… you can’t make it drink.

Wrong.

You can, by putting salt in it’s oats!

The question is should I let the horse work it out for itself that it’s thirsty?

I think I should.

This has a lot do with Social Media, for some people they’re thirsty and others are not, and as Seth said yesterday in his blog “Being certain about how someone else feels or what motivates them is foolish.” and he’s right.

Evangelism. Works both ways – but as much as we need a dialogue and not a monologue “sh*tting” on people because they post something that you don’t agree with is terrible.

Penny’s (ecademy) blog yesterday was wonderful and exactly how she felt, and IMHO was exactly right. However, one line out of it was poignant “When I became Humane”.

To me being humane is being human, and humans like to talk and share (sadly they seem to enjoy killing as well, but I’m not interested in that.) Talking and sharing is social media.

Of old we did it via cave painting, chalk, books, radio, television,pens, sign language, signs even! Nowadays some of us have moved that need to interact onto the web, and it’s my view that the web world will dominate – this is obvious by the nature of the exponential rise in web use.

Therefore, I would put it to you that the reason that some people are frightened, don’t see the value or just want to dig their heels in when it comes to the web is not down to the lack of ability to converse, but down to: Fear of computing? Fear of time wasting? Fear of lack of control? Fear of change? For the most part there seems to be something stopping the use and to date no one has told me what that is.

Fear of computing: Firstly computers are stupid, they have bad design, unwieldy, and in the main too overpowered for what most users want or need. In the on-line social media world we work in the cloud not off a hard drive – so don’t be afraid of computers, if you can use a phone you can use social media.

Fear of time wasting: This is a excerpt from my blog the other day “R.I.P R.O.I in social media” – “I was once talking to a bunch of salesmen at an event, and I asked them “how many times do you speak to someone before you get the sale?” – “seven times” was the average answer. “So what were the other six visits for?” I asked, “so they could get to know you” was the reply.

So in essence the first six visits were there to form a social bond, which is no different to using the “on-line” methods. Interesting. Moreover, I would argue that the on-line method is cheaper both in time and finance – AND can be measured more easily.”

It would seem that time wasting already exists and quite a few humans are guilty of it – if we did a “time and motion” on all of us I’m sure it would throw up some surprise – but hey we’re human.

More people are communicating via on-line methods than are communicating via e-mail and yet we all use e-mail and no one complains. And we can measure this, we know this as fact – but we can only measure it because so many people are doing it already – so we should be able to take a crumb of comfort from that.

Fear of lack of control: You never had any in the first place, and even if you believe you did you don’t now, but then why would you want to control people – you should need to control yourself.

I believe that by first controlling yourself means that the need to control the outside world ceases. If someone “attacks” you for a bad product or service then it only raises one question: Did you do anything wrong? And the answer to that is either yes or no.

If the answer is yes then you have only yourself to blame BUT you can learn from it – and thats not a bad thing.

If the answer is no then you have a perfect opportunity to “defend” yourself thus making me, the reader, understand your side. This, in turn, helps me make better decisions and for that I could be thankful to you.

But to try and control the situation, so it gets covered up will not work. It may have worked in the past but no longer.

The web is transparent.

Fear of change: Alas no can get out of this one. We are in a world that is full of change and most of it is very needed. Forget social media for a second, The Web is as big a change now as much as the Industrial Revolution was back then. We can see it but we can only measure it with hindsight, but we have no choice but to embrace it.

So with this blog I have tried to point out where the water is from my opinion and I’ve not put salt in the oats. However, I’m thirsty. Is someone going to show me where to drink?

We’re all human and we all have “like minds” we’re not that different, lets start a conversation – no salt.

… and another thing I would add, to put salt in a horses oats would indicate a pre-meditated input via measuring. Therefore, bringing into question the morality of doing such – hhmm.

Original post can be found on socialmediagraffiti.com

Regards
N

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