I like to look at social networking as a broad-based social phenomenon. My test case involved parenting my daughters. First there was the constant instant messaging 8 years ago. Now they text using their phones exclusively. No email. No voicemail. I think it keeps it clean and “right now” for them. Social networking is, if anything, about flow, immediacy and relevance.

I joined Facebook about 2 years ago. Got my “cool Dave” photograph out. I look fit and young. I have gone to parties and events from invitations from friends distributed through Facebook. I’ve done the important culling of “friend” invitations through the oh-so-important ignore button. I’ve emailed people and asked, “how do I know you?” Facebook is the all purpose web application to find out what is going on with people who find Facebook valuable enough to spend a lot of time on it. I check in to Facebook about 4 times a week. I will increase that participation as it increases in relevance for me.

So what about other social networks? I’m an observer of, but not a contributor to, political blogs. I have my favorites that I check several times each day. It has become another newspaper experience. I don’t have any cause-based social network yet, as I’m busy enough collecting and interpreting the information feed I’m getting on selected topics.

Social media is a major new application of technology to our daily lives. Time to wake up and participate.

photo credit: stevendepolo

I bought my first computer in middle school using paper route money, a stylish and trusty Radio Shack TRS-80. It’s kind of strange that I remember the model number of my first computer.

I exercised my own computer geekdom by learning early programming languages like Fortran. And by the time I graduated from college, I had become pretty fluent in using a word processor to complete my coursework. Phew!

My first memory of using the internet was in grad school during the mid ’90s. I remember going to a computer lab to set up a free AOL account. We got a free AOL CD in the mail every week for that entire decade… or it seemed that way.

By the way, when did Google become a verb? I’m not sure and I can’t really remember the first time I went to “google” to search for an answer to a problem.

Enter the recent (or not so recent) phenomena called social networking.

The reason I like social networking is that it solved a decade-long problem that even Google couldn’t fix; reconnecting with old friends and colleagues. Within the span of a few days, I was able to use Facebook to connect with old friends that I almost never thought I would talk to again. Having the opportunity to recreate powerful memories from my childhood and pre-Oregon years has been a true gift. I’ve also dabbled with LinkedIn and Twitter.

From a business perspective, I’ve read countless case studies and have experienced first hand the buzz that can be created when social networking is used to market an event and/or product. Finding a way to apply these lessons to achieve current goals in our business is very interesting to me.

Finally, one thing that I don’t like about Facebook is that other people can upload pictures of you. An old friend from summer camp uploaded a bunch of pictures circa 1987 that included me sporting what I suppose can now be called a vintage hairstyle complete with a classy tank top.

Coming up next…my colleague and improv theater extraordinaire, Deborah Elliott.

It’s comforting to know the terrain. Like all of us, I rely on familiarity and community to ground me in these times of radical change.

In 1975, I began my career in a Midwestern newsroom, typing on a manual typewriter. In the 30 years since, I’ve been a casual adopter of new technologies. So it surprises me to discover how much new terrain I’ve explored in the virtual world over the past 12 months.

Perhaps the Obama campaign opened up this virgin territory for those of us who were somewhat technophobic. His election, his meteoric rise and fundraising confounded our previous assumptions about “how the world works”.

In the past six months I have done the following new things with social media:

• I started a Facebook account and found friends from every city I’ve ever inhabited. It’s changed my sense of community and connectivity across my lifetime.
• I’ve also written and forwarded a blog-type email to my address book that was heavily forwarded by others throughout the internet.
• I began reading political blogs and watching TED, and found my own favorites.
• I began to web-surf as play.

I’ve become a pioneer in the virtual world… pioneer in the sense of wondering what will my journey find on the other side of that mountain. The future possibilities of this virtual world makes me more optimistic than ever.

Coming next….a social media vignette from our youngest partner, Michael Kosmala.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

It would have been hard to make it through this past Presidential election season without hearing mention of, or experiencing firsthand, how Social Media revolutionized the way in which political candidates engaged people at the grass roots level around a common purpose.

And as we look to our own work, the lessons learned from the election are so profound that we can’t deny the power of social media and its potential to expand and deepen our relationships across our own audiences and business stakeholders.

• Do words like wikis, vlogs or Facebook sound familiar?
• Or does the thought of learning yet another new technology cause you to become what my partner Dave calls a “walking eye-twitch?”
• Have you used one or more social media applications in your personal life?
• Or better yet, are you already experimenting with its use in your day-to-day business operations?

If you’re new to social media, here are some examples as presented by our friends at Wikipedia.com:

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Youmeo (social network aggregation), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Avatars United (social networking), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging), and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.

As The Canoe Group prepares to launch our first social media experiment, we thought it would be interesting to share our own individual stories chronicling our history and relationship with technology.

Our hope is that while you may likely find yourself relating to one or more of us on a personal level, these short vignettes will serve as a reminder of the broad perspectives your friends and colleagues bring to the subject of social media.

Coming tomorrow…the first of our three part series featuring our founding partner Marta Mellinger.