Trying new things

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on October 25th, 2010 at 06:02 AM | | Tweet

Doesn’t it sometimes seem that as soon as you get used to an interface, it changes?  For instance, the Facebook “friends on line” indicator is suddenly a block of faces.  What happened to the vertical queue? Twitter wants you to try “New Twitter” just when you’d learned the short-cuts of Old Twitter!

Laura and I feel your pain.  We do, because, like many of you, we were already grown-ups when the first PC came off the conveyor belt.  Instead of “In Design” and “HTML” offerings, our undergrad experience in computer science was limited to a class in Fortran, where you’d sit amongst smelly electronics and be handed a ginormous matrix-dot ledger of numbers and letters.  Yuck!

Somehow, we ended up in this crazy world of digital and social media, bound and determined to Tweet and post and comment with the youngsters—not because we have to, but because, if we have to admit it, it’s actually sort of fun.  Especially if it’s part of a comprehensive life that still includes anachronistic adventures such as handwriting a note to a friend, or helping our middle-school kids with their math, employing actual rulers, pencils and paper.

I still remember my grandmother, an Austrian immigrant. At age 60 she was completely baffled by the VW-sized microwave we’d just set on her counter.  “The dials!” she chirped. “What’s this round thing in the middle that turns?”  She resisted using it for a while, occasionally poring over the instruction booklet, until one day she heated a mug of tea with new-fangled contraption, and from then on, you couldn’t stop her.  She’d invite you over just so she could nuke potato or leftover meatloaf and be witness to the labor saving miracle of this machine.

In the upcoming months, Laura and I will be experimenting with some of the nuances of social media and integrated marketing as a way to assist some of our clients—who have admitted their reluctance to delving in full force with the posting and tweeting and the like.  We welcome your comments and questions as we trudge down the social media Interweb, and we’ll do our best to answer them and/or find an expert to illuminate the most pressing issues our readers face.