Last year, 2009, was a remarkable year. The explosive growth of social media carried with it many first time authors and first time public speakers. As an Advanced Toastmaster Gold and a member of the National Speakers Association, I’m thrilled to see so many people beginning to express themselves in public and share their best thinking with the rest of the world.
23 of the 26 social media oriented books I read in 2009. Lots of good ideas herein.
I jumped on the bandwagon (actually, as a self-identified and moderately credentialed marketing professional, I felt I had an obligation to) and consumed a ton of content from the new crop of authors. (here’s a social media reading list I prepared for a friend who began teaching social media at a community college last fall)
Moving into a new decade seems to be a good occasion to put aside the flurry of new works and to return to works that have stood the test of time. To expand my elementary understanding of metaphysics (the study of reality), I’ll read both David Hume (a Scottish skeptic) and Immanuel Kant. Hume questioned our assumptions about reality and our understanding of cause and effect (“no one has ever observed a cause,” he said). Kant also explored our presuppositions about the nature of reality.
Both men would bring refreshing insight into the “new” era of marketing. My contention is, social media creates the greatest opportunity NOT by making it cheap to spam even more people, but by inviting us to stop and question our own assumptions about the
Thinkers and writers from days gone by still have much to teach us about social media!
nature of reality (is it really true that the purpose of business is to increase shareholder wealth? Really? What if that’s NOT the purpose of business but only a by-product of a greater purpose?)
To hopefully expand my own ability to think logically (always a pursuit, though it feels so out of reach), I’ll explore Evangelical Theology by Karl Barth and an Introduction to Systematic Theology by Cornelius Van Til of Princeton University. Both men knew Hume and Kant inside and out.
Moving past the exploration of the ways things are, and moving towards a life-long goal to be an effective communicator, I hope to read and digest two profound classics: Thought and Language by Lev Vygotsky and Language and Thought and Action by S.I. Hayakawa. Both address solid thinking toward the symbols and artifacts we use to both understand our world and to convey our experience of it to others.
Next up are a few works by old-time masters at effective communication that leads to action. Though the titles of a couple of them are outside the pale of post-modern sensibilities, the content promises to be well worth the investment of time anyway:
- Propaganda by Edward Bernays
- Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson
- Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann
All three works specially explore the art and science of public relations and creating content to move groups of people to action.
Finally, in alignment with my primary belief about the nature of reality (everyone wants to be heard, everyone wants to be understood, and everyone wants to know his or her life matters), I’ll continue my study of qualitative research. This year I’ll focus on Ethnography, which I think SHOULD become more important to corporations than social media. (If corporations employed ethnographic researchers, they would not ever need a social media guru or a director of social media; for that matter, they’d probably be able to cut their advertising expenditures by way more than half.)
- Learning from Strangers by Robert Weiss
- Tales of the Field by John Van Maanen
- Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes by Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw.
Throughout the year I’ll share what I’m learning. Would you please share what you’re learning, too?
No doubt there’ll be another crop of first time authors (including me) in 2010. We should encourage them. At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt if we spent more time with classic works that have stood the test of time.
