New Media

The year-end Vancouver Meetup of Meetups is happening on Tuesday, December 15 at 6 pm at Ceilis Irish Pub. I will be there (representing the Vancouver Blogger Meetup Group). Other cool people will be there. So the only pertinent question for my Vancouver-based readers and other geeks reading my RSS feed is, are you going to be there?

Let me give you 10 reasons why you ought to show up:

1. In case you didn’t notice from the establishment’s name, the meetup venue is the kind of place where you can drink beer. I like beer. Odds are, so do you. And if you don’t, they’ve got some other stuff behind the bar.
2. You might just get a chance to meet your blog’s most persistent troll face-to-face and slap them.
3. You’ll get business cards from people who still use hotmail addresses. Then you can write to them and say, “Hey, I was totally going to hire you to do $10,000 worth of stuff for me, but then I saw you were using this crappy hotmail address. No thanks.”
4. The chicks from The Real Estate Technology Meetup Group are all smokin’ hot.
5. More beer!
6. Shane Birley and Shane Gibson are going to arm-wrestle. The winner faces off against Raul in a cage match.
7. Someone is bound to teach you how to pronounce Ceilis properly. That’s always good to know.
8. This is your big chance to buy me drinks until I’m so wasted that I give away all of my blog usernames and login passwords.
9. Door prizes, which may or may not include Chris LeMay’s moustache.
10. Admission is by donation of $10 to the Lower Mainland Christmas Bureau, or an unwrapped new toy. It’s for a good cause. Do something nice, for a change.

Hope to see you there, folks. Happy holidays.

I’m honored that this blog has been nominated in the category of Best Canadian Political Blog for 2009.

If you like what you read here, please rank this website in the top spot. Note that due to the recent name change for this blog, you’ll be voting for “Currents by Jonathon Narvey”.

Please vote at the DemoChoice Web Poll.

Voting only takes a moment. With your help, New Media will become known as the leading political blog in the land. Thank you for your support.

Bloggers of Vancouver, it’s time to celebrate. Shane Birley, the guy who literally wrote the book on blogging, and yours truly (I never wrote a book, but I do author blogs, so I guess that’s enough) have been called up by Raul to help restore order to this frenzied new media scene that’s developed in our fair city.

Contents of my inbox from last night, courtesy of Raul:

Dear members of the Vancouver Blogger Meetup,

A few months ago, I realized that while running the Vancouver Blogger Meetup is my passion and I love doing it, I wasn’t being effective by trying to juggle 768 things. Two members of the VBM emailed me privately and asked me if I needed any help running the VBM. I responded that I was doing ok and that I would call upon them when I did need help.

As it turns out, I do now. And thus I have asked Shane Birley and Jonathon Narvey to be true to their promise and step up to the plate to be the Assistant Organizers. I still remain the Organizer of the Vancouver Blogger Meetup, but now there are two wonderful friends who are very much committed to the VBM who will help me organize the monthly meetup.

I will be tasking Jonathon and Shane with keeping up with the frequency of the VBM (once a month seems to be working well), and I will be doing coordinating with them to keep them organic, free-flowing and non-corporate.

All responsibility in regards to the meetup, of course (including responding to complaints) is mine, so please do complain/compliment/send me an email should you have any concerns or questions.

I want to acknowledge the continued support of Jan Karlsbjerg who always keeps detailed minutes of our Meetups on his blog (http://www.jankarlsbjerg.com) – thanks Jan!

Finally, thanks to all of you for being part of this group, and for your kind words whenever I’ve needed support. You are all wonderful.

Any questions, comments, worries, doubts, complaints or otherwise written communication, fire them up my way.

Yours sincerely,

Raul

All Vancouver-based bloggers must now forward their blog username and password, as well as all pertinent information such as candid sexy photos are invited to send along suggestions of themes and venues for future blogger meetups to Shane and I so that we can better serve your needs. You know how to reach us. Best regards.

Longtime readers will notice a not-so subtle re-branding of this blog. The generic “Currents” is finished. New Media is where it’s at.

I’ve been a part of the “new media” scene since it became relatively easy for terminal late adopters like myself to start publishing and promoting stuff online. We’re all still trying to figure out precisely what new media means and how “old media” is going to survive in the Information Age. And I’ve written before that I really do think both new and old media are actually just flip sides of the same coin.

In future, knowledge transfer will take place in a symbiotic relationship between syndication on Web 2.0 platforms and essential raw investigative data from the traditional media sources. So, new media isn’t precisely new. It is something different than what we’ve had, but mostly it just builds on what we’ve already had. A vintage Model-T Ford and a brand new Ferrari may look different, but they’re both basically cars, if you get my meaning.

I’ve operated in both traditional media and communications and this new media world for a while and this is where I want to continue to be be. This site will continue to be mainly a central platform for collecting my own essays and opinions. It’s still a personal site and as such, I will be keeping my name-based URL. However, I will also be linking and highlighting more the voices of those with whom I’ve built relationships in this new media scene.

So stay a while. Leave a comment. Feel free to get in touch with me on my other social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Looking forward to re-connecting.

New Media Douchebags Explained

If social media is all about conversations, engagement and community building, what to do when there is only broadcasting and not actual conversation? As social media enthusiasts (and I call myself one), do we look in the mirror often enough and ask of ourselves am I really engaging or just pushing my message out?. Is social media becoming an echo chamber again? – Hummingbird604

So, do I practice what I preach when it comes to social media? Not always. Maybe that’s a good thing.

I’m long overdue for a social media-themed post, so I’m glad I saw Hummingbird604’s query. I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while.

Linking to his post is a social act, so at least I’ve got that going for me. But like many social media evangelists of late, automation through Web 2.0 tools has gone from supplemental aid to crutch to virtual substitute for engagement. I still try to engage when I can, but I’d guess that upwards of 70 per cent of my messages in social media are broadcasting.

But that’s OK.

What is broadcasting, anyway? It’s not “anti-social” behavior, just not directly “conversational”. Mostly, I’m talking about those automated 140-character messages, usually containing links, that get churned out automatically from blog RSS feeds to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, hopefully engaging the eyeballs of my combined audiences. I do want to share interesting content with my friends and followers, and logging into separate profiles to do so is not an option. I just don’t have the time.

Don’t get me wrong. I love it when people respond to these syndicated messages with their own tweets, comments and email messages — and I do strike up conversations when that happens (And before I forget, if you do find this post interesting, please leave a comment!).

But how often do my “broadcasts” result in these conversations? Probably less than half the time. and I usually don’t have the time to engage beyond a few back-and-forth tweets before a project deadline wrenches my attention away. I have to keep my “social” conversations pretty streamlined — the equivalent of meeting a friend in real life for a pint, enjoying some stimulating dialogue and then skipping out 15 minutes later, just as things are getting good.

And how often am I actively visiting other people’s social media profiles and blogs to leave a comment or spark a discussion? Certainly, not as often as I’d like. I can probably count on one hand the number of comments I’ve left on blogs in the past month.

Partly, it’s a reflection of a tough economy where marketers have to justify their efforts with shorter-term ROI. Social media engagement can pay off big for organizations, even in the short term. Abandoning social media campaigns entirely to bots with RSS feeds — or just abandoning them, period, is a recipe for failure if you’re really looking to engage an audience. But when we find ourselves wearing so many hats and facing increasing pressures at work to deliver more with less, the “social” part of social media, just like the “social” part of our our non-work existence, will inevitably take a hit.

Social networking and social media are here to stay. The real engagement that comes with it is also here to stay, too. But work is work and there’s a time and place — online or in the real world — for conversations. We do what we can.