The Anthropology of Social Media

Small businesses are being lured by the bright shiny object called Social Media Marketing. To be sure, this is an important development. One way to look at this phenomena is as a collection of tools that you can add to your SMB marketing toolkit.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies.

- the cluetrain manifesto (www.cluetrain.com)

In his article "Having the Right Tool is 90% of the Job" published in the HP Logoworks Small Business Newsletter, Skip Shuda from Team and a Dream explores the anthropology of social media, and how it has evolved.

In a recent Keynote address called “Andy Hunt on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning“, author Andy Hunt relays the story of a man who was trained to see using just his tongue attached to an electronic imaging device. The man became so adept he could navigate a car through a parking lot with only his tongue for vision.

This bizarre repurposing of the use of our tongue serves to illustrate something we humans have been doing for millions of years. We build stuff that enables us to dig deeper than with our bare hands, fight more lethally than kicking or punching, and travel farther and longer than running. Man, the tool-maker.

Person to person communication is one of the most vigorous areas of human tool-building. Starting with extenders like the written word, the trained courier-bird and smoke signals, our ambition to communicate faster farther with more people has driven innovation upon innovation. The printing press marked the advent of mass communication, extending our voice to thousands of ears. With electronic communications our voice-extending spree exploded across phone, radio, TV, satellite and so much more. From Gutenberg’s wonder to the Internet, mass communication has only been around for a handful of centuries.

And then it really got crazy…

Internet Marketing is the art of optimizing Internet-based conversations to promote a specific Point of View (POV) with a specific audience. After all, the internet (little i) is just the plumbing for a whole host of voice and conversation tools. Cyberspace is made up of a fleet of different modes of communication. “Markets are Conversations.” Is the first thesis of the 1999 manifesto that illuminates the future of a global, human conversation...

Continue reading this post on the HP Logoworks Small Business Newsletter.