I found myself at MIT attending an event on Twitter and Social Networking yesterday. It was like deja vu all over again.
You arrive in a new country and everything is different. Things that are the same are different too. Even the toothpaste tastes different. You think you understand the language, but you don’t understand the meaning. You hold the new country in a strange mix of awe and contempt. Or is it fear of the unknown? Fear of not being able to navigate the new world?
There was talk of handles, tweets, tweet-backs, tweet-ups. And how they all relate to blogs and SMS and texting. And how blogs relate to webinars and viral videos. And how they all relate to Facebook. There was talk of BarackObama.com as an exemplar marketing drive. And how the CEO of Zappos.com tweets about spilling soda on his pants and how it makes Zappos more “human”. There was talk of non-profit fundraisers using social media to raise money. And marketing people talked about using these technologies to create buzz!
Is this stuff for real? There was clearly a generational gap — I was not the youngest person in the room, this being MIT — but I wasn’t the oldest either. And these people really believed!
And yet, I can’t dismiss it. You can’t arrive in a new country and be dismissive of its people.
