Fishing the social media seas

I loved this quote that was in the program for a great PRIA seminar I attended today on New Media and PR:

'The good news is, everyone's visible online. The bad news is we're all three inches tall.' Seth Godin, Purple Cow.

It reminds me of a tag line that fellow blogger Tea Brennan once used: 'I went outside once and the graphics were shit.'

Yes, there's no doubt that we're all spending a truck load more time hanging out and communicating online and those conversations are bouncing around out there on the interwebs for EVERYONE to read.

And trawling this vast sea of information are whole fleets of search engines like Google Alert, dipping their lines into the briny and landing fat, fishy hauls of conversation into the inboxes of people worldwide. Us fisherpeople specify what species of information we're after, but just like the 'real world', sometimes you've got to wear the odd clump of seaweed, or pull your hook off an information snag.

* Okay, it's a tenuous analogy, but it's the best I can do over a luke warm coffee and a bag of orange snakes! *

What today's seminar has reinforced is that the term virtual reality is increasingly a misnomer. Today's online world is as real as bricks and mortar and for people working in the communications game it's a case of come on board today, or risk becoming the techno dinosaurs of tomorrow.

Yeah, you're probably saying 'ah, der!', but as someone who has had their toe in the online world since 2005, there is so much I still need to learn... and it changes every day. While we have office IT - slash - techno geeks who champion the online world, in some countries they have PR people who work exclusively within 'teh interwebs' - Digital Influence Teams... go figure! In Australia we're still fighting for the right to access facebook at work.

I also found out this morning that blogging is like ohhhh sooooo yesterday, but hey, I'm an old fashioned sorta guy. Twittering is now the way to go, so expect me to drag myself out of the briny and up into the big blue sky any day soon! And beyond that I'll be Plurking and Plazing on my mobile phone.

Yes indeed, it's time to get with the program or risk legions of smarmy Gen-Y fake tan purveyors snickering at us as we get our Twitters confused with our facebooks.

A big thanks to: Richard Giles from Recommendations Ventures and scouta.com; Bronwen Clune, CEO of Norg Media, founder of perthnorg.com.au; and Steven Taylor from Creative Nature Communications who has been using the interwebs since the days when Commodore 64s were still being traded on the open market.

One last thing - I know all three of you have got your information long-lines dangling in the briny waiting for any company mentions via Google Alert, so if you do happen to sail past The Perth Files, please be sure to leave me a message.