Texaspatriot’s Weblog

After lunch now – Listening to Joe Mansour with the David All Group.

Joe’s presentation is on using social networking sites. Their uses, what to do there, and how to do it. The top three sites, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn all have millions of users. These sites and others make it easy to keep in touch with multiple people all over the world.

It’s important to remember the context of each space – MySpace is casual and informal, while LinkedIn is a professional networking site.

As the Ron Paul movement proved – you can use these sites to your advantage through friends, groups, bulletins, etc. Increase your friend counts, keep active – don’t start your page and then ignore it. I have to say this is a tough one – there are a lot of sites out there and I can’t keep up with them all myself. If my friend did not keep up with our myspace, I hate to think what would happen!

Margie is sitting with me and she got it right – there’s a lot of credit given here to Barack Obama and how he forged the way. Margie and I respectfully disagree. Ron Paul forged ahead before Barack Obama ever did. Obama latched on to the “change” part of the message – just not the substance. He took it farther – because we can’t discount the impact of the media on the popularity of Obama – which then increased his popularity online.

The best part of the whole session was the active debate at the end about the next generation being “dumbed down” as the original comment put it and how they hated “you know” being used in every sentence. Several people came to the defense of the younger generation. What I find interesting is that the older lady who commented about the dumbing down seemed to miss that it’s not social networking sites that dumb kids down – it’s the education system and for just who’s fault that is – she needs to look in the mirror.

I was very happy to see people coming (mostly younger) to their own defense. I have found many many many articulate, thoughtful, smart and interesting people through the Ron Paul movement who are in their 20s and younger. They somehow managed to escape the dumbing down social rhetoric of the current horrible “school” system. They still managed to get an education in spite of our current schooling.

A friend of mine, Erica, stopped by and we agreed that the speaker missed the boat on meetup.com. His stance that it isn’t really a social networking site was way off the mark. That is THE site really, to take local activism off the internet and onto the streets.

All of them have pros and cons – which is a good reason to have a profile, or profiles, on several sites. The “younger” generation is way ahead on this one. If you want to reach them, you have to go where they are. And try not to call them stupid – people tend to not like that.