Jim McGee is celebrating his 6th blog anniversary. Congratulations Jim! He writes:

“This space is a place where I try to get my own thinking straight and a way to immerse myself in the ongoing conversation of others trying to get their thinking straight. Some of them think in like-minded ways, others in very different ways, and all are important to the journey.

This particular set of social technologies must be lived in to be understood. I think this is one of the impediments that larger organizations face in managing adoption. They are comfortable with the illusion of carefully crafted plans. They need to become reacquainted with the less well-marked paths of real learning.”

Just yesterday, Stuart and I were chatting about a 45 minute talk/conversation he has with a Client tomorrow on how they could adopt social media in their business. He was feeling a little stuck with what tack to take - and my suggestion to him was not to prepare too much - just get the first 3 minutes ‘formatted’, and then go with the flow. I could say this with confidence because I know he has really ‘lived’ in these social technologies for the last so many years by immersing himself in them, and would therefore be able to facilitate the conversation effectively, regardless of the direction it takes. I know this too from my own experience of living in these technologies.

We went on to chatting about all the ‘buzz’ in the PR world around his recent posts (see the comments too), and how quickly they are listening, and responding. We realized then that there is a lot of hunger and desire among the PR folks to learn, and many of them, although relatively new to this field, are learning quickly, by really ‘living’ in these technologies and bringing them to their professional lives. Which is really cool. Yet the question I have is are they asking their Clients to do the same?

Some of the ‘aha’ moments in the bootcamps we have done with Clients have been when we actually set them up to say, send pictures from their swanky mobile phones straight to flickr, or when we set up a little googlereader account for them so they could track conversations around their areas of interest, or when they published their first post to a blog - even if it just said something like “I wonder what I’m doing …”.

Living in social technologies has become so much easier today, than it was 2 or 3 years ago … at one time, it meant you had to be really active - publish (typically, blog), or be really alive on social networks. It’s not the case today - living them can be both active and passive - for instance, listening to and keeping track of conversations around your brand or areas of interest is more passive than active, and can lead to more effective active engagement - it tells you whether you need to say drop in a comment, or have a space of your own to acknowledge the conversation, or whether you need a Youtube strategy or not.

One challenge I have is in responding to a question I’m often asked, is how do you manage the time to live in these technologies - and I really get stumped then. It’s a real barrier based in I try telling them how the technologies themselves are evolving everyday, to help us do this more effectively, I give them examples and tell them stories around them. I tell them that they need to devote atleast 6-7 hours a week in immersions both personal and professional, and actually get the top management to encourage them to write it into their jobs. But unless they really wet their own feet in it, it’s really no answer for them, and does not allay their fears.

Would love to hear views on whether you’re asked this question too - and how you address it.

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Tags: jimmcgee, stuarthenshall, socialtechnologies, immersions, PR, PRbloggers

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