MaestroJ - digital strategy & new media

If you click on the small “Share This” icon at the bottom of this post, you will be privy to dozens of services that allow you to share, distribute and discuss content online. For the uninitiated, it becomes a blur of poppy catch phrase names which make little sense – Spacebook? Hummer? Flaptor? Platxer? Redlicious? Diggspace? Dug It? The speed with which we consume these platforms and dismiss them in a single fell swoop is getting faster and faster.

Trends, technological or otherwise, used to be so much easier to cycle through. Some very advanced, brave people trialled new things, still unfinished but showing promise, they spread this to their own networks, who qualify the tech even more and feedbacks on issues they encounter – then the uptake spreads to the rest of us laypeople in its relatively finished market-ready format. The cycle is referred to as the Technology Adoption Curve.

When Facebook updated its platform to present a more streamlined, news feed focussed layout in the Wall area, many harbingers of its death cried out that it has finally succumbed to the current media darling social network, Twitter. We now know that Facebook maintains its spot as the top social network site for Australians, although Twitter keeps growing like it’s on steroids.

Even Twitter isn’t immune to the “so yesterday” phenomenon, as many “Innovators” and “Early Adopters” cry out for the next big thing now that Twitter has gained much attention, irrespective of that fact that it’s still very niche.

For corporations this means that the vehicle isn’t the most important thing for your strategy. Channel selection is a very important part of the process but a social media strategy should be developed with no requisite dependency on one particular platform.

For the consumer, it probably means very little. Spacebooks and Twitfaces will come and go, and they will do with them as they please.

Journalist E.R Murrow probably summed it up best in this instance;

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problems in the relations between human beings and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem of what to say and how to say it.