Page 24 - Tonilee & Bobbye Social Media Special Edition Oct Nov 2011 (1)

SOCIAL ME-ME-MEDIA By Robert Tussey

The trouble with the march of technology is that the parade moves faster and is a younger crowd and we boomers don’t hold the pace as well as
we used to. As a writer I must, if I’m to be successful, add all of the most popular social media gadgets to my toolbox. I need to be LinkedIn, have
a face on FaceBook, tweet and twitter until my fingers are numb, blog, web, and have one of those little symbols (on everything that is socially me)
that the smart phones use to drive them to my website. I must YouTube myself. It’s all about – me. I’ve got more passwords to these social get-to-
know-and-love-me sites than the MPG on a Prius.
We boomers were the original ‘I, Me, Mine’ generation and took a lot of grief for it. Now, with this virtual ‘I’m everywhere all the time’ paradigm we
seem like pikers. That said, cyberspace has become our second home. Whether we use Android or iPhone or iPad has become another question
we must address to succeed in business. I hear the Blackberry fans moaning. Sorry, but you’re being left behind by quicker more user-friendly
software designed specifically for people like me who struggled with RIM and quickly bolted to the friendlier cyberspace of Apple and Android
(please, no cards and letters).
The simple fact is we must keep up and take part in the new innovations of doing business or we will most certainly fail. We creative types, in our
ever pressing desire to be heard, seen, or read, have always battled for the public’s attention. Self sponsorship has become de rigueur. Today
Narcissus and his pond seem casual observers in the throes of the self promotion and in your face approach to staying ahead of the curve.
Product or service based businesses are in the same boat. There are few completely unique business models so we must make the most of what
we are and prove that we are the worthy choice. It’s exhausting! There’s nothing like coming home after a twelve hour day and updating all of our
blogs, tweets, LinkedIn and website accounts before we can consider dinner and the family. This is after touching all of these technologies during
the day at traf-
fic lights and
the drive-thru
burger line.
What I’m look-
ing for (in soft-
ware) for the
smart phone
is Dragon type
software that
we can dictate
to and IM from
to Twitter and
texts, and
24 update our
blogs (The new
iPhone 4S with
SiRi is moving
rapidly in that
direction).
That would
take hands
free to the next
level.
The gist is that
social media,
in all of its
incarnations, is
a simple fact of
doing business
today and we
can’t dismiss
the incred-
ible power it
represents.
Alvin Toffler, in
his book Future
Shock, spoke
of a society
moving so fast
it would leave a
great portion of
it behind. We
simply can’t
afford, in order
to succeed,
to watch that
train leave the
station.