JoeCascio.net

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by Ravit Lichtenberg (@ravit_ustrategy) to help with some perspective on a blog post she is preparing. Ravit is the founder of Ustrategy LLC, whom I met through one of her clients, Julie Rorrer (@juliedarling), a fellow Connecticut Twitterer. (Really, how else does anyone meet these days except through Twitter?)

I’m afraid I gave Ravit way more information than she was really interested in, but in the process of answering her questions, I really got into the retrospective mood and went into some detail of how I got into this online maelstrom called Social Media. After sending it off to Ravit, I got to thinking it might make a good blog post. I mentioned to this Ravit in a subsequent exchange today and she encouraged me to make it public. So, here, with almost no editing excecpt for formatting, is “My Social Media History.”

How did you start with Social Media?  Why did it attract you?

Ravit,

I hope this isn’t way more information than you wanted, but once I got started, I found myself enjoying the romp through history. I’ll send the answers to your original questions tomorrow, ok?

As best I remember, I got introduced to social media through videoblogging. Specifically, I started watching Rocketboom back in 2005, when Amanda Congdon was the host. I began to comment on the rocketboom site and on Amanda’s personal blog. I also got interested in a little video blog called DriveTime, which featured a guy named Ravi Jain and his wife Sonia from Boston who did a talk show in their car during their daily commutes. What really struck me about Ravi and Sonia’s show was how intimate the videoblog medium was. After just a few episodes, I felt like I knew them personally. Video is very unique that way. It forms a personal bond the way writing or audio never can. And I suppose that was the “social” aspect that really drew me in. The possibility of getting to know smart, creative people through their web presence really intrigued me.

In July of 2006, Amanda Congdon had her infamous firing with Rocketboom’s founder Andrew Baron. After leaving Rocketboom, she started her own personal videoblog from Connecticut, which I started to comment on fairly regularly. Finally, she landed a new gig and kicked it off with a launch party in New York City in Sept 2006. The party was hastily arranged at the new offices of the pioneer video hosting service blip.tv. I decided to go with the hope of meeting a real “web-celebrity”. I will never forget meeting Amanda. I introduced myself and she said, “Oh! You’ve been commenting on my vlog!” and gave me a big hug. I have to say, if anything cemeted social media for me, it was that experience. Here was someone known by millions, but still accessible and a “real person”.

Now, you can’t be into videoblogging and not know about Steve Garfield. Steve is the Father of Videoblogging and figured out, on his own, how to post video to a blog back in January of 2004. Steve runs a monthly meeting called Boston Media Makers that attracts people in video, audio, radio, TV, newspapers, art, acting, film, blogging and just about any other topic under the heading of “media”. I started going to those meetings back in late 2005 and met Steve (with whom I’ve become friends) and Ravi Jain.

In October 2006, I also started my own videoblog, Joe’s Video, Etc. I used a digital still camera (and still do) that takes video and did some simple editing with Windows Movie Maker. I’d started doing some political text blogging earlier than that, but my largest contribution in blogging came with video.

Later that year, and into the first part of 2007 and SXSW, I got onto Twitter and have been totally hooked ever since.

You are, as you point out, not the usual demographic for all things social media and microblogging (I’m probably on the edge myself). You’re also not in the (stereo)typical geography—i.e., Silicon Valley, NY, Austin, Portland.  You must have a truly unique perspective on things and how Social Media is being used around you

I am near Boston, though, which has a very prolific and active social media community, many of whom are involved in marketing and PR. Over the past year or two, I’ve made many new friends, including Chris Brogan (@ChrisBrogan), Laura (@Pistachio) Fitton and ex-Bostonian Julia Roy (@juliaroy).

How do YOU define social media?

Social media is people conversing and sharing using text, audio, video and (gasp!) actual in-person meetups. Social media also has an explicit notion of networking. Building a social network of “friends” or “followers” is intrinsic to the notion of social media.

What do you use it for?

Meeting people in a purely social sense. Social media has allowed me to find a large group of people that I like and that like me. And the great thing is that liking each other is the primary thing that binds us together. Not work, or profession or common interests, although there are a lot of those. Yeah, I would say that’s the primary thing.. people I like who like me, too.

Secondarily, it has turned into my method of getting work. Networking has always been a key to success in business, but social media has kicked it into orbit. I’ve found the key is to NOT try to exploit it overtly for business. That’s where a lot of social media and esp. Twitter newbies fall down. They try to use it as another channel to push their message out. The thing you have to understand about social media is that it’s like a string. You can’t push on a string, you can only pull.

How do you see it evolving?

I like to say that we are in the Compuserve era of social networking, in which there are a lot of services, each providing essentially the same thing that do not interoperate, that are vying to try to capture users from each other. I hope that the future lies in open, standard protocol based social networking instead of closed, walled gardens. The Open Stack initiative is working in this direction, although so far it isn’t clear how it would find a path to success.