Business Insight Zone

My SXSW pal Scott Monty has a good new post up in which he describes how Twitter helped him out of a lodging pickle. On short notice, he needed to find a hotel room in New York for a client meeting, but this time the last-minute travel sites he usually counts on turned up nothing useful.

No rooms in the city were to be had for under $800. I could stay at a hotel near the airport, but my commitments required me to be other places in the city, so it would be a logistical nightmare (and expensive) to stay near the airport. What to do? I turned to Twitter, of course.

Many people in my network were willing to help – I received replies directly on Twitter and private direct messages. Suggestions ranged from specific hotels they knew to areas of the city to consider, all the way to someone who pulled up a specific price quote on a room for me. [...]

Thanks to a well-connected and attentive community, I was able to keep myself off of a Central Park bench for the night. It just goes to show, that if you take them time to invest in relationships and being a valued member of a community, it can work in your favor when you need it.

Here’s the comment I left on Scott’s post (lightly edited):

To my mind, the key here is that Twitter did for you what other media (phone, e-mail, blogging, etc.) could not do because of the way they’re structured. I think that, as people get over the novelty value of the various social media, they’ll come to appreciate the unique ways that these new tools can address certain challenges better than anything that has come before.

We already understand that there’s overlap between the functions of our various well-established communications tools — e.g. you could phone, IM, or e-mail a friend to verify a lunch date. When we’re talking about established tools, we also understand which cases call for which tools — e.g. talking to my mom on the phone serves a different function than sending her an e-mail, which is different again from sending her a paper card on her birthday.

As time goes on, we’ll continue to use Twitter and other social media tools in ways that overlap with older communications media, but we’ll also come to rely on them for the unique problem-solving properties that arise from the way they are structured.

This meshes with something I was talking about at lunch today with my friend Katie Ford, who has written articles on social media (among other topics) for Hoover’s. She told me that she was initially skeptical about social media, wondering if people weren’t retreating to inferior online communities because they had failed to build “real” offline human relationships.

What she discovered, instead, was that the various social media can do wonderful things for us that nothing else has done so far. I remarked that my own experience is that social media adds to my friendships and relationships, without detracting from my ability to, say, join a friend like Katie for a long face-to-face palaver over lunch.

When you need a hammer, you need a hammer. When you need a wrench, a chisel won’t do. Et cetera. Social media (of whichever brand name) will continue to flourish because they fulfill purposes that other communications tools can’t.

~

Related posts:

• What happens when you can’t keep up with your popularity?
• May the best product win?
• YMMV.
• Western Union and record labels.

~

(Hammer by batega; chisel by david_numan.)

Category: Social media