Get past the excitement of the shiny and new

Posted Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 5:17pm in PR General, Technology  | 

I like shiny new tech toys. I do. Whenever a new web app is released I tend to sign up for it in eagerness and wonder of how this new tool will help me in my life. I’m a bit like Neville in some respects. I can’t help it. It’s the excitement of the shiny and the new. Added in the fact that the older I get the geekier I become and you’ve got a recipe for CPU usage overload.

Of course, before I can make a decision, all web apps must first go through the Davies Test. What’s that I hear you ask with excitement and curiosity? Well it involves a couple of things: How cool it is, how often will I use it and, last but not least, will it help me in my day to day job. I tend to try something for no longer than a week and if it hasn’t met two out of the three stringent sub-tests then it’s gone.

But you see, not everyone is like me. Not everyone gets excited when eBay adds RSS feeds to specific searches. Or when the Sun newspaper revamps its website to include more interaction. Or when e-consultancy reports on the rapid increase of CGM content in the UK. Quite frankly, some people (including PR people and their clients) simply don’t care.

To put it another way. Not all are affected by the geek gene (I don’t believe I am but I could be in a state of denial, I don’t know) so the shiny and new isn’t going to appeal those that aren’t I’m afraid. Does it make your colleague any less of a PR practitioner if they aren’t? No. Does it make a client less informed than you? Of course not. They just don’t get excited over technology ’tis all.

Not all are affected by the geek gene so the shiny and new isn’t going to appeal those that aren’t.

My point is this: when explaining the new developments in social media and the new technologies that go with it, you’ve got to do it in a way that gets them on their level. Show your client their Wikipedia page, set up RSS feeds of interest that relate to your colleague’s expertise, demonstrate who’s linking to your client’s website via Technorati. And better still, dig out what they’re saying.

You can talk about RSS until the cows come home, bore them to tears with how great Flickr is and, quite frankly, they don’t care how many videos are hosted on YouTube. However, show them something that gets them on a personal level and a communication/reputation level and watch the glaze suddenly disappear.

The trick is to stay focused on the communication aspects of the technology and not the technology itself.

I tend to get excited about the shiny and new at times and god knows I’ve wasted plenty of timing experimenting with them. But the trick is to stay focused on the communication aspects of the technology and not the technology itself.

That said, CoComment is ace. I’ve been testing it out for the last couple of weeks (thanks David) and have to say it’s a necessary tool in the blogger’s armoury. I used to try to tag each blog I’d left comments using del.icio.us from an idea I got from Kami but kept forgetting. There’s a handy Firefox extension which automatically tracks every comment you leave (provided you want it to) and alerts you whenever additional comments have been made. How did I live without it?

There’s still a couple of bugs in the extension it seems. For example, at times it doesn’t alert you when others have left comments after yours and at other times it alerts you when no additional comments have been made. Weird. Still good though.

technorati tags: shiny+and+new, technology, communication, stephen+davies, cocomment

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