I attended another interesting presentation on social media.
Using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Of them all LinkedIn is the easiest to understand. It is essentially replacing your Rolodex (what is this btw…!), business cards, (and paper resumes). It is a gold mine of information.
Facebook is more personal and Twitter (which I personally like) is increasingly becoming like a global stream of consciousness (and just as hard to follow).
These technologies are great, the information available is just tremendous.
However the social media boom reminds me a little of the original internet dot.com bubble. Think back to 2000.
There were lots of great ideas at the time, everyone was excited about the new technology, VC funding was flowing. However dispute all of this we still bought books and music from stores, had paper statements and watched TV. All this excitement, yet not much had changed.
Then slowly, after the crash and over the next 10 years, gradually we understood what really worked, the code was cracked and our lives have been changed. Now we could not live without it (nor could social media!).
It feels we are in the same excitement phase with social media. There are lots of ideas, some will work some will not, however for the right company who really ‘cracks the code’ there are major opportunities.
In the next 10 years (probably only 5 this time!) we will understand…
