The Social media and a documentary maker

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Ornit Barkai, a documentary producer working on a documentary about the social media. Her project is one which I am particularly interested in because she is taking an exploratory approach through interviews to see what the social media are, She told me that she has documentaries with Jeff Pulver and many other interesting social media people. This also includes some friends of mine, Phil Campbell and Chris of Ourmaninside.com. For part of the night I took her camera and was filming footage for her as I knew the people and which were the key moments. The seesmeetup itself was great in that I was able to meet at least twenty to twenty five seesmicers I already knew and help make these friendships at least a little more passionate if nothing else. In saying passion though I mean that we know each other in the physical world rather than the two dimensional ethereal existence brought on by people behind computers. You have to realise that the social media are not a nine to five thing. It’s not that you walk away and the social media fade away. The social media, are by definition about friendships, not about platforms, not about products, not about anything else. it’s not something that you should step away from when you walk away from your computer. It’s something that you should experience at all minutes of the day. You know that I overheard a conversation by some young girls speaking about instant messaging on the mobile phone and one of them was surprised this was possible. She’s younger than me and she’s unfamiliar with this. You, social media people, should think about this. If you’re working at getting people to listen to your brand and feel more connected you’ve got to take the time to converse with everyone around you. By converse I don’t simply mean answering when they message you. I mean that you have to take an active interest in who they are as individuals. You have to keep an eye on what’s going on at all times of the day. By this I don’t mean that you can’t do anything but social media but you do need to show an active interest. If I write about one topic or another as a tweet I really appreciate seeing people respond and that’s not just my feeling. A lot of people feel that way. I’ve seen it quite a few times. I really feel the social media need more people to think of them as a lifestyle, communicate all the time, because if you don’t you’ll be flooded. Communicate one or two messages every hour an your audience will not rush to write to you during the ten minutes you’re online. It’ll help you not feel flooded. I was really enthusiastic about the documentary idea although when thinking about the way the social media and it’s people are at the moment I feel slightly dissapointed. It’s not everyone that dissapoints me, just certain individuals.