I'm social

Social media was made for me. Tonight I went to my FastTrac program bearing new business cards from Flickr and Moo. I chose ten of my favorite photoss from my trips, dogs, and family and had them printed into minicards with my business information on the back. They were very well received. I can see that they make a great marketing tool.

Wait until everyone sees my Hugh McLeod cards, however, with the cartoons on the back. They will be equally cool, in a different way.

I found both of these marketing advances through reading blog feeds on Google Reader. Because it is all immediate, I can order whatever strikes my fancy or try out a new web service. I sign up for everything I think I can use, and then I sort it out after a trial.

This used to be an arduous process that involved folding down magazine pages with interesting new stuff on them and coming back to them later (later never comes). Now I indulge all my whims and impulses immediately.

True, the tech bloggers are often writing just for each other, but every once in a while an outsider sneaks in and, willing to spend a few minutes with Google Reader, finds herself awash in great new information she can use.

But if this information is only about technology and business, isn’t it too self-referential? Yep. That’s why I am encouraging my yoga teacher to have a blog. I don’t only need information about technology toys, I need it about yoga, about all my illnesses (physician blogs are quite a aways down the pike) and conditions, about real estate — issues of every day life.

That’s why food blogs, like Daily Eats and political blogs, like the Huffington Post are great. Or travel blogs. These are the blogs for the rest of us, the silent majority who wouldn’t know Python from Ajax, mashups from memes.

But we know what we want, don’t we? We want expertise, convenience, and innovation.

I am happy to be able to see Barack Obama announce on his website, rather than at a press conference. The media always hate press conferences anyway.

This year, two candidates have already announced using social media — John Edwards and Barack. And each of them has used it differently. John Edwards invited a bunch of A-list bloggers and vloggers to travel with him on his campaign plane and watch him closely as he flew to four key states making his announcement. Obama, on the other hand, posted a video announcement on his own web site and waited for it to “go viral.”

I’m sure these two candidates will not be the last to use all the different tools of social media. At the end of the day, I want to see how many different tools are used by a single campaign, and whether that campaign is a winner.

I’m excited about the election already — but not about the candidates. About the campaign tools and their possibilities.