and decreasing “visibility” of processing power.  In other words, computing through dedicated devices will slowly disappear, while information processing capabilities will emerge throughout our surrounding environment. With continuing developments in miniaturization and declining costs, it is becoming not only technologically possible, but also economically feasible to make everyday objects smarter, and to connect the world of people with the world of things. 


Ok. Examples:

“Adunio” is a small, low cost circuit board intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, or anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Its use in real world has led to a revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter.

The dumbest example of the application of this technology that I have ever seen is a device attached to an office chair that tweets at the presence of natural gasses (ahem).


Another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet about what’s fresh from their oven. 


This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point. This is the revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state. The Internet of Things isn’t happening in the R and D labs of large multinational conglomerates. It’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world. 

As I mentioned before RFID tags have been used for years now in passports, ID cards, and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned.  And they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands, including Abercrombie and Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of pants.


RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. 


You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits. 

Those of you with a Facebook account, have you ever noticed the top right hand side of the page?  It tries very hard to present you with advertising information that is customized to your demographic and interests.  My Facebook page tells me that I apparently, I have interests in another degree, yoga, and instructional materials.


Clearly, there are privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your groceries dead on arrival. 


There are privacy advocates that are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — think about the idea that RFID could be on our person without us knowing or that your cellphone might be surreptitiously turned on to monitor your whereabouts. None of us would like that too much.


But on the other hand, soon you will be able to “Google” your car keys, or your dog, or better yet your husband, or when you can’t find him. So, as social media becomes more widely accepted as a communications channel, more and more businesses will find ways to use it. Some of them will innovate, and social media is the vehicle. 


When the audience becomes the media channel, they can create and distribute through networked conversation without relying on a broadcaster. We all feel a need to belong to a group, social or otherwise, whether through shared interests, familial relationships, or supporting the same baseball team. Belonging feeds our sense of who we are and it makes us human, and the technology allows us entrée to wider groups of people who share our interests – and as the groups become bigger, they tend to become better informed, and the stories more complex.


Today, both social media and the corporation are connecting directly to these groups. This phenomenon is causing something to happen. It’s called disintermediation.  Another video explains best.


The key word is ‘scarce’ and networked distribution changes everything. Let me tell you why.  

You have probably heard the story of Gordon Moore and self-titled theory called Moore’s law. 


As a reminder, Gordon was chairman of the Intel Corporation and in 1965 he observed that the number of transistors that could be placed on a circuit board had doubled every two years since the invention of the integrated circuits in 1958.


Further, predicted that this exponential growth would continue unchecked and so far, he has been right. 


This law of exponential increase in computing speed and memory capacity is what has fundamentally changed our methods of communication. In the industrial age, media were expensive. Movies relied on people and technology to create them, and time, space and money to distribute and store them.


Newspapers are hugely labor intensive to write, expensive to physically print, and had to be distributed quickly to maintain demand. The increase in processing power and storage predicted by Moore’s Law means that digital production and storage is now virtually free.


The internet means that distribution is virtually free.

Information and entertainment is now nearly infinite, but economics is all about supply and demand, so scarcity has a lot to do with creation of value.  A virtually infinite amount of information and entertainment is a drain on the finite amount of attention available to consume it. What is scarce, and therefore valuable, is attention.


There are seven commonly understood mass media:  print, audio, cinema, radio, TV, internet and mobile. There are many “experts” predicting that soon these will all just be different channels on the internet, and that mobile will presumably be the most important access point because it is always with us and always on.


At my house, we have clipped the television cable. We watch what comes over the antenna and programs that are streamed to us via the internet. After six months, no one at my house misses it.


To bring us back again to what this all means, I’ll frame it in terms of Parkland College. 


We are actively using these resources and have made a conscious decision to hire talent into our marketing and PR department with experience and understanding of the power and value of this shift. There are over 20 different Facebook pages related to Parkland College and a half dozen or so Twitter accounts.

We want our fans (in our case they happen to be students) to engage. 

We know -- it has been proven over and over again -- that the more engaged out student are with some (any) aspect of the College, the better they will perform in terms of grade point average and the more likely they are to graduate.


So we go where our students are.



It is probably the same for us as it is for the brands you represent, whether it’s yourself or your employer. 


Being part of the social media is a two way thing though, and while we may have Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace profiles (and if you don’t, I recommend getting one of each, and trying it out for a while) so do most of our clients. The marketplace is heating up.

One last video.

As science fiction author William Gibson said, “the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed”. 


Bonus points if you can read this:

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