Education and the New Economy

How realistic is it for school curricula and administrators to find the resources they need to train all their teachers to teach digital media and to use digital media as a way of teaching in all of the classrooms?

Socialnomics Meets Webonomics

+Erik Qualman knows something about digital leadership. His Socialnomics videos have been the quintessential tool many of us have been using to educate others about the merits of social media.

If you really want to be inspired, check out his Ted talk. 

My co-host +Cynthia K Seymour and I were uber-excited about having Erik on our +Virtual Newsmakers show, after several months of planning.

As it turned out, Erik would Hangout from the passenger side of his car, en route to another city. 

No problem. But as mobilenomics met webonomics -- no video. 

No problem. We reverted back to traditional technology: the phone. 

A couple of Internet outages later, a Hangout was born. As always, Erik did not disappoint. So have a listen and learn how to step up your own digital leadership.

Online Media or Social Media?

Perspective is a funny thing.

For most of us who live in cyberspace, the answer is obvious. However, too many think that social media equals online media, digital media, or Internet media. While the last three are the same in my eyes, to another, one may not be like the other. Digital media means web design to universities and a web guy. Just like some web people think graphic design applies to them, too. Tell that to people who produce books.

Social media is all of the above, but not visa versa. Online media/digital media/Internet media include social media but they also include:

• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Video sites
• Blogs
• Online media
• Online articles
• Online press releases
• Virtual launch parties
• Online gaming
• Apps
• Mobile communications (i.e. text)
• Skype
• Online conferencing
• Instant messaging
• Google ads
• Pop-up ads
• Wikipedia
• Discussion boards
• Photography sharing sites, such as Flickr, Instagram
• Websites

There are many more elements to add, including those we haven't even invented yet.

Social media is one ball on the Christmas tree and the above are the rest of the decorations that hang on it. Social media sites are also a relationship-building sites that can incorporate the rest of the balls on the tree and visa versa.

User/Password Overload

Amazon, Air Miles, utility companies, banks, blogs, retail, social media...everything requires a user name/password. 

Do you use the same one for everything? It is not the most secure thing to do but that would make things a log easier. 

I have to keep updating the list, usually adding to the 12 pages of login information for all the sites I go to. There is no way I will ever remember them. 

My email, bank, and a handful of others I have at the tip of my brain. The rest, I have to look up. If I misplace the list, I'm done. So I have the list saved in many places...just in case.

Is it just me?

I have so many logins that when a newsletter, website, or information source asks me to create a user name/password for the sake of reading their stuff, I move on to the next one. Except for a select few, chances are I do not need the information that badly. I have to really want your stuff to stretch my Word doc to page 13.

We are being user name/passworded to death. Somewhere out in cyberspace, there are user/passwords set up for those who forgot where they've logged in.  

Logging out...

We Are the Media. We Are the Publisher.

Nobody wants to wait even five hours to learn more about an incident in their neighborhood. As we wait for mainstream media to catch up with the story, or at least post it online, frustrated, we turn to our friends in Facebook and ask the question in our status update, “Does anyone know what happened?” Or more likely we go to Twitter and use the keyword finder to hunt down tweets from the people who were there at the scene as it happened. They WILL tweet about it in play-by-play. That is real time news, on the scene, as it happens. It may not be entirely accurate or verifiable, but one gets the sense of the situation long before the media assigns a reporter.

Because of cameras in our cell phones, we can take onsite video and post it to YouTube or CNN iReport in minutes.

We are the media now.

So it’s no surprise that the book publishing industry needs to evolve, but so far, it’s the last one out of the gate. It didn’t heed the precedent of the independent music industry, even after Apple invented the iPad tablet and Amazon launched the Kindle.

There will always be those who like the brick and mortar publication. I’m one of them. However, it’s way easier to carry books inside a Kindle.

I am also damned excited about the future.

As an independent publisher, a writer, and a business, the opportunities, the creative options, and the ability to connect one-on-one with my audience is where it’s at. I don’t have to rely entirely on mainstream media to push out my message via paid and unpaid advertising. I AM the media and I AM the publisher and I’m connected to my audience directly. I have created a community of not just like-minded people, but people who are interesting, who have an interest, who help me spread my message, and who engage me with interesting content, advice, and entertainment.

This is an excerpt from my next book: Surfing the Digital Wave of Publishing and Marketing. For the rest of the introduction, go here:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bz7GbM-AsvgwenBMYzRlaDRjdjg