Happy Independence Day!?

How does your garden grow?  The mission of advertising has always been about driving the purchasing behavior of customers.  And this holds true even as the era of big advertising, network television, and mass media seems to be coming to an end. So when social media experts talk about “Seeding, feeding, and weeding,” they’re not breaking new ground.  Any healthy business is based on starting relationships with consumers, and nurturing them over time. My job is helping clients pick the right gardening tools.

San Francisco traffic was a nightmare today.  Since everyone is off for July 4th they’re either out running errands, or driving away for the weekend.  Which reminds me that not everything can be “virtualized.” Last week I flew back and forth across the continent in airplanes that were completely full.**  Humans (especially Americans) like to go places. The two biggest implications for social technology is that (1) everything is becoming ubiqitous and mobile and (2) if you twitter on your phone at a restaurant, eventually your friends are gonna get sick of you!

**Of course this is due to reduced flight schedules, but even still.

Social Animal Smart people are spending a lot of time forecasting how technology will change our lives.  And that’s a good thing, of course.  But my personal rule of thumb is to take with a grain of salt anything I can’t understand after reading it twice.  So when Jeremiah Owyang,  one of my all-time favorite gurus, at Forrester’s writes that in a year or two, social networks will “aggregate all explicit and implicit data, creating a new type of social inbox,” I get a hankering to go walk the dog.

It Takes (More than) a Village The best thing about social media is how it extends our reach across physical, economic, political and geographical barriers, enabling us to create communities of choice. And that’s also the worst thing about it. Yesterday our DSL connection cut out, and I was reminded of how addicted I am to social technology. Because even though I live in one of the largest cities in California, my “village” is the world.  Which would explain why I’m writing this on my condo’s roofdeck, pirating some unknown neighbor’s wi-fi signal.

Happy “Independence” Day!