The Social Media Revolution

Imagine for a moment that it’s 1436. News has just arrived that a man named Gutenberg has created a machine that stamps out bibles. Cheap. Picture the conversation around you:

“We can afford to own our own bibles!”
“That’s nice… why would I want that, I don’t read!”
“When I want to read the bible, I go to church and they read it to me!”
“The whole thing is wrong. Such an important book should be written by hand.”
“So now what, we’re all going to pretend to be experts on the Good Book?”
“People are going to stop going to church if they can read at home.”
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for this.”
“Yeah, but it’d still be pretty cool to own one.”

It’s probably not immediately clear that Gutenberg’s “moveable type” press has just democratized communication. People likely aren’t thinking about how easy access to information will accelerate the Renaissance and bring about a Golden Age of art, science, and politics. They can’t see the future. They can’t see the benefits that learning to read holds for them.

Fast forward to the 21st century: This time, the technology is called social media. But the conversation surrounding it is straight out of 1436:

“We can build our own personal networks across time and space!”
“That’s nice… why would I want that, I don’t need to attract ‘friends’ in New Zealand.”
“When I want to meet someone, I make a phone call and introduce myself!”
“The whole thing is wrong. Relationships should be built face-to-face.”
“So now what, we’re all going to pretend to be experts on creating personal brands?”
“People are going to stop learning to build relationships if they can always escape to an online network.”
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for this.”
“Yeah, but it’d still be pretty cool to own one.”

Fortunately, there’s one key difference: This time, we have the benefit of hindsight. We know what happened the last time around, 600 years ago. So we don’t have to know the specific benefits that social literacy will bring us to know that social literacy will bring us big benefits!

Develop Your Social Literacy

By 1500, printing press shops dotted Europe from one end to the other and the Renaissance was in full bloom. What happened between 1436 and 1500 to make that possible? Two things: first, people learned to read. Second, authors and publishers developed what I call “process literacy:” They figured out a common way of referencing and indexing each others’ works, so readers could track ideas back to the original source.

Today, we’re in about 1450. Social literacy is inconsistent across populations and technologies, and we still lack a consistent architecture for sharing and referencing information across social platforms. Which is exciting news, because that means that the real wins are still ahead of us: da Vinci, Hobbes, Voltaire… these titans made their incredible contributions to society a century or two after Gutenberg’s press was invented. Given how much faster things move today than they did centuries ago, we won’t have to wait a hundred years to see the impact of the social revolution. We’re already seeing it. But we’re in this very entrepreneurial time when we’re still creating a new world of possibilities… we’re the ones building the future—how cool is that?! And because of the compressed cycle time we’re dealing with, actively engaging in the process today may give you a huge head start in capturing the value that will be created tomorrow.

Get Profersonal™

In 1436, printing books meant printing bibles because that was the only book around that mattered. Before long, presses were adapted to create books about science, literature, and politics, too. And more bibles. Lots of bibles. Lots of different versions of bibles. So many versions, in fact, that a guy named King James got fed up and, 172 years after the first printed bible, published a single, definitive version to clear things up.

That’s what happens when you democratize things: things get messy before they get better. Social media is still in its messy phase. Remember when Facebook added the “It’s complicated” option to describe what kind of relationship you’re in? Boy, were they right. When it comes to work, our relationships are increasingly “profersonal™,” with social media causing the lines between professional and personal to blur and erode.

Things will get more organized… just not yet. We’re not ready for that yet. A lot of people struggle with the messiness of social media, probably because they had become accustomed to the order of their old lives. They compare today to the past and see the problems. But if they were to compare today to the future, they’d see the opportunities. They’d see the historical context and realize that what we’re doing is basically like learning to read all over again. Only this time, instead of democratizing information, we’re democratizing our relationships.

The Big So What

We don’t need institutions to tell us our place in the universe anymore: we sit at the center of our own personal network.

Of course, with that freedom comes a lot of gray. Institutions gave us order: you were married or you weren’t. You worked at a company or you didn’t. You were Protestant or you weren’t. Now, it’s a mess. I can adopt rituals from pretty much any religion I like (yoga, anyone?) because I can network with people from that religion and learn about it. I can be a contractor at 4 different organizations. And yet, even without clear definitions around my relationships, my network stays perfectly intact because it’s now based around who I actually talk to.

It’s going to take some time to figure out how to clean things up again, but eventually, it will work itself out.

It always does.

What to Do Next

It’s 1450. What do you do to make sure that you can share the benefits of the coming Renaissance? (Step 1: live longer…)

(1) Get literate. Set up your LinkedIn profile. Follow me on Twitter (@seiden) and start getting over its learning curve.

(2) Find small ways to use the technology at work and home. For example, what if you looked people up on LinkedIn before meeting with them? What if you used Slideshare.net to post decks that your customers want? What if you used Facebook to stay in touch with your family across the country? What if you set up a blog about how you built a treehouse/invented a new cookie recipe/saved a wild tiger where you shared stories that would be helpful to others doing the same?

What’s happening today is a big deal. Fortunately, we have a model to follow to help us ensure that we’re successful. Just make sure you’re eyes are forward, on the coming Renaissance.

Jason Seiden is CEO of Ajax Workforce Marketing. Ajax amplifies brands by aligning employees' online messaging.