Monday Musings: #Like Minds & Social Communications

Welcome To Your Monday. Here are some musings for the week of March 1st (eek - it's here already) 2010. We kick off today with a couple of summaries from the fantastic #LikeMinds summit, which took place down in Exeter, England on Friday and Saturday last week. We Are Like Minds is a very interesting blend of business, culture, technology and marketing - all connected by (to use Mr Blanchard's term) - Social Communications (we are ditching social media for now...). You can check out Olivier's summary of the summit here. After much internal debate (and some nagging from @drewellis) I had to turn down an invite, which may in hindsight been a mistake - as it looks like all involved had a great time, evidenced by the enthusiasm of my friend Gemma Went's summary of the conference here.

The Like Minds 2010 Team (via @thebrandbuilder)

Just to take up Olivier Blanchards point, as I think he has got it as close to right as we can at the moment, "Social Communications" may be an important change in our vernacular - as he make a very well made (and succinct) point - it was never about media in the first place. I truly believe we are not far away from (as I mentioned last week) that social "media" is going away. What we are seeing around us at the moment is not too dissimilar from the evolution of the printing press, radio, television or telephony, merely an evolution of communications.

We are right to point out that there is something of a cultural phenomenon going on here though, so for now to keep the "social" bit attached to the term seems appropriate, as this is a fundamentally different method of communications that what we have seen before, particularly in the business world. Never before has such a freedom of interaction been allowed to foster in business culture, navigating between hierarchy and rank to just connect people to people - finding like minds. That is something different. So for now "social communications" will have to do.

In other news:

"What the Hell is Social Media?" (Good question in the light of the above!) - A great little video wung its way into my reader this week via fellow Surbitonian and all round good guy Rax Lakhani.

A great explanation of integrated communications in the form of "The Big Social Media Marketing Plan" (or should that be communication?) from the pen of Penn Olson

And a fantastic productivity tool via @lifehacker called InBox2 which combines email and socialnetworking to better organise tasks and files in a lovely way. One to try out! (Windows only for now sadly, but a good web app for all you Mac's out there).