The instructive point here is we are now able to truly gauge our appetites for news, both what and how much. Broadcast media would be wise to use this as an a-ha moment.

It will take guts, but everything is moving faster, including the shelf life of a produced program.

It is also why all I can watch these days is Nat Geo.

Interface is a matter of taste, trust, and comfort. I like it, but you don’t have to. However one of my clients is seeing quite an impact in the few short weeks Bing has been in existence.

Bing is the #2 search traffic driver to this site, trailing you-know-who. It is drubbing Yahoo by a factor of 3x, and 93% of the people that hit my client’s site via Bing are new.

Love it or hate it, one thing is clear–it is making us pay attention to it.

The NBA franchise gave its head coach, Kevin McHale, the boot. That isn’t the story here.

The story here is that the news was delivered via Twitter from one of the team’s players, Kevin Love. In its report, the AP notes that Love “actually leaked word of McHale’s departure early Wednesday…”

Leaked? No, Love provided the information to the world.

News media and PR flaks no longer have control of information distribution, and they are struggling with the changing world. They aren’t understanding a concept a smart guy recently stated:

When people needed to get places faster they didn’t invent faster horses. They invented the car.

Five minutes of comedy has summed up years of blather.

Jon gave a look-see at Google’s newest Big Thing, Google Wave. It got him thinking down the path of the amount and amalgamation of social media, as well as the impact of the distributed nature of all things Google. His two questions that are significant, to me, a business and marketing guy:

Will it be too much?

When do the mid-to-late adopters just decide to give up entirely?

My thought, Jon, is that it is already too much. Now, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we long ago passed the point where there were too many “next big things” and there were too many ways to socialize. Much like the news business needs a source to re-organize all of the best news stories created via link relationships, social media needs a home. This could be it, or not. That is the standard I want to see.

My question: could the whole problem with finding the winning social media model be harmed because there are too many fronts on which we’re doing battle, each with its own nuance? Think about the old board game RISK. You were never going to be successful trying to win Europe, North America, and if lucky get South America too. Focus is key.

And that brings me to point #2…progress and sustainability are defined differently for many people and many businesses.

The trap many social media “experts” fall into is that they lose that focus. You don’t need eight billion Twitter followers. As long as you understand the nuance of the platform, you are good to go. Productivity is not 300 tweets per day to prove something. Productivity is finding that nuance that makes it work for that client.

So spend the rest of your time focusing on productivity. Volume does not equal quality. Put another way: the crankypants people who “don’t get” social media are many time reacting to the volume of, honestly, garbage. They are absolutely correct that so much of it is a waste of time.

But not all of it.

To circle back, I don’t know that the late adopters will ever give up. Because new applications and platforms are making things so much more connected so much faster, by the time some decide to tinker with Twitter, everybody else has moved on to something else.

They aren’t getting there, perhaps because nobody can honestly tell them what’s going to happen when they do arrive. and they don’t bother because everybody has moved on.

Why I believe Jon has asked extremely pertinent questions is because the whole darn enchilada is becoming about technology and not about the people that use it. That is a colossal misstep.

What middle and late adopters are giving up on is not social media; rather it is a productive solution.

The challenge is to get them there sooner and have a solution. We’re getting awfully close to the time when The Next Big Thing needs to actually be that.

Personally, I’m looking to the guy with fewer tweets and more thought leadership.

Here’s the thing: the first two responses that came in had the very same problem. It made me realize that all responses seem to take the same tack, and I’m finding it makes the whole process a smidgen cumbersome. (Not exactly what you want to do to people when you want their business.)

The problem resides with my very first statement to the client. It was identical for both RFP responses: “go to page six; that’s where the first relevant part comes into play.”

Six pages to get to anything that actually NEEDED to be read? Ouch.

We’ve done our due diligence. This whole Internet thing allows us to track down background information, and we know people who can sign off on your capability. Further, you don’t get called in the first place if we don’t know a little something about you. Please spare the paper and effort for the company background, as well as your five paragraphs on the “proposal background.” It’s our proposal; we get it.

Besides, everybody reads proposals the same way: flip to the pricing page and work back to the actual solution.

It would be awfully gutsy for someone to START a proposal with pricing and timing, give the solution, and then give 14 diffrent ways to contact in case of questions.

But I bet you’d be remembered.

Commentors as witnesses? Jury members? Experts? Who vets them? Fleshes out fact from fiction? Tracks down the anonymity? Who judges “relevance?” What types of stories “matter?”

So many questions…

Fortunately all this social media stuff allows it to occur for anyone, anytime, and you don’t even need to get smart people in any room in your own house.

You get to read one thing, read another, and compare. Your ability to put concerned thought into an idea is enhanced because you have multiple viewpoints–from smart people–available immediately.

That happened for me this morning: Seth Godin blogged about “Betting on the Wind,” which is essentially making sure you understand there are external forces out there you have no control over, and you’d better consider that fact when investing.

Nassim Nicolas Taleb came immediately to mind. His book, The Black Swan, was a game-changer for me. (Warning: it reads more like a textbook, but grab a highlighter and sit down with it.) Taleb is frank in his assertion that randomness plays a huge role in the world, and “experts” many times are no better equipped to predict the future than my dog.

It’s great stuff and the lesson: plan for the unplanned. Impossible, yes. But be prepared to roll with what you cannot control. The best part is that two completely different smart people say, essentially, the same thing.

Love that.

***

Useless note: I’ve cleared four hours tomorrow (and my hammock and a few Stellas) and I’m finally going to get to sit down and spend focused time with Jarvis’s What Would Google Do?. Can’t wait.

(Side note: if there’s ever a lesson to the newspaper industry, this is it: I have no idea what network was playing the movie, nor do I know the channel–it is in the 230s, somewhere near The Golden Girls–but I know where my Info button is to get quick background on what I’m watching. You guys think about that for awhile…)

This movie was relevant to me when I was in my late teens and early 20s. To quote Dirty Harry and every other Clint Eastwood character was cool. You just felt like a tough guy ripping those lines through gritted teeth. Maybe not cool or tough now, but I thought so back then.

And it hit me that relevance is such a huge motivating factor in our lives. We all want to make a difference, make an impact, be relevant. It makes us feel good to know we are needed. However there is a thin line between needed and wanted.

Perhaps we need to bury relevance as a motivator.

What would you do differently if you knew 40 people were impacted instead of 40,000? If your answer is anything but nothing, you are cheating yourself out of quality.

Somewhere between the mantras of Nike and Larry the Cable Guy resides the basics for success. Always do what you are doing, analyze, and improve. But don’t be swayed by your audience.

Though Dirty Harry is no longer relevant to me, I watched and quoted those same tough cop lines, through gritted teeth.

Doesn’t matter. Nobody really gets it, just like nobody really got eBay. That worked out well, no?

Just keep moving forward and experimenting. We’ll all figure it out.