(Note: If you don’t have a sense of humour, please don’t read this post and do your readings instead – it will probably be better time spent)
I’m on a roll, third blog post for the week… I’m not on the ball, I’m just inspired to be irreverent, which happens when you take two online classes and ask yourself why you are spending so much time indoors when there is so much sun OUTdoors. On days like these, I also reflect only the disjunct between school and what happens in the working world. So much of school work is hypothetical which is good for thinking about things but there is always this thin line where you know you have crossed when you start obsessing over how many blog posts you have made for the week, how many tweets you have tweeted and of course how many wiki edits you have made.
Thankfully, my ability to be irreverent shows that I am not there yet.
Let’s talk about “the social everything” – a term Anita and I coined today over a delicious dim sum meal (great moments of epiphany happens over food) where we were engaging in social food bonding. Social is big business, the social web, social media and if we go towards the internet of things, you might even have social household appliances! Many companies are realising the power of social media and are leveraging on it to reach out to more people either through direct advertising on social media platforms or creating a social media presence for themselves to engage people beyond the transactional. Social is the new business buzz word.
However, social is nothing new, it has just been given a new face. In China, businessmen secure deals over dinner and drinks, mutual partnerships have their roots in good business relationships, good customer service is about building good relationships with your clients; building relationships is intricately linked to building good social networks and not necessarily online. One of the dangers of social media is the assumption that if you are on it, you are building relationships. That is only partially true. Social media cannot replace real world interactions – the irony is that the convenience of it sometimes devalues the effort. It’s as simple as wishing a friend Happy Birthday over Facebook as opposed to sending a physical birthday card. Social media can be a start, a gateway but if you want meaningful relationships, you have to put in more effort than typing words over the internet.
Likewise physical classes as opposed to online classes. While there are benefits to online classes, they cannot replace physical classes in the area of relationship building. At the end of the day, content will only take you so far and if you have all the content in your head without the social skills to make it relevant to the people around you, you will only achieve limited success. It is better to have less content and more social skills than more content and less social skills (unless you want to become an academic). Getting the best grades, rushing to be first, proving yourself academically is only going to get you a piece of paper at the end of the day. Everything else after is social.