One of the cool things about being a speaker is hearing all the interesting stories of how technology is impacting people. Here are a few I have heard in the last couple of weeks… On gentleman in his 60’s came up today and said he really did not know much about social media, but he was proud of something he has accomplished this year. His wife had picked up a stray dog she had found and had promptly gone old school to find the owner. She put up posters around town with a picture and a phone number. After a week or so, the dog was still at the house and this guy was getting nervous about a dog being added to their inventory. So he went upstairs to his computer and went on Craigslist and put in a picture and an ad for the dog. Now our main character lives in Houston and within an hour, he has a response from someone in California wanting a more detailed picture and claiming to be the dog’s owner. He is very excited. At this point in the story, I had to ask, how could someone from California possibly think they owned this dog? Well, it turns out the owner had been to Houston and had left the dog with her parents for a while and it had run away. She flew in from CA and picked the dog up, so our guy was VERY pleased with himself. Need I say more about the power of a free, Web-based tool that allows anyone to post content that others might be interested in?

I was visiting with a franchisor that I had given a speech for a month ago. At that speech, I told the audience about using addictomatic.com as a search engine to see what people are saying about an organization. One of the franchisees when back and ran a search on the franchisors name and found a blog from an employee of the franchisor that was speaking very negatively about the annual event the company had put on. He forwarded the blog to the home office and the employee was terminated. There were a few lessons learned on this one. The employee learned that blogs that are only followed by your friends are still public to search engines. The company learned that they need to monitor their name more closely. And I learned that when I teach people about new tools there could be unintended consequences.

I met with a CEO of a banking company last week and he shared the following. He was interested in learning how to use Facebook as a business tools so he started a profile and connected with friends and family as a starting point. This included his 20-year-old son. After learning the ropes, he accepted a few friend invitations from some of his good clients. Within a week of being proud of himself for connecting to business associates in this way, his son posts an expletive laden screed on his dad’s Facebook wall. As he read what his son wrote, he was disappointed that his son used that kind of language with his friends, and then he panicked when he realized that all his new business contacts would see the same screed. The lessons learned here would be that it might be a good idea not to mix your personal and professional contacts under the same profile. The son learned that what he writes needs to be filtered against a true understanding of everyone who will see it. Oh, by the way, everyone can see it.

So what did I learn from these stories? Only that technology can do magic things to solve problems we would not have solved without the tech. And that we have a long way to go before we are proficient with social media. You do have to give people points for trying…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com