In Missing The Point, Robin Cannon interviews a handful of the ‘cool kids’ club re: web design/dev and tackles some popular misconceptions about social media.
It was an interesting read for me, as I’ve had conversations with a number of local people about the web in general and social media in particular, in which I spoke and evangelised on many of the points these industry gurus make.
What I find immensely interesting, is that these are people drawn from around the world, hence operating on a global scale, and they’re reporting on many of the same issues I am facing in conversations with clients and potential clients. I speak to local people about how to use social media successfully to either build relationships with their potential audience among of millions of VOICES, yet many are already facing a huge gap in terms of how they’re employing the web to disseminate their content. Hell there’s a lot of trouble just grasping the concept of what content is.
The cool kids are reporting the same things. The same things? It makes me think that ignorance on how to use the internet intelligently is not exclusive to the Caribbean. However, in our case, we have the added disadvantage of being small territories and less capable of wasting tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars on misguided web development.
Our only advantage–or rather, our potential advantage–is our ability to adapt to the changing shape of communication and employ these techniques to benefit US and our own economy.
So while misconceptions about social media can wash in larger developed countries, we should be lean, mean and hungry enough to fuel our progress using the tools available to us.
Yet we don’t.
Add comment