Downtown Rotary
Heidi Doerhoff Vollet
The answers to the questions "What is social media? And why should I care?" Or you do if you heard Steve Mays of Learfield Communications at the July 26 Jefferson City Rotary Club meeting. According to Wikipedia (as quoted on Steve's slides), social media is "an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio."
You should care because social media are replacing the traditional media broadcast model - one source and many listeners - with a conversational model - many sources and many listeners. Anyone in government, law, business, religion, education, media, medicine, finance, politics and, yes, civic clubs like our own, must participate in those conversations or risk becoming irrelevant to the three out of four Americans who use social media (more than use e-mail) and depend on social networks.
To refresh your memory, here are Steve's slides. And a big thanks to Steve not only for speaking to us but also for his help establishing our Rotary blog. If you missed the meeting, Steve blogs at smays.com
A couple reminders:
- We will not meet next Monday, Aug. 2; we will meet at noon Wednesday, Aug. 4, at the Capitol Plaza to honor 46 new teachers.
- Our guest speaker Monday, Aug. 9 will be U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton.
