THE DREAM IN ACTION

This week my sister was asking me about Friendfeed and how to find value in it for her PR company. This is an extract from our conversation…

Taylor: what’s Friendfeed exactly, what you’ve done online? what you’ve posted, commented, etc?
Taylor:  what’s the purpose of it, i’m trying to understand
Me:  it aggregates all of your online activity from twitter to flickr to blog posts…it brings everything to one platform.
Taylor:  alright, i can’t see that being that useful for a company, maybe just individuals
Me:  try and change your thinking… don’t think, “would this be helpful or not”, instead think, “this would be helpful, how?” You almost have to force yourself to find how a tool would be helpful first…then test it with that attitude. Then if it really isn’t helpful, then dump it…but a lot of times people aren’t able to find the value in their first glance at a tool.
Me:  make sense?
Taylor:  yeah it does!

This notion of forcing yourself to find value in new tools comes from the fact that people have a very difficult time thinking outside the box. The reason that people have to think outside of the box to find the value of many of these new social softwares, or web tools is because these tools force people to create entirely new workflows for getting things done. These tools cause people to change habits and change pre-conditioned understandings of how things are done. That’s never easy, at first! At first the re-tweaking of “how” may seem unproductive but often that re-tweaking allows for greater productivity once that new workflow becomes the “norm”.

Example: If I normally open my browser and open my top 3 sports sites, top 2 political commentaries, and my 2 family members blogs it is not going to make any sense to me when somebody tells me that I can just open Google Reader to read all of that. Without the knowledge of how an RSS reader works opening up one tool to read all 7 of those sites won’t make any sense. At first it may seem weird to just open Google Reader to read my sites but when I dive into the tool and actually use it I find that it is significantly more productive to centralize that consumption of information.

This is just one simple example of how not understanding a new technology might hide the value of it. Just as I encouraged my sister to use a technology, in this case Friendfeed, before she says, “I can’t see that being that useful…”, I would encourage you to test out a tool before deciding if its useful! I’m asked all the time how I think a growing business can take advantage of the web and the interaction it enables, and many times my response is, “try it out and you tell me”. So much of the time the value will be totally different for one person or company than it will be for others.

It is similar to the notion of ‘innocent before proven guilty’. You have to give new technologies or tools a chance before judging them