1. Hoover’s Tim Walker is quite the presenter. He had billed his talk at this morning’s Austin Social Media Breakfast at the Genuine Joe Coffeehouse as informative, painless, and funny — and he delivered on all counts.
2. Tim likes to talk with his hands.
3. Tim reminded us that a medium is just a “means of human communication.” Media include everything from printed newspapers and blogs to smoke signals and church sermons.
4. Messages easily jump from one medium to the next “because people want to communicate;” they also “tend to use the media available to them for much the same human purposes over time.”
5. Was Martin Luther that different from today’s blogging superstars? He knew how to take advantage of a new technology of his day, the printing press (not to mention word of mouth), to spread ideas and build community.
6. How did Bob Hope stay so popular throughout his life? He knew how to port what was essentially the same act across multiple media (vaudeville, radio, television, etc.) through the years.
7. Corporate bloggers who only talk about their products and services would be wise to take a cue from Tim’s neighborhood hardware merchant, who will refer Tim to another store when he doesn’t have the product Tim needs on a particular day. In so doing, the merchant gains Tim trust and becomes a resource Tim will willingly come back to again and again.
8. Tim echoed Chris Brogan’s sentiment that newspapers are not in the newspaper business. Rather, they’re in the newsmaking business and need to deliver that news through whatever media/device their customers demand (newspaper, website, RSS, mobile phone, etc.). Understanding that distinction, Tim said, is crucial to papers’ survival and evolution.
9. Tim suggests that we’re only in the very early stages of development of social media, and that associated unpredictable social, economic, and personal changes are still very much to come.
10. Once again, Austin’s social media community showed its enthusiasm and willingness to come together, share, and learn.
Listen to Tim
Thanks to Karen Kreps, we have an audio recording from Tim’s presentation. Click below to stream or download.
Tim Walker presents at Austin's Social Media Breakfast 4 [16:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadOnline media from Austin’s Social Media Breakfast 4
- Tim Walker’s recap
- Tweets using the #SMBAustin hashtag
6 comments ↓
[...] [Temporary editorial note -- I'm trying an experiment: since I spent a chunk of the afternoon napping to fight off a head cold: rather than wait to polish and publish my talk from from this morning's Austin Social Media Breakfast, I'm posting it now with minimal changes so I can start pointing people to it. I'll edit it today and tomorrow, add pictures and links, clean up typos, etc. So please think of this like one of those "flash" transcripts of earnings calls you see sometimes on the news wires. By the way, thanks to the estimable Bryan Person, you can hear a recording of the talk via this MP3 link. Bryan's writeup of the session is at this link.] [...]
Bryan, thanks for a good summary of another great event!
And Tim, you had me at “mimeograph”
Great discussion today. Thanks for organizing SMBAustin, Bryan.
It really sums up what are social media… social media is interaction among humans! technology is only a tool to enhance the experience
[...] Tim Walker had us revisit the past to help us see the present and future more clearly (read or listen to his talk – you’ll enjoy it). In what had to be the most entertaining history lesson [...]
[...] from printed newspapers and blogs to smoke signals and church sermons (Courtesy of Tim Walker, Social Media Breakfast [...]
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