Joseph Pine
and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy 1999, was a harbinger
of the end of the services economy, which according to these authors peaked
some years ago. As observers of the rapidness of commoditization in nearly all
markets and business they were vaticinators of the experience economy we are
now realizing in social media. The social media tsunami is fueling the
experience economy as people, groups, customers, partners, companies, and
governments and many other organizations are interacting and forming
interrelationships via the social media peer groups in new and unforeseen Web
2.0 ways.
The societal
and anthropological aspects of social media peer groups are just now beginning
to be understood and the ramifications of these interrelationships are just
being felt. These new platforms are enabling communications that leads to
interrelationships between people, and groups that has never been seen before.
They now enable us to create, build, maintain and reestablish previous
relationships from other points and times in our lives, and are enabling new
relationships with our government, NGOs, and the companies we consume products
and services from.
Enter the social media
landscape: craigslist, facebook, youtube,
myspace, twitter, flickr, photobucket, linkedin, digg, ning, yelp, tagged,
squidoo, scribd, stumbleupon, hi5, bebo, reddit, myyearbook, technorati,
caboodle, Friendster, flixster, xanga, epinions, plaxo, mybloglog, yuku,
metafilter, blackplanet, care2, getsatisfaction, friendfeed, clipmarks,
cafemon, newwvine, omgili, gigya, ballhipe, current, revver, ping, tribe,
magnify, digo, dzone, xing, faves, tweetdeck, ecademy, twine.
(The Fifty Top Social Media Sites
from Website Magazine’s Feb 2010 issue, I added craiglist)
The Good, the Bad, the I don’t care and
now the Ugly
In the world
of Sociobiology our father E. O. Wilson taught us about societies and behavior
previously unknown to man, the hierarchy of termites, ants and other insects
that have one common trait, altruism. Each member of the community
communicates, interacts, behaves and performs a function that is predetermined
by the community hierarchy and all are in the best interest of the community,
harvesting, defending territory, nurturing eggs and gardens within. Humans don’t
act like this and when presented with a new community like social media they
will act in many ways that are often predictable and sometimes nefarious. What
we don’t know about Facebook and many of the other sites is how humans are
really acting and what the good, the bad, the I don’t care and the ugly
experiences are.
The Good
Two years
ago I found my long lost cousin in Australia on Facebook, wow we Skype nearly
every week now. This is a good interrelationship. I have found enormous
professional value in being a member of LinkedIn and my network has expanded to
several hundred colleagues and professional connections. My Facebook community
of friends and colleagues is mixed with both, but I would prefer that it be only
my friends and that is where the line blurs. I know that HR people can profile
me now on Facebook and even decide whether I am culturally fit for a potential
job, this is good and bad. I could be culturally unfit just because I am too
old or because of their perception of my sexual preference. This is good and
bad. Facebook in particular has now become a great tool for social media
marketing for small and large businesses alike in addition to non profits who
want to get closer to their customers.
The Bad
The
beginning of the bad is when relatives that did nothing for you suddenly appear
and want to be your friend. They are the relatives that you wanted to forget,
but they are still there back at you as if nothing really happened. It’s like
that Rodney Dangerfield joke, “would you
be friends with your relatives if you weren’t related to them?” It can get
really worse if you are stalked by a former girl friend or boy friend and
Facebook has many stalkers, I even had one person do what they thought was a
cute video of me during the last holiday season. There is a tremendous amount
of information out there on all us and it is growing every day, so be careful
when you share information about traveling and other personal issues. Remember
that according to statistics a high percentage of identity theft comes from
your own relatives that are jealous of you. There are also many stalkers that
use Facebook’s IM to get people’s attention to start a conversation; they may
come from your friends networks. For example some men will IM every women they
know to be single a happy mother’s day wish even if they don’t know if they are
mothers or not. This just happened to one of my friends.
I don’t care!
Then a
series of old friends from high school came back into the picture, and I
connected with them, but have found their world to be one that I don’t live in
anymore. They talk about the little insular and provincial New England town
that I was raised in and invite me to groups and events important to that town.
These events aren’t important to me, I don’t live there and to be quite honest
I really don’t care about them. Nor do I want to enter into relationships with
people that I really have nothing to share with anymore. I am not trying to be
snotty or uppity but I really don’t care about their home town lives. I don’t
live there.
The Ugly
The ugly
stories keep pouring in and with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and
within other social media peer groups, I bet there are hundreds if not
thousands of stories like the following happening all the time. Last weekend I
had lunch with a friend that hates Facebook. He claims it has wrecked his
brother’s and his best friend’s marriages. In the case of his brother, his wife
left a marriage of 23 years and a 14 year old daughter to be with another
woman. Unfortunately, she forgot to de-friend my friend and is flaunting her
new life on Facebook for all to see while abandoning her husband and daughter.
In the case
of his best friend his wife also left because she found her high school
sweetheart on Facebook and recently just up and left another 20 year marriage
with two children to be with him. I heard the same story from my hairdresser on
Monday of last week about how her sister just up and left her family. It would
be easy to dismiss these situations based on unhappy marriages and the times of
uncertainty that we live in today because of our broken government and
financial system, but I don’t think so. Facebook and the other SMPGs are
enabling communications that would have never happened before. What do you
think? How many stories like this have you heard?
The Personality of Cuttlefish
Cuttlefish (Sepia
sp.) are marine invertebrates and are actually are mollusks in a class called Cephalopoda
which is highly adapted for swimming. They are the fastest swimmers of all
marine invertebrates and employ a highly evolved jet propulsion system using
water. Some species can actually propel themselves out of the water and are
known as flying squids. There are only around 650 species in the class which
includes squid, octopods, and nautili, the largest are the giant squid. Giant
squids inhabit depths along the continental shelf to depths of 600 meters and
the most famous of them the Humboldt squid range in large schools up and down
the Pacific coast.
All
cephalopods are kings of camouflage and can change their color instantly and in
some cases their skin texture to match their immediate surroundings to hide
from predators or lie in wait for prey. Cuttlefish
are slower swimmers than streamlined squid and leverage their small shell for
bouncy along with fluid and the gas nitrogen. Light is a major factor for
Cuttlefish and it regulates its bouncy the more light the less buoyant. They
spend the day burrowed into the bottom and at night they become active gaining
more buoyancy to swim up into the water column to hunt. Cuttlefish and squids are
what is called highly adapted for raptorial feeding and carnivorous diet, they
have ten arms arranged in two arrays of five around the head. Eight are short
and heavy while the other two are twice as long and are called tentacles used
for seizing prey.
Some
Cuttlefish live at depths of more than 1200 meters and others live in shallow
tide pools in our warmer oceans. These animals have the highest degree of
nervous system development of all marine invertebrates which enable their mobility
and carnivorous nature. They are diecous (meaning there are males and females)
and they engage in copulation with normally the male seizing the female head
on. Cuttlefish can display complex color changes which are thought to be
directly related to behavior and most species change color when alarmed. I hope
you have enjoyed this blog post and good luck selling and marketing in the
millennium. And how will your behavior change the next time you log onto
Facebook, will you turn a different color?
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