The Triumph of Hope Over Experience - December 11, 2009

The Triumph of Hope Over Experience - There are approximately 1,372,936 people online right now who want you to attend their free social media webinar so that you, too, can launch your business into the stratosphere. Or at least the blogosphere. Examples of success abound - Dell selling millions of dollars of computers through Twitter being the one most frequently cited. You will also hear about Comcast customer service, Burger King’s “friend vs. Whopper” campaign and many more. That’s why the most refreshing article I’ve read in the past three months was from John Naughton, of the Observer. The title says it all: Facebook now has 350m users - and there’s no point in advertising to them.

Too big to fail - It’s a sobering thought, but in the tech world, no one’s really so big and powerful that they are completely immune from failure. And I’m not just talking about TimeWarner sloughing off AOL this week like so much dead skin from a bad sunburn. Despite all the hoopla, it’s entirely possible that Apple’s iPhone will eventually be as popular as its computers (i.e. not very). The same goes for penniless Twitter or its impoverished cousin Facebook. Many thought, for example, that Microsoft was one giant that could beat Google at the search game. But these days if someone says “Bing” you’re probably thinking “Crosby” not the floundering search engine.

How much is too much? Well, that depends. This week the University of California’s Global Information Industry Center claims to have counted every single last piece of “data delivered to people … measured [in] bytes, words, and hours of consumer information” during the course of a year. The report throws around all kinds of numbers I’ve never heard of before - but most are reminiscent of the late Carl Sagan’s “billions of billions”.  The irony here, of course, is that this massive study, funded by huge corporations and conducted by one of the country’s biggest universities, completely misses the point. The reason social media is exploding right now is that it CONSTRAINS how much people can write. Not just the standard Twitter 140 characters, but everywhere in texting and blogs and comments boxes and the like. Less is more, indeed.

How “Real” is Real Time? Can you imagine attending a play where the actors had never rehearsed? Reading a book that had never been edited? Being stuck in a meeting where someone just yammered on and on endlessly with no purpose? (Well, that last one, okay). Great marketing, good TV, and even excellent “improv” is all the result of practice, practice, and more practice. There’s a lot about the instantaneous nature of technology that is liberating and helpful. Using a smartphone to find a gas station when the meter is on “E”, for example. But when it comes to interpersonal communications, I couldn’t agree LESS with media star Jeremiah Owyang when he claims real time “isn’t fast enough.” Perhaps he’s never read Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Sometimes the best told tale is one you have to wait for.