Twin Princess Number Two and yours truly are in the heart of California’s wine country. She’s sleeping, I’m wired on Diet Coke and working on my presentation.
Today we flew in from JFK into Oakland, drove through San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge and up Route One to Muir Beach. We have hills in Pound Ridge but damn, Marin County has hills.
Tomorrow I’ll be giving a workshop entitled “Beyond Blogging” as part of the New Communications Forum. This is the third year I’ll be participating and every year it seems to get better with a wider range of interesting people. It’s the perfect follow-up for SXSW, a more intimate gathering of the smart people I like to hang out with.
Sometimes I wonder if we’ve lost our collective senses of perspective, if not our minds.
Here in the Bedford Central School District (motto “Please, We’ll Put Your Kid In The Gifted Program If You Promise Not To Sue Us”) the high school has been evacuated twice in the past few months owing to various “threats”.
More likely these threats, which turned out to be graffiti on the bathroom walls threatening to blow up the school, were designed to help the perps avoid a test. And of course the perps got what they wanted, plus the added bonus of attention and the gratitude and admiration of their peers.
That gratitude might be short lived owing to a new policy subjecting every child going in or out of Fox Lane Middle and High School is subject to random searchs of their bags, their lockers and their persons. Way to go, teaching children to respect authority and all. Treat them like criminals because of a joke.
When I was in High School we were treated like responsible adults until we stepped out of line. And we made jokes about blowing up the school and watched movies like Rock and Roll High School and somehow ended up alright. Because, news flash, the job of the American Teenager is to flip the bird at authority. Believe it or not, the drinking age was 18 and sometimes during my senior year, I even had a beer, legally. And I survived.
Working off of a post from Brian LItvak, who argues that everything he needs to know about the Internet, he learned in college, Nate Westheimer asks how us older folks keep up with the kids. Or if anything at all has really changed.
Interestingly, just about everything Brian points out as being self-evident in 1999 was pretty obvious to me back then as well. Of course in 1999 I was already in my mid-30s and had seen a few trends come and go, but this one seemed to be a keeper. Power slipped pretty quickly from the hands of the entertainment and information cartels and into the hands of the users. Even if only a few of us knew it back then.
In 1993, I was 29 years old and had my first email address. I was a member of Mindvox, one of NYC’s first ISPs. Back then you had to explain yourself if you had friends on the Internet. As my wife and I had to do when we met at a Vox meet up in 1995.
By the late 1990s I was using email to pitch reporters while my colleagues in the PR agencies I worked in back then were still using the US mail, fax machines and the phone. Most of my colleagues thought email too informal, or somehow not real enough for important use.
Now of course the same PR people have killed email as a useful tool in the PR trade.
I guess not much has changed people-wise. What’s changed is the technology, the rate of change and the cost of doing business. As inexpensive as it was to do business on the Web in the 1990s, it’s much cheaper now. And we have more than a decade of experiences under our collective belts to tell what works and what doesn’t.
How do I keep up with the changes? I just follow guys like Nate.
It’s almost time for the annual New Communications Forum, this year in Santa Rosa, California.
This has become the conference to attend if you are in the PR business and want to learn from the smartest and most insightful minds in the industry. Every aspect of social media and how to integrate it into your communications program will be covered by the best experts in the field.
I’ll be running a pre-conference workshop entitled “Beyond the Blog” on ways to move your social media outreach efforts beyond just having a blog. There are still spaces so if you are interested, sign up here.
