Monday, October 25, 2010

Social Ties And Social Media

Malcolm Gladwell speaks at PopTech! 2008 confe...Image via Wikipedia
Chris Dixon: You Need To Use Social Services To Understand Them: I’ve made more strong ties through Twitter (and blogging) than I have through any communications medium I’ve ever used before...... I barely tweeted or blogged for a long time .... the insistence of Caterina, who had the foresight to insist that everyone at Hunch blog, tweet, contribute to open source projects, etc. ...... I now get some of my best ideas from responses to tweets and blog posts, and have developed dozens of strong relationships through the experience.
This Gladwell article in The New Yorker has been making the rounds. Biz Stone talked against it in an article in The Atlantic. He figured between The New Yorker and The Atlantic one is the Republican Party and the other is the Democratic Party. Chris Hughes countered the Gladwell article almost immediately at his tumblog.

What makes Chris Dixon's rebuttal stand out is his sharing his own personal story. Somewhere else Chris has said that it is not possible for you to be able to find the early stage startups that are doing the next big things if you are not heavily into social media. By the time those startups catch the attention of big media, they are already too big. But all of them start out by having a Twitter account, a blog, perhaps a Facebook page. Meaning they are all pretty much out in the open, but there are so many of them. How do you know which to pay attention to?

My first reaction to the Gladwell article - and I read it before I came across any of the rebuttals - was that obviously this guy is not a Twitter user or a blogger. But I was more interested in reading all the details on MLK's life that that article shared.

Social media is for real, and it is here to stay. When your audience is only 10 strong, or 100 strong, or even 1,000 strong, social media is your only media. Or when you audience is 100 million, and every member of that audience is clamoring to be heard, social media is your only media.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, at South by ...Image via Wikipedia
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