About Social Media Today
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Facebook in the Experience Economy & Cephalopods Pelagic Raptors of the Deep
Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy 1999, was a harbinger of the end of the services economy, which according to these authors peaked some years ago. As observers of the rapidness of commoditization in nearly all markets and business they were vaticinators of the experience economy we are now realizing in social media. The social media tsunami is fueling the experience economy as people, groups, customers, partners, companies, and governments and many other organizations are interacting and forming interrelationships via the social media peer groups in new and unforeseen Web 2.0 ways.
The societal and anthropological aspects of social media peer groups are just now beginning to be understood and the ramifications of these interrelationships are just being felt. These new platforms are enabling communications that leads to interrelationships between people, and groups that has never been seen before. They now enable us to create, build, maintain and reestablish previous relationships from other points and times in our lives, and are enabling new relationships with our government, NGOs, and the companies we consume products and services from.
Enter the social media landscape: craigslist, facebook, youtube, myspace, twitter, flickr, photobucket, linkedin, digg, ning, yelp, tagged, squidoo, scribd, stumbleupon, hi5, bebo, reddit, myyearbook, technorati, caboodle, Friendster, flixster, xanga, epinions, plaxo, mybloglog, yuku, metafilter, blackplanet, care2, getsatisfaction, friendfeed, clipmarks, cafemon, newwvine, omgili, gigya, ballhipe, current, revver, ping, tribe, magnify, digo, dzone, xing, faves, tweetdeck, ecademy, twine.
(The Fifty Top Social Media Sites from Website Magazine’s Feb 2010 issue, I added craiglist)
The Good, the Bad, the I don’t care and now the Ugly
In the world of Sociobiology our father E. O. Wilson taught us about societies and behavior previously unknown to man, the hierarchy of termites, ants and other insects that have one common trait, altruism. Each member of the community communicates, interacts, behaves and performs a function that is predetermined by the community hierarchy and all are in the best interest of the community, harvesting, defending territory, nurturing eggs and gardens within. Humans don’t act like this and when presented with a new community like social media they will act in many ways that are often predictable and sometimes nefarious. What we don’t know about Facebook and many of the other sites is how humans are really acting and what the good, the bad, the I don’t care and the ugly experiences are.
The Good
Two years ago I found my long lost cousin in Australia on Facebook, wow we Skype nearly every week now. This is a good interrelationship. I have found enormous professional value in being a member of LinkedIn and my network has expanded to several hundred colleagues and professional connections. My Facebook community of friends and colleagues is mixed with both, but I would prefer that it be only my friends and that is where the line blurs. I know that HR people can profile me now on Facebook and even decide whether I am culturally fit for a potential job, this is good and bad. I could be culturally unfit just because I am too old or because of their perception of my sexual preference. This is good and bad. Facebook in particular has now become a great tool for social media marketing for small and large businesses alike in addition to non profits who want to get closer to their customers.
The Bad
The beginning of the bad is when relatives that did nothing for you suddenly appear and want to be your friend. They are the relatives that you wanted to forget, but they are still there back at you as if nothing really happened. It’s like that Rodney Dangerfield joke, “would you be friends with your relatives if you weren’t related to them?” It can get really worse if you are stalked by a former girl friend or boy friend and Facebook has many stalkers, I even had one person do what they thought was a cute video of me during the last holiday season. There is a tremendous amount of information out there on all us and it is growing every day, so be careful when you share information about traveling and other personal issues. Remember that according to statistics a high percentage of identity theft comes from your own relatives that are jealous of you. There are also many stalkers that use Facebook’s IM to get people’s attention to start a conversation; they may come from your friends networks. For example some men will IM every women they know to be single a happy mother’s day wish even if they don’t know if they are mothers or not. This just happened to one of my friends.
I don’t care!
Then a series of old friends from high school came back into the picture, and I connected with them, but have found their world to be one that I don’t live in anymore. They talk about the little insular and provincial New England town that I was raised in and invite me to groups and events important to that town. These events aren’t important to me, I don’t live there and to be quite honest I really don’t care about them. Nor do I want to enter into relationships with people that I really have nothing to share with anymore. I am not trying to be snotty or uppity but I really don’t care about their home town lives. I don’t live there.
The Ugly
The ugly stories keep pouring in and with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and within other social media peer groups, I bet there are hundreds if not thousands of stories like the following happening all the time. Last weekend I had lunch with a friend that hates Facebook. He claims it has wrecked his brother’s and his best friend’s marriages. In the case of his brother, his wife left a marriage of 23 years and a 14 year old daughter to be with another woman. Unfortunately, she forgot to de-friend my friend and is flaunting her new life on Facebook for all to see while abandoning her husband and daughter.
In the case of his best friend his wife also left because she found her high school sweetheart on Facebook and recently just up and left another 20 year marriage with two children to be with him. I heard the same story from my hairdresser on Monday of last week about how her sister just up and left her family. It would be easy to dismiss these situations based on unhappy marriages and the times of uncertainty that we live in today because of our broken government and financial system, but I don’t think so. Facebook and the other SMPGs are enabling communications that would have never happened before. What do you think? How many stories like this have you heard?
The Personality of Cuttlefish
Cuttlefish (Sepia sp.) are marine invertebrates and are actually are mollusks in a class called Cephalopoda which is highly adapted for swimming. They are the fastest swimmers of all marine invertebrates and employ a highly evolved jet propulsion system using water. Some species can actually propel themselves out of the water and are known as flying squids. There are only around 650 species in the class which includes squid, octopods, and nautili, the largest are the giant squid. Giant squids inhabit depths along the continental shelf to depths of 600 meters and the most famous of them the Humboldt squid range in large schools up and down the Pacific coast.
All cephalopods are kings of camouflage and can change their color instantly and in some cases their skin texture to match their immediate surroundings to hide from predators or lie in wait for prey. Cuttlefish are slower swimmers than streamlined squid and leverage their small shell for bouncy along with fluid and the gas nitrogen. Light is a major factor for Cuttlefish and it regulates its bouncy the more light the less buoyant. They spend the day burrowed into the bottom and at night they become active gaining more buoyancy to swim up into the water column to hunt. Cuttlefish and squids are what is called highly adapted for raptorial feeding and carnivorous diet, they have ten arms arranged in two arrays of five around the head. Eight are short and heavy while the other two are twice as long and are called tentacles used for seizing prey.
Some Cuttlefish live at depths of more than 1200 meters and others live in shallow tide pools in our warmer oceans. These animals have the highest degree of nervous system development of all marine invertebrates which enable their mobility and carnivorous nature. They are diecious (meaning there are males and females) and they engage in copulation with normally the male seizing the female head on. Cuttlefish can display complex color changes which are thought to be directly related to behavior and most species change color when alarmed. I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and good luck selling and marketing in the millennium. And how will your behavior change the next time you log onto Facebook, will you turn a different color?
