Here’s a collection of fairly profound stats from a presentation given recently by social media guru Louis Gray. These select items show those of us in education where businesses are focusing their attention and the skills needed by modern graduates.
Yesterday I was lucky enough to get to facilitate a fascinating discussion during ASTE 2010. I’d prepared an hour worth of presentation, but halfway through the questions from participants were so interesting we spent most of the time discussing the issues rather than listening to the presenter (me).
We talked about a number of elements including the paradigm shift we’re currently in the middle of, how the fundamental way that knowledge is managed is changing, and how businesses are using social media to maintain customer relationships. And chiefly, we discussed the hurdles our schools are facing when integrating social media into the classroom in an attempt to better prepare students for the “real” world they’re about to enter.
The slides below provide visual support for the discussion. This talk also borrows heavily from Larry’s Lessig’s TED talk “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law” (embedded below).
And here’s the TED talk by Larry Lessig:
With the release of Google Buzz, there’s oodles of speculation at what Google is aiming for. Facebook’s popularity is soaring, and now they’ve announced they’ll be launching a webmail product to compete with Gmail. So, is Google threatened by Facebook? Heck yea!
The social media wars are heating up! Google already has a humongous user base, and Buzz automatically links into existing Gmail contacts, giving people an instant social network. How well the mass of non-tech Gmail users will take to Buzz remains to be seen, they might find it one to many improvements to an already great product. And whether or not those who’ve already invested time and sweat into Twitter and Facebook will consider switching? Only time will tell… but it’s bound to be an exciting 2010.
The problem with social media, as thousands of users have experienced, is it only becomes valuable when you have a people in your networks that reply to you.
It’s easy enough to get some family members and high school chums to reply occasionally, but for the fascinating professional feedback we all crave, you have to network with people you know and share commonalities with. If you “follow” a bunch of people who don’t know you, they won’t reply to your posts because… they don’t know you. Social media is all about the relationships. People rarely decided to “like” or “retweet” based on the content of the post alone. They balance that with their knowledge of the poster.
So if you want social media to have a positive effect for you in more than just a casual way, you have two options:
A) Get all your coworkers and colleagues to use the same networks that you do, proficiently.
or
B) Work laboriously to become part of certain networks by posting to their blogs, commenting on posts, and generally showing yourself as a person worthy of their CPU cycles.
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