(This was posted June 5, 2009 on my blog "Positively Media" at PsychologyToday.com) Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and so ridiculous." Think of the tech-saavy younger generation as another country with a different language. Their lives are inseparable from technology and they are connected to each other and to information flows in ways many of us will never understand. We can learn to speak their language or we can look ridiculous and irrelevant. No where is learning to speak the language of technology more important than when you're trying to educate young people. At a time when one in five American students drops out of high school, we parents and educators need to work on our language skills. This is why I love to see educational institutions embrace media technologies. At Azusa Pacific University (APU), my friend David Peck is … [Read more...]
Twitter and Goliath
This was posted April 13, 2009 on my blog "Positively Media" at Psychology Today. First it was "Dell Hell" and now it is "#AmazonFail." For all the debates over the purpose, point, and value of social media, it is events like these that illustrate how important they have become and how powerful they can be. "Dell Hell" is one of the iconic stories in the history of social media sending an emphatic message that consumers have a new power. In June 2005, blogger Jeff Jarvis shared his less than satisfactory experience with Dell's customer service on his blog "Buzz Machine" with the title "Dell Hell." (This story is documented in a number of places, including the books Groundswell and Citizen Marketers, both quite interesting.) The reach of Jarvis' blog got his story out there, but the fact that his experience resonated with so many other Dell customers coupled with the system properties of the Internet sent the story viral, ending up not only all over the web but in the New York … [Read more...]
