Calling for Social Revolutionaries

At Blog On last weekend our keynote speech was the Principles of Social Media by Peter Lunn from Cracking Media and it gave the room plenty of food for thought on how they run there social media. I enjoyed the keynote so much that I asked Peter to condense it down into a blog post for me.

Checking out any list of history’s famous revolutionaries you are not likely to see Johannes Gutenberg and Tim Berners-Lee among them. Yet those two men were responsible for revolutions that changed our world and impacted upon every single on one of us.

The invention of the Printing Press and the Internet brought about revolutions never seen before, revolutions where no guns were fired and no governments were overthrown. These were revolutions of communication.

Communication Revolution #1

Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionised the production of books, meaning they no longer needed to be painstakingly copied by hand, but could be mass produced and multiply the sharing of the information and knowledge they contained. Until then communication was largely limited to one person telling another or at most one to the relative few who could assemble in a confined area to hear someone speak. The printing press revolutionised reach and made communication one-to-many.

Communication Revolution #2

From the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century through to near the end of the 20th century, communication did change through the inventions of radio, television and cinema, but its mode didn’t. Communication was still one-to-many.

The invention of the Internet broke open the reach of communication from being the domain of publishers and broadcasters and those who could afford them to making it possible for anyone to become their own publisher or broadcaster. It revolutionised the reach of communication from one-to-many into many-to-many.

Scarcity and abundance

Just 20 years ago, relative to today, there was a scarcity of information, but an abundance of attention. As information consumers we were limited to reading, listening or watching whatever was shared with us through the media channels of the day.

But today, these poles have been reversed. Now, in the many-to-many Internet-fuelled world we live in, there is an abundance of information available to us in the moment of a mouse-click. Information is all around us. It’s there for us as consumers, but we are also consumed by it. Our attention has switched from abundance to scarcity. We tune out the noise knowing we can tune in to whatever we want, whenever we want.

The evolution of social media

As communication has exploded since the advent of the Internet, so we have also seen the evolution of many channels of communication. Amongst those, social media has become part of many people’s daily experience. But if we think about it, there’s nothing new about being social. We are social animals who are wired to communicate with one another. Being social and the way we socialise as humankind has therefore been more of an evolution than revolution. But therein lies an issue.

When Communication Revolutions collide

The transition from a long-standing world of one-to-many communication to today’s world of many-to-many has caused a collision in the way we communicate. Our culture and communication is used to the one-to-many world in which we have lived for centuries and so when presented with the opportunity to self-publish or broadcast we are conditioned to the old one-to-many communication ways.

Each of us now has a voice, a message to be heard, a story to be told, and our social wiring is plugged into the opportunity. But in our new Inter(net)-connected world, the networks between us have become overloaded. There’s so much noise that when we speak, no-one is listening. 

The need to become social again

To put it bluntly, we need to shut up! The number one tip I can give to make our online world work better is that we need to stop posting and be quiet for a moment.

Imagine a party at which everyone is talking about themselves, at each other, without pausing to listen. It wouldn’t be fun would it? But that’s often the case with the “parties” we attend online, especially in social media. For example, you only have to browse down a Twitter stream to see post after post after post of people talking, but no-one is listening to them, Whilst conversation is not easy in 140 character chunks, that doesn’t stop us using social media tools to make conversation work. We need to become social again and you can get help with an instagram growth service.

Offline ways makes online work better

There’s no doubt that the Internet has changed our world, but whilst this latest communication revolution has changed the ways in which we can communicate, that doesn’t mean we should abandon what it means to be social. If anything it is an opportunity to reinforce it and make our world the better for it.

The truth is that the ways we learn and are taught to communicate successfully in the offline world, work perfectly in the online world. In fact, if we take the principles of offline communication and use them online, then those offline ways make online work so much better.

When we go to a party or any gathering of people socially or for business, we know and understand the rules of engagement. We know what works and we know what annoys us and what can annoy others, and we know by doing the things that work makes conversation and communication work better. So, why not do that online?

Become a social revolutionary

We need to stop posting and start listening. We need to keep listening and start engaging. And when we’ve learned to listen and engage and be social, then when we do post and share what we have to say it will work so much better. That’s guaranteed!