The Worldwide Conversation and the Role of Social Media

Last evening I attended a very interesting MassTLC Social Media Cluster event featuring David Weinberger, the co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto and the author of soon-to-be published Everything is Miscellaneous.

After David’s insightful presentation on how we are moving rapidly to an All-to-All disbursement of news digitally, creating “The Daily Me” rather than an editorially controlled publication or broadcast, there was a lively discussion among the attendees with David. Capabilities such as tagging have blurred the distinctions between metadata and data and how information is organized for the individual. Publicly negotiated knowledge is changing the role of experts – and if an expert chooses not to engage in the conversation – new experts and content will arise. Newly defined roles for experts, such as news aggregators, will continue to grow. And of course the role of our traditional media will have to change.

Issues such as how do marketers respond to these fast moving opportunities and privacy concerns were expressed as well as how regulators and the publishing industry will try to continue to control the disbursement of information to all of us.

Paul Gillin, who is the chairman of the Social Media Cluster and author of the newly published The New Influencers, was in attendance contributing to the discussion.

The session was thought provoking, as intended, and will continue to drive discussion among all of us on leveraging the new social media.