Keynote: 'Emergent media for Person-to-Person Communication’

Speaker: Joanne Jacobs
Expert consultant in social networking technologies
Twitter: @joannejacobs

@growwithorganic on Emergent media for Person-to-Person Communication

Joanne has an awesome blog. This isn’t surprising to anyone who reads some of her material about blogs and blogging. Joanne knows her subject and knows how to observe and evaluate properly. Her content has a genuine scholarly tone to it that I find impressive. I can’t think of anyone better qualified to talk about emergent person to person media. If you want to know what the next big thing is going to be so you can make your first million, you would be smart to catch this Keynote.

Social Media is familiar

What is most exciting about Joanne is that she gets why social media is special. Its not that social media is a new way of communicating. Instead social media allows you to communicate using technology in an (for want of a better phrase) 'old fashioned' more familiar way over long distances. Joanne talks abut ‘social media’ in terms of usability. Social media is more usable because it is more natural for humans to use.

Usability is familiarity

Usability is often seen as a rather dry and uninteresting practice, but what I like about Joanne’s approach is that she sees that usability is just about making media more familiar, and as I have stated in many articles before, what could be more familiar and usable to us ‘social beings’ in our ‘society’, than ‘social’ media. Social media is a glove that fits and so we are predisposed to want to use it.

Whether Joanne would go this far I do not know, but I do know that her keynote is going to give some really exciting insight into the types of media that are going to drive P2P, with some examples of how this technology is being used now and will be used in the future.

Social media isn’t the only example of technology that is a natural and integral part of our human development or evolution, but it is the most obvious to see and understand.

Social media that create a multi-dimensional experience

The technologies Joanne will identify are ones that bring the extra dimensions to the social media that is required in order to wholly integrate into the way we live our lives. They are all technologies that seek to integrate the horizontal, the vertical and the sensory, to enhance our real life social interaction and experience of the world around us in all dimensions. This is taking the approach towards social media as an inherent part of how we live our lives in the future to another level. These are media that essentially take the first steps to breaking down the barriers between our experiences, social interactions and learning in the media and our experience, social interactions in day to day ‘offline’ life and makes them fully integrated.

This is very exciting stuff. On one level its exciting to build and create these technologies and use them in marketing and other activity, but it is also exciting because it shows how social media and P2P is a genuine game changer.

My experience of integrated, multidimensional social media

For example, I had a meeting in London with a colleague and friend who is the MD of a traditional advertising agency last week. We meet in a pub in the West End, The Nellie Dean on Dean Street. After a few drinks I was evangelizing about social media and he pointed out that unlike most meetings where he sent, name, address, directions and maps to the venue in order to aid the person he was meeting to get there, he had only sent me a postcode for the venue via SMS because he know I would use my smart phone to find it.

He was right. In order to get there, talk about it to people and find out more, I had used the following technology:

• GPS
• Two augmented reality apps
• Google Maps
• A London tube app
• A national rail app
• A Wiki in order to find out the history of the pub and the link with the name of the road
• Twitter and twitpic, ping.fm, facebook, Google profiles and LinkedIn to keep myself amused and to find out where my friend was when after 15 minutes of waiting he still hadn’t turned up.

My whole journey and experience was augmented by multi dimensional social media that let me enhance my understanding of time, place, journey, experience and social position.

Challenges

Joanne also very astutely identifies what the key challenges facing P2P media are, and where further development is needed; including privacy, 'Content Curation', and what I think is the next big area of development in technology: Interfacing.

I have never met Joanne before, and didn’t really know who she was until we started sponsoring LikeMinds, but I have to say I can’t wait to meet her. It makes me wonder what the next big thing might be and what it will look like. LikeMinds is going to be the place to find out!

What do you think are the tactics, tools and methods that will define engagement today and in the future? Post your thoughts and we will add them to the Likeminds stream.