GREAT ADAPTATIONS

How is your social media exploration going? Have you noticed the growing conversation about “The Conversation,” and how lots of people are converging to try to make the language of this new media more useful?

One of my associates, Ursula Kauth, and I are talking about social media in much the same way you might talk about a new frontier. It has a lot of those characteristics. We are actively learning more about social media every single day, and as we go along, we keep creating a better map to share with our readers.

Since the map of social media can lead people to success in all kinds of creative ventures and innovative businesses, I think of it as a treasure map.

What is on your treasure map? Have you thought about what you’d like to create as we move through these wildly changing times? Do you have your own domain yet? What is it called?

You are warmly invited to join me in the conversation. Stay up to date on the important changes in online communication by joining the website community, there in the box on the right column. You can also come look at the tab above, “Brain-Friendly,” to learn more about how I teach people to write practical online content. With a well-founded blog, you have a place people like to return to and talk about to others. And that’s the beginning of a business plan.

Put regular blogging at the top of your to-do list for social media. It’s the cornerstone. From there, many adventures will unfold.

See you in the conversation!

Cheers,
Suzanna

There’s a reason I didn’t post a photo of big fluffy clouds. It’s because “the cloud” means all that data flying around in the something-sphere, all that stuff stored “on the web,” all those conversations that are happening “virtually.” All those quotation marks are because these are, or maybe will be one day, terms we look at as the beginnings, the baby-talk, of this conversation evolution.

Social media is carrying bits and pieces of all sorts of moments from these big tech conventions, right into our individual brains, right into the gray cortex. I’m talking about Twitter, today, mostly. Leo Laporte is letting us know he survived the keynote (that was posted at 1:31 pm), and that he enjoyed the gathering of people around him afterward. (Interesting thing to stash away in my presenter’s brain.) He has also credited Craig Syverson for creating the Keynote slides. See how we meet each other in the cloud? Chris Brogan tweets from CES, reminding us to wear comfy shoes. Tim O’Reilly is tweeting about ETech, the Emerging Technology Conference, which, appropriately, has not happened yet – it’s in March.

If you aren’t plugged in to any of these conversations, I guess it’s a shoulder shrug and a “so what?” If you are, you may be nodding, and mentally adding ten or twenty other ideas, reviews, comments, suggestions, and reports you’ve seen on Twitter or Facebook or BlogCatalog or ten or twenty other social media sites lately.

I’m going somewhere with all of this. As you can (maybe) see here, communication technology is taking us deeper into the layers of our culture, allowing us to get a real and a real-time sense of things that are happening simultaneously in far reaches of the globe. Then, when we talk about it, tell each other the great people we meet, we shorten the degrees of separation from 6 down to 2, often down to 1. So here’s one description of what social media can do for an individual, when that person has become just a little bit capable of employing it. (That’s me. Fairly new to it, some facility, able to be in the conversation. Just a little bit capable.)

Description of what it can do: Allow you to get close to someone you want to know, work with, interact with, give to or draw from, by giving you the opportunity to speak to them through others, naturally, like being introduced to a friend or an associate. Only global.

That’s one thing.

Ursula Kauth and I are talking about lots of other benefits at our live event in Corte Madera next Thursday. Check it out – we are the Social Media Mappers.

Cheers

Suzanna