Apparently I, like Web 2.0, am old school and past it. So say my designers. Apparently we should now be talking about the coming internet.
Really? I thought it was about using the best tools for any job. Whether these happen to be a Blog that allows a company or individual to express opinions, a website to sell or tell people something, a forum that allows people to interact or some careful pre-planning that allows a site and it’s content to be found easily by search engines is not important. What is important is using the right combination of tools for the job. Intelligent Interaction.
And while I’m ranting let’s not forget children (designers) that Social Media isn’t a new phenomenon. Oh no. Interactive forums have been around for years. Facebook etc. just put a pretty face on them.
Check out our Triumph Pitch site if you don’t believe me and take some time to browse the many forums. Old school. Yes please…
There are no such things as ‘tools’ when it comes to social interactions online. These things have no fixed definition, they change and evolve. It’s not about tools at all. It’s about what people do, and how they want to interact.
This is currently best illustrated by Facebook, something you astonishingly dismiss as merely ‘putting a pretty face’ on long-existing social media conventions. Is that how they got over 200 million users?
They clearly understood that it’s not about specific and discrete tools, but about evolving interaction and communication so that more people could and would use it. I wonder how many million FB users think forums and blogs are just for geeks, yet in some ways that’s precisely what they are using.
It’s the names themselves, the terms we coin that can hamstring us. The term ‘Web 2.0′ irks because it implies a fixed product (which it’s anything but). The same can be said about what a forum is, or a blog, or even email.
I agree with Stephen that social interaction evolves and changes. Everything does. A measure of that is the tools we are using now to carry out this interaction compared to 20 years ago.
When I first arrived in Britain in 1992 the only tools available to me for contacting family back home were post and telephone. Today, my children talk to and see their Grandparents every Sunday morning via Skype and can email them their latest school work. My whole family is currently tracking and conversing with my neice via Facebook as she enjoys her post school European trip.
But all of these devices we use to interact are still only tools, no matter how successful they are.
Our job at Global Beach is to understand how to help our clients choose the appropriate tools for their business and how to measure the success of that choice.