Social Media & the Cost of Fuel

Paula & I just changed plans to visit our daughter in Dallas because of the high price of airfare and the lack of direct connections. A friend who's a retailer at Tahoe tells me he expects a terrible July 4th weekend because of the high price of gasoline. Another friend--in a Fortune 100 company tells me that travel budgets are being zeroed out as a cost cutter.

There simply is no dispute about it. Habits are changing because of fuel costs. Those habits, I think will also impact the economy, not for the short time but for a long time to come.

Even as a social media evangelist, I have often and repeatedly noted that nothing replaces face-to-face meetings. In almost every major city of the Western world there will be at least one meet-up tonight between people who have already talked to each other and built relationships online. The number of conferences related to social media continues to rise.This is because we still need to see and talk to other people.

Most everyone prefers to buy goods that they can see and touch and a brick and mortar store is clearly a  better venue for it than a virtual space. There are exceptions we all know, plane tickets, books, music have all become easier, cheaper and faster to buy online. And stores that used to sell them are slowly disappearing from the landscape.

But now, fuel costs are starting to change more--a lot more than would have been the case if the price of a barrel of oil had not double each year for the last two years. By not flying to Dallas, a hotel and car rental place loses a sale. Several restaurants lose sales and so on.

I think we are seeing the beginning of some longterm trends, many f which will increase the use of the Internet in general and social media specifically:

• Conferences designed to attract national and international speakers and attendees will wane next year. There will be fewer of them and they will be smaller. This reverses the trend of the last three years. Instead, there will be more online conversations using a variety of tools. A big winner will be the virtual conferences that use a variety of tools to get attendees and presenters to see, hear and interact online.

• Businesses will increasingly use social media to get closer with customers. This, of course, is already happening and happening at a pretty fast rate.  But I think the trend is about to accelerate. Because it is getting too expensive and inconvenient to meet face-to-face in the real world, there will be more efforts to bring the conversation to the next best place, in the form of virtual communities.

• An increase in video. Online video is already on the steep end of the well-graphed hockey stick. But it's use for online conversations, such as Skype, Mogulus, Kyte.tv and Qik are offering are about to explode I think simply because seeing each other as you converse is better than just texting and a lot more convenient than flying.

There are probably a lot more examples. As much as I advocate social media and online commerce, I am not so happy to be looking at this one. It will be a long time before the Western world loses it's addictive dependence on fossil fuels. Until that happens our lifestyles are going to be more restricted.

I'm thankful for the Internet and broadband because without them we all might be heading  loser to lives in the little house on the prairie and that would not be a good thing.

• Online communities.

Comments

[Steven E. Streight aka Pluperfecter, formerly Vaspers the Grate]

I think Face to Face communication is highly over-rated and abused.

It's harder to hypnotically, charismatically dupe someone when you're not in their presence physically. I know people get conned in email scams and phishing sites, but I think it's harder than doing it in person in most cases.

Many people attend conferences to get drunk, party, cheat on the spouse, and brag about how they were there.

Soaring gas prices will be great for ecommerce, social media, and videoconferencing and live streaming video productions.

Face to Face communication is vital in many situtations, but it's also be overdone and relied upon too heavily.

I feel I have great relationships with you, Scoble, Doc Searls, BL Ochman, Liz Strauss, Evelyn Rodriguez, CK, and my many Twitter pals, etc. and yet have never met them Face to Face.

Like it or not, we must learn to type and write better, and faster, for that is the future of communication.

We must also learn how to use video in more situtations: tutorials, product demos, video chat, product intros, all the things that used to be done in conferences, etc.

Great post Shel. As always, you're on the bleeping edge of social media and web technology applications.

:^)

[bitpakkit]

Excellent post. Affecting positive change and maintaining human connections is not only possible but mandatory, and we all need to evangelize this more effectively.

The bottom line is that the people most affected probably don't care too much about a bunch of SM thought leaders jetting around the world to live blog a conference.

Perhaps we need a mechanism to flag material in our business that is clearly derived from a gratuitous travel budget in order to further the cause of a single individual (poster).

Anyway, more than this I agree that if we can start, maintain and expand the conversation in and on the video, that should suffice.

[Justin Thorp]

Shel, you know me. I'm as big an advocate as you get when it comes to the notion of "global neighborhoods." But... sometimes I think the rise of global neighborhoods and it's importance in our lives has been to the detriment of our local neighborhoods.

I have this vast community of people all over the world that I communicate with on a non-stop basis and will often to travel to meet with face to face but I don't know most of the people who live down the hall from me in my apartment building. I don't know the people who live in my neighborhood.

I hope and pray that the spike in gas and fuel costs will encourage people to patronize businesses that are close to where they live so that we can re-energize that notion of local community.

If you wanna read a book that blew my mind... check out Great Good Places by Ray Oldenburg.
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Good-Place-Bookstores-Community/dp/1569246815

[francine hardaway]

And that is why I am moving closer to the people I want to spend the rest of my life with. No "retiring to Florida" for me.

[Steven E. Streight aka Pluperfecter]

Yeah, the rise in gas will have positive ramifications:

* walking

* losing weight

* riding bicycles

* staycations

* more time with family, instead of conferences and traveling

* more hatred of domination systems like oil companies and OPEC

[Kittrell]

I agree with the comment stating how face to face communication can be vital in many situations, but disagree on her perception of how it can be too heavily relied upon. Face to face can be the very thing to determine truth.

[Mike Morris]

It's not just businesses that are using social media and online video, political campaigns are doing so as well. Barrack Obama's presidential campaign has their own social networking site and also has a presence on Facebook and YouTube. The main roadblock to virtual conferences right now is that it's exceedingly complicated for the average person who would attend a conference, downloading plug-ins and such just to be able to view a live feed properly can be incredibly frustrating, however if the technology is improved and simplified, this definitely could be a promising avenue. An example of this is the MSNBC show Race to the White House, which is attempting to create more viewer interactivity, but how many people are really going to email or phone in their questions while watching the show?