#likeminds - How Are We Changing The Way We Communicate

The early session has been very much a beginner’s guide to social media.

Anyone who thinks that curation is the “next big thing” in social media, as I saw one person say on Twitter, has obviously missed the last 10 years of blogging, for example. 

In fact, many of the key messages are “here are the big mistakes” – just pushing the marketing message, not being authentic – and a few inspirational messages – “social media” saves lives!” – without much depth. It’s baby steps stuff, the basic concepts you need to operate in this space.  This is an opening session, true enough, but it feels like an opening session targeted at those who are only just dipping their toes into this stuff. 

Some good insights that the more “social media forward” people sometimes missed are buried in there – that the civil service will never really make use of social media until they get proper internet access. And that (in my experience) can apply just as much to businesses which lock down anything that looks in any way “social” as being inherently non-business. As if business isn’t extremely social…

UPDATED: It should be noted that others [found more value](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/feb/26/socialnetworking-bebo) in these opening sessions than I did.