Some time ago I took time out to watch a presentation done for developers. I’ve embedded the link below. If you haven’t yet watched it, be warned, it can get you in. It’s about 1 hour and 20 minutes long and, if you are as interested as I am in new ways to enhance communication and collaboration, you won’t be able to stop watching once you’ve started. I was utterly fascinated by what was demonstrated and I believe this tool could be a terrific asset for small business.

And I’m not biased by the fact that this product was developed in my home town of Sydney. 

Whether or not I get to be one of the testers, I’m looking forward to the day when Google Wave is generally available.

If you want to try your hand at Google Wave, there is a simple online form for registering your interest.

I’ve been having an interesting time – for “interesting” read “time-consuming and frustrating but I hope it’s worth it” – working out how to communicate a particular message to friends on Facebook. For experienced Facebook users what I’ve learned the hard way will probably seem terribly obvious, but someone might find some value in my sharing the experience.

And in the glorious tradition of blogging, I’ll have had the pleasure of getting it off my chest.

Background is that in my previous post on my current adventures with Facebook, I promised to write about making my new Social Media Roadmap page on Facebook more functional.

In looking at putting some time into the project I had been gratified and encouraged by the very positive response I’d had to inviting people to sign up on the new page, first in the somewhat pressured context of the Facebook page name “landrush” and subsequently. From the initial minimum 100 “fans” I had needed to be able to submit my name of choice for the page, the number has grown now to 186.

But as I was about to start on the process of pimping the Social Media Roadmap page I noticed that on my Facebook profile I have some 763 friends. It occurred to me that some of those friends might want to know about the Social Media Roadmap page and might not have picked up on my invitations, on Twitter, on my Facebook wall, etc.

Should be easy, I thought: just send a message to my friends.

Because they’re my friends, right? So where is the button to message all my friends? Can’t find it. Ask around. “Oh no”, I’m told by a friend (as in the offline version of “friend”) who knows about these things, “Facebook won’t let you send a message to all your friends at once.” This is apparently to protect us all from spamming: understandable, but right now that’s a pain. So what can I do? “Simple” says my friend, “you create groups and message them. But remember there can’t be more than 20 people in a group.”

Here’s where it got interesting. Whether by design or indifference, the Facebook setup is extremely user-unfriendly when it comes to linking friends together in groups.

And one of the first things I learnt in the process was that, technically, what I needed to create were not “groups” but “lists” (“group” means something else in Facebook).

First I had to click on the Friends tab in the main menu bar. That gave me pages of friends’ names and photos and at the top of the list a new menu bar with three tabs: Create New List, Edit List, Delete List. I noticed also that on the left hand side I already had some lists I had created at some point: but they were fairly selective and would not do for the current purpose.

Only the tab Create List was highlighted at this point, so I clicked that and a popup box appeared, with a field for the group name, and friends’ names and numbers displayed three across. There are two ways to add a name to the group, namely by typing into a separate field the beginning letters of a name or by clicking on a member’s picture. As you add names a tally is registered at the top of the box (“Selected”). The aim for me with the current exercise was to add no more than 20 to a list.

A complication I made for myself, consciously, was to exclude from the lists any of the people already on the Social Media Roadmap page. I did not think it would be a good look to be sending a notice about the page, or invitation to join, to someone already on the page.

As I could not find any way to export the list of names on the Social Media Roadmap page (as I can do, for instance, and with email addresses, with my connections on LinkedIn), I set up a spreadsheet and put in some time copying each name from the page into a spreadsheet.

I then cross-referenced that list of those already on the page with each of the new lists of friends and removed the duplicates from the friends’ lists.

So the current situation is that I have 36 lists of names of Facebook friends who have not yet become fans of the Social Media Roadmap page. As I understand, one of the advantages of the new page setup is that I will be able to message everyone at once without having to do sub-lists.

Over the next day or two I will message the 36 lists of friends progressively about the Social Media Roadmap page and hope some of them will see that as something of sufficient potential interest and value to them to consider becoming “fans”.

Then I will look at ways to make the page more interesting and helpful. And I intend to post about that in due course.

And Jake asked “Will there be a time when older people don’t think it’s cool to joke about their tech cluelessness?”. As a card-carrying “older person” I was not offended, although at least one commenter, younger than I, took umbrage at the generalization about age groups.

One reason I was not offended is that I do hear, especially from people over about 55, those jokes about not understanding the technology – usually, I believe, with a sub-text of “and I don’t want to know”.  Up till now I’ve tended to “go along with the joke”, as the saying goes, although I don’t actually find it funny. But now that I’ve read and reflected on what Jake is saying, I think I might emulate young Jake and start getting a tad peeved. Because however jokingly, however implicitly, being proud of ignorance is surely not a good look for anyone, at any age.

And ignorance of social media, at this point in time, is no longer an option for anyone who has a serious desire to be successful, or continue being successful, in business, government or other walks of life.

Speaking earlier this week at a conference on Government 2.0, on the theme that parliamentarians and public sector managers need to become active participants in social media, I mentioned that at at another event a couple of years ago, in the private sector, I’d been asked by a member of the baby boomer generation how people who did not become knowledgeable and skilled with the new media would get on, and I’d said “they will just become irrelevant”.  I did not spell out, but left the thought hanging in the air, so to speak, that the same would apply to politicians and public sector managers.

Not that I want to preach to the choir here. I just wanted to share the “Ah ha!” moment I’d had in reading Jake’s post and participating in the comment discussion:  ignorance about social media is no laughing matter.

More to the point, I am guessing there are many people besides me, who are active users of social media, participants in social networks, and are starting to find it frustrating in business to have to deal with people who are not participating.  Minor irritants perhaps, in themselves – “you’re not on Skype and you don’t want to check it out?” “you’re not on Twitter and you think it’s a waste of time?” – but indicating a mindset of resistance to learning and adapting.

I believe some of those people are in for a shock, the day they find that their unwillingness to learn new skills, new ways of communicating and collaborating, has left them out in the cold. Some of us just won’t want to put in the effort to do business with them and will seek out people who are more tuned in to these modes of communication and collaboration.

It won’t be joke time any more.

In short, I can see a time, if it hasn’t already arrived, where being able to use social media effectively and, for the digital immigrants among us, as natively as possible, will become a requirement for doing business. And, for those who feel they are behind the game, putting in the time now to learn and be more skilful will surely pay off in providing an edge in a tough world.

The age discussion is just a distraction.

But as I was asked on Monday by conference convenor Senator Kate Lundy,wh ere can those people who want to learn go to get the information they need? One suggestion I made, which would work for people in business as well as those in government, is to join one of the Social Media Club groups, where the motto is “if you get it, share it”. Other ideas or suggestions?

Picture credit: Social Media Club, San Francisco/Silicon Valley, Kristie Wells, via Flickr – Creative Commons

]]> http://www.thinkinghomebusiness.com/2009/06/27/social-media-ignorance-not-an-option-for-business/feed/ 12 http://www.thinkinghomebusiness.com/2009/03/20/how-can-rural-communities-compete-on-dialup/ http://www.thinkinghomebusiness.com/2009/03/20/how-can-rural-communities-compete-on-dialup/#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:51:12 +0000 http://www.thinkinghomebusiness.com/?p=1164 This post is about a cause and a campaign, which is aimed at engaging the attention of high level influencers, decision-makers, legislators and generally the movers of the levers, to the urgent need for rural communities in America to have access to high speed Internet, and moving those influencers, decision-makers etc to practical action.

I don’t do causes much on this Thinking Home Business blog. Not because I don’t care about things, but because it’s just not that kind of blog.

But every now and again something comes along which seems very pertinent to the community of people who have home based businesses or who might be thinking about experiencing the many pleasures of this way of doing business, if the conditions were right.

For me, one of those conditions is broadband access – high speed Internet. Essential. Non-negotiable.

So I was frankly shocked to discover a week or so ago that some 61 per cent – 14.3 million – of homes across rural America do not have access to high speed Internet.

Which means that the possibilities available to me, in semi-rural Australia, are not available to all those people in the USA, which gave us the Internet in the first place!

Something isn’t right about that.

Mind you, I have to admit that if it hadn’t been for my own recent experience with having our Internet access “shaped” by our former Internet service provider – i.e. slowed to a dialup crawl – I might not have been as receptive as I was when an email arrived about this issue of the digital divide in rural America.

Quite frankly, I had forgotten till then how excruciating it can be to be stuck on dialup.

And at that time I was indeed experiencing immense frustration, first of all in just getting on line and then in temrs of not being able to use sites or services I normally use without any problems. I was even going out to McDonald’s and another local coffee shop with free wi-fi, to be able to get some basic work done.

That may help to explain why I paid attention to that email. It was from Megan Tady of FreePress and was alerting me to a multimedia report, Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road and asking me to share this information with you, the readers of this blog.

In the email, Megan wrote:

To get an up-close view of life on the digital dirt road, I spent five days in North Carolina — a textile-industry hub that has been hit hard by the economic downturn — documenting the challenges facing rural communities without high-speed access.

The report incorporates video interviews with people in towns across North Carolina and highlights just how challenging it can be for people to participate fully in the life of the broader society when the best they can get is dialup.

Across rural America there are families who are being denied, practically speaking, and on a continuing basis, not just for a week as I was, such basics – in contemporary terms – as:

• the valuable access others of us have to information, instantly, globally
• opportunities to participate fully, interactively, dynamically, in the democratic process
• opportunities to nurture and build businesses, whether online or offline, or a combination of both
• crucial information about the availability of employment in locations which are near enough to drive once you have the job, which with broadband you could have found out about online without getting in your car, but seriously expensive if you have to drive there just to find out what is available
• facilities for children to learn and acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be able to compete and prosper in this 21st century

The Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road report is published at the InternetforEveryone site.

InternetforEverone is “a national initiative of public interest, civic and industry groups that are working to bring the benefits of a fast, affordable and open Internet connection to everyone in America”.

InternetforEveryone is calling on the Congress and the President “to act in the public interest by enacting a plan for the wired and wireless Internet” built on the principles of:

• Access
• Choice
• Openness
• Innovation

Although I was pretty cranky a week or so ago when I couldn’t get normal, broadband access, now all is hunky dory, with a new ISP (Internode), fast DSL service and savvy, friendly, seriously helpful tech support. And while in Australia, where I live, there are plenty of people who are currently denied, for all practical purposes, access to high-speed Internet, we fortunately have now a Federal Government which is officially committed to redressing that disadvantage with the rollout of a national broadband network intended to reach a whopping 98% of homes and businesses. And has budgeted for that.

I would like to think our American cousins, whose country invented the Internet and shared it with the rest of us, could expect no less.

I hope this blog post will encourage you to think about ways you can support those good people at InternetforEveryone in their great campaign “to bring the benefits of a fast, affordable and open Internet connection to everyone in America”. For a start, you might like to sign up for updates and/or join the conversation at InternetforEveryone’s Digital Town Hall.

For example with expenditure on marketing. How many of us can say that every dollar we spend on marketing, directly or indirectly, is money well spent and will certainly produce profit? Hat tip to you if you can. For the rest of us, there is surely always something new we can learn – or something old we can re-learn – to get better value for our marketing spend.

Content management system software company Bizzuka has come to the party with a very helpful resource. They have put together a nine-part video series,  Nine Ways to Maximize Your Marketing Dollars During the Recession.

The series includes insight and advice from well-known advertising, marketing and social media industry leaders such as David Meerman Scott, Paul Gillin, Ben McConnell, Adam Broitman, Ann Handley, Todd Defren, David Alston and others.

Each video is only 4 to 5 minutes in length. That makes the series about a 45 minute instant seminar on how to use the Web as a cost-effective marketing tool during the recession.

And there is no admission charge. A very nice gift from Bizzuka to the business community.