Your Business’s Digital Future

   Just when you thought it was safe to coast on your Facebook fan page laurels new dangers to complacency are lurking around the corner. Let’s just say you don’t have to get worried, but you should be prepared to rethink everything you know about your public image.

   If you haven’t established a viable presence on the Internet, you won’t be left behind. It might behoove you to get started soon, however, just so you can join in the fun! In the December 3, 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal an interview with David Gelernter, a Yale professor, mapped out a road to our digital futures. Things look very, very bright down that road.

   Gelernter, infamous for his near-murder by the Unabomber years ago, writes about how the Internet, a clumsy vehicle at best in its current form, should become more elegant, rational in application and use, and useful to us who traipse around on the Web. The man has a vision of a system that makes sense to users.

   He sees us organizing things into what he terms “lifestreams,’ which we would recognize in Twitter. We could put things together in an elegant way to serve our needs. Facebook does this in a crude manner now, although it is refining its system constantly. We could keep all our “things” together in one place instead of the hodge-podge mess we struggle with now.

   How could this work for your business? Well, think about having the information you want to communicate in one place that is easy to use. As it is now, you might be making changes to your website, your Facebook page, your Facebook fan page, sending tweets, sending emails, using voice broadcasts, and so forth. It’s enough to keep a social media manager crazy all day with these stuff.

   The challenge we face in business is getting information out in timely fashion without contorting ourselves or being in a constant frenzy. Let me demonstrate how one company recently solved some of these problems.

   I give you…the ipad. Steve Jobs insisted all his products have elegance and be easy to use. The ipad is a neat little package of problem solving genius. Think about how it functions, where it functions, and the size for all that functioning. I’m amazed everyone hasn’t ditched their computers to use the thing all the time. Well, okay, it’s much easier for me to write sitting at a desk top computer with full-size keyboard than at a little toy-like device. But you get my drift…

   As we become more proficient in our communications and learn how to really reach the people who could be our customers, we’ll welcome anything that benefits us in taming the beast of the web. We shall overcome…our difficulties with technology.

Have a terrific week!

Patricia