Twitter don’t sell (or advertise)

Here’s Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, analyzing O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly’s analysis of what a publisher does:

…it is virtually impossible for publishers to “be the winners in a technology race.” So publishers should spend less time chasing what’s cool and what’s new and focus instead on the nuts and bolts of nurturing audiences and sales channels and delivering authors’ work…

Echoing the spirit of generosity and absence of direct self-interest that you’ll hear from the pulpits of Seth Godin and many others, O’Reilly spoke to how social media isn’t meant to work as a sales tool. “Start thinking about what you can contribute… It’s about how you can add value to the communities that happen to include you.”

I’m still unconvinced that we know when to say when when it comes to Twitting, Facebook, et al. At what point does social media stop helping individuals navigate through oceans of content — and only make the information glut worse? I don’t have a good answer for this. But I’m in the market for one.

While I’m at it, this analysis of Amy Grant’s video “Lead Me On” made my day yesterday.

PS. Further to social media and its potential to bite us back, I also can’t help shake the feeling that in addition to exposing us to lovely and novel items and ideas and pretty pictures, it to a great extent fosters the same sense of inadequacy that mass advertising was designed to instill — i.e. it gets people itchy for lifestyles that elude them.

Overheard

“Say you want to eat a whole pie. If you put your face down in the pie, you get pie all over your face. But if you slice out one piece at a time, you’ve a chance of getting it done.”

As long as I’m keeping a running list, cont.

“How to Be Useful” as per 2 Corinthians.

And in common-school education during George III’s reign:

There were no cheap books or newspapers, and no proper system of public instruction. The poor seldom left the counties in which they were born. They knew nothing of what was going on in the world. Their education was wholly of that practical kind which comes from work and things, not from books and teachers; yet many of them with only these simple helps found out two secrets which the highest culture sometimes misses, – how to be useful and how to be happy.