Week 1 Reflections

Before I even started going through the material for this week, I told my friends about the course and the requirement to start a Blog and create a Twitter account. As soon as they heard this, they started laughing! Not because they felt either assignment was too hard, too lofty, or too complicated to understand, but because they blog and tweet everyday for "fun" and have been trying to convince to me participate for months (maybe even over a year). Each time I tell them I am too busy with school, friends, my household chores and face-to-face social activities to spend my time wasting away on a computer. They always laugh, look at me as though I am a little "behind the times" and remind me that as a young IT professional, I sound quite old fashioned and uneducated. They claim that I am really missing growing trends that I should be keeping up on since the digital, information technology arena is not just a "cool, trendy" space, but also my chosen profession and career!

Normally I just dismiss their comments as silly jokes that peers constantly like to give. But after reading the material this week, I am beginning to realize that to a growing number of business, marketing, and IT professionals, their ideas are correct and mine are wrong. Apparently many people view what I see as simple fun, social networking activities, as powerful communication and knowledge portals that will drive business in the future. They even go as far as to say that people are not so busy they no longer have time to "waste" watching TV, but that they have just switched to "wasting" their time online. Not only do they spend all their free time online, but they interact in a much more meaningful way online, then while watching TV, which allows businesses to form more powerful relationships with their customers, than ever imagined before. I am not sure my peers would be as excited as the marketers, about some of the plans businesses have for online and social networks, like Google, FaceBook or Twitter, since they are rather intrusive and evasive into the minds of consumers. But since most are IT professionals I think they would see the value proposition for both consumers and businesses. Because if today's marketers are able to meet their new goal of creating more meaningful and rewarding relationships with consumers that allow them to create advertisements that not just bombard them they way TV commercials do, but actually subtly slip into their day to day lives, the way blogs or tweets about some one's favorite product do, then maybe everyone stays to benefit from this new digital marketing revolution, even "old school" minded folks like me!