An away day from the office isn’t what it used to be.
So, for instance, not so long ago a day’s training at the Ecademy learning about Social Media for Business with self-described Silicon Valley tech geek, blogger and early adopter Louis Gray would have been just that. A day away from the office and all the associated desk-bound projects left there under the watchful eye of an out-of-office message, and maybe a quick and conscientious check-up call over lunch.
Not so now. In a room of perhaps 80 people the vast majority were skilled smartphone ninjas, even the ones still finding themselves baffled over the difference between feedburner and friendfeed (friendburner?), and I was far from the only one checking a few incoming work emails, facebook statuses and bookmarking names of other sources to go check out. On the back row others were enthusiastically tweeting quotes and questions live to Louis and wider the world – Gone are the days when they ask you to switch off your phone before booting up the powerpoint. I’m still trying to decide between the echofon and tweetdeck apps at the moment, having previously preferred easier former option but now being swayed back to the more all-in tweetdeck on recommendation from Louis, one of its first adopters and early evangelists, and having now seen the scale of new tweets I can expect from following him I suspect I’ll be glad of an app that can handle some heavy social media lifting.
All of this certainly helped highlight one of Louis’ central points about how we handle information and overload in the modern working day. That this has fundamentally shifted seemed readily apparent to everyone in the room, and Louis summarised this neatly as a conceptual shift from jobs where people worked full time to jobs that now happened in real time. If the place where you work won’t let you engage with these tools, says Louis, you need to find a new company.
A few days later, and I’m still processing some of the deeper implications of this pattern shift in my working topography and doing a little social media stock-taking. I wouldn’t even pretend to be as fully immersed as Louis so clearly is, but it seems the first signs of a residency in cyberspace are there for all to see. Quickly totaling my own main social media sites and information channels, it seems I’m regularly plugged in to three distinct email accounts and seven social media ecosystems (with multiple accounts in more than one), while connection with this online life shuttles back and forward across a couple of different laptops and a smartphone with its own discreet contact list of phone numbers and text messages. This doesn’t include all of those sites like Amazon where I simply maintain an account rather than participate or post content, or those blogs and bulletin boards (remember those?) I might visit and comment on as part of my broader online browsing and grazing.
Louis likened the buzz we see surrounding services like Twitter today to ten or so years ago when email as a marketing channel for business was really starting to ramp up. To summarize quickly, you likely wouldn’t attend a day’s presentation on Email for Business today, it’s just part of the landscape, and likewise ten years from now Real Time will simply be Time once again.
In the meantime, and again courtesy of Louis, here’s a link to the Online Marketing Blog with some handy hints for those who’ve optimized their social media presence and are now seeking to optimize the way the amount of time they stay immersed.
