There are moments in life when I am very conscious that I am an animal at heart. When I get hungry, there comes a point where I cannot focus on anything other than hunting prey – or at least a doughnut. When someone tackles me on the soccer field, I pretty much have to talk myself off a cliff from retaliating back at them. Sadly, the list goes on and on. In my more enlightened moments, I recognize that there is one huge difference between the typical hairy quadraped and me; humans have the ability to put tools to use at a sophisticated level. Well, some humans… Not only can we innovate and create entire new classes of tools daily, we can use them to harness the collective power of all humanity. I believe the Internet is the first example of such a tool. The first time we have created a tool that allows a large number of us (someday all six billion of us) to share knowledge, communicate, and collaborate. Dogs cannot do this, even though they are pack animals. Cats certainly would not do this because they barely tolerate each other. Snakes cannot type so they are out as competition.

If the Internet is the foundational first tool that allows us to create a collective and shared knowledge-base, then social media/networking is the second stage. With an infrastructure that allows us to communicate for free (or next to it) and that provides tools that make connections possible from anywhere at anytime, we are now exploring the boundaries of creating new ad-hoc electronic tribes. We have labeled this social media/networking and these tribes are now blossoming, imploding, and reforming at a high rate. These tribes can be technology based – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. Or they can be media based – Youtube, Scribd, or SlideShare. Or community based – Ning, corporate Intranets, or event based sites. As a member of most of these tribes, I now have a powerful collection of new tools for marketing, relationship building, idea sharing, and communicating. Every day there is a new innovation in this social media world, and I feel blessed that I understand this new movement and how to leverage it as a tool. I feel blessed for mankind that we will forever more have a set of tools that will allow us to relate to each other in new ways, to vote on the content we think is powerful, and to create streams of thoughts and ideas to share moment to moment. Alas…

I read one time that monkeys in a specific group will learn how to use a stick as a new tool and will for many generations pass down that knowledge. Yet monkeys from other tribes will never get it – even when they observe the behavior benefiting their own kind – they don’t get it. I mean really, how hard is it to understand sticking a twig in an anthill and pulling it out with lots of ants attached as a tasty meal?

I had a long conversation with an executive the other day about Twitter and the concept of microblogging and why it is a great marketing tool – he did not get it. I mean really, how hard is it to understand a flow of communications from selected sources that let’s us communicate concisely to a self-chosen group.

If you feel like I have been wandering you around on a safari in getting to the point, let me be clear… There is a powerful and growing collection of new tools under an umbrella we call social media. It is nothing more than a bunch of humans (your customers, clients, and members) learning to use the Internet infrastructure as a tool to create tribes in order to share information, communicate, and collaborate. It is more effective than many of the methods of relating we have had in the past (TV, radio, telephone, fax, etc.) It is cheap, unregulated, unfiltered until I choose to filter it, and scalable to a number of people I have never been able to share with in the past. Young people use it because it works. It is not magic, it is not complicated, and it is not expensive. It is the most democratic institution we have ever created because it crosses all geographic boundaries, and is uncontrolled by any power-broker. It is not a fad, it is a powerful trend and the longer you wait to get it, the more you are losing.

I have heard all your excuses – here they are in order. I don’t have time for this! I don’t understand this! I am afraid people will learn things about me! What if someone says something bad about us! I don’t know many others doing this in my circle!

I guess I just wonder how much you might have to see before you will accept that this new tool actually provides value. Or, I guess you can self select out of the game and let the next generation show you how to use the tool when they take over…

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com