One of the first things I remember from starting out with my first job in the IT industry back in 1999, was that everybody and their dog needed a webpage. These days it seems like it’s a bit of history repeating. Sadly to me it’s seems like the promised land of social media ended up getting to be just like back in 2000 - this time around it’s just on steroids and speed combined.
To me this has never been about the tools. I don’t like them much. Some of the even seem incredibly shallow to me.
Im a people person. I create (and rock it) for a living. Those of you who know me well, know that I can really frustrated if things Im passionate about aren’t used for their full potential. I don’t think social media as tools are used to their full potential. They are used for a campaign pitch and to get more money out of the clients because some sort of hip edge, diversity and misused connection known as social media. It frustrates me when I see a social business agency or social agency or whatever-they-choose-to-call-themselves, who doesn’t really contribute with a lot themselves, but just keep passing links around from others about social media. Who keeps hyping the hype. Who promises their clients that everybody will be listening to them because they are using the tools – and not because they have anything smart or great to say. Just because they are there.
Remember 2000 ? where everybody had a website because it was a “window” to the company?
Guys we’re still windowpeaking. And we’ll keep doing it until we understand that it’s about identity, content and proactivity.
The tools? it’s really the last thing you should worry about.
It truely is.
ps. the picture is of our new dog at home. He’s called Jarvis and is still just a little puppy. He’s amazingly bright and cute though..
This essay by Jonathan Harris entitled “our digital crisis” has moved me deeply. (I found it via Swiss Miss).
Especially these lines:
“Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.
We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril.”
Sometimes, I think that people forget that things that are putted on the internet are real. Facebook events really happen (even there’s about a 50 % no-show). Social needs to be more than tools and clichéed buzzwords that everybody is talking about. It needs to have substance and be able to be implemented.
It needs to be what’s behind the billboard, and not the billboard in itself. It needs to be the processes, the substance, the flow, the thoughts.
It needs to be you. You need to be respected and accepted because your real. Not superficial. Not just a billboard.
Things are quiet on the blog these days, but pretty hectic everywhere else, moving houses is such a big deal and I am looking so much forward to settling in, the transition is driving me slightly mad these days, maybe because there’s so many unsolved issues. But around 2 weeks ago I was so lucky to attend Roskilde Festival in sunshine. It was such a great time and probably one of my favorite festivals ever. (bands rocked, friends everywhere and great weather, what’s there not to like. Laura and Sami drove down from Helsinki to attend the festival as well and Sami made us come to this really cool and weird concert with the finnish band: Circle. It was a weird blast, but after a while people starting really getting into it – and I must say, it’s the first time I’ve ever witnessed a simulated decapitation of the singer by the bassist – with a guitar.
After the show the band members themselves started to clear away their equipment. It made me burst into a “be your own roadie” statement. One that I promised I would look into more on the blog. I mean being an online rock star and all (ahem=) Im the one to toy around with the statement as well.
And if you think about it “be your own roadie” isn’t really a bad statement for a company that wants to be more like a rockband. If you’re a rockband and you are your own roadie, it means that you’re relying on yourself to get things done. Epic. In my world it’s often the “being my own roadie” that’s the most exhausting, but also the place where you really can feel the entrepreneurial freedom. It means that even though you’re the band, you’re relying on yourself to make the show go on. Taking away the excuses for not getting things to happen for you and taking responsibility and not blaming the world for everything.
It’s up to you.
You need to do it yourself. Create it yourself. whatever.
Be your own roadie.
Livin' my dream by running the social web agency 
