I kid Robert Scoble a lot. His fascination with all things new, his desire to jump in to every debate and every issue in social media, his ubiquity, his love of audience all fascinate and amuse me. Most people pick and choose where they will have passion and become expert. Robert seems to be fascinated with everything.
Yet, every few years Robert does something important something really important and after he is done doing that important thing the world of social media changes for the rest of us. This was true when:
- Robert schlepped a camera around talking to mid-level geeks at Microsoft. This certainly was not the start of original-content online video, but it WAS the first time an enterprise embraced it and used it to tell it's story in a transparent way.
- Robert used Scobleizer to write about his life inside Microsoft, thus demonstrating that one mid-level employee could give an unpopular company a more human face.
- The Scoble Show. When Robert went to Podtech, he proved the a business-technology video could be sponsored by a company in a successful way for the sponsor and at a sustainable level for a quality content producer.
In fact, Robert has broken new ground in more ways than any social pioneer, at least anyone that I can think of. And he is about to do it again.
Tomorrow, Robert heads out to Washington DC where he will spend four days interview a string of politicos and elected officials on social media and tech related issues. These include Cong. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif).
Most of these video interviews will only be 15 minutes in length and I am relatively certain that most of the people he interviews for FastCompany.TV will give him little more than self-serving soundbites, from elected officials trying to show they "get it" and leaving some questions as to whether they do or do not.
That is not the important part. What's important, is that officials who serve at the will of the people have great instincts to go to where the people are. This is why you find so many elected officials at so many funerals, weddings, etc.
The people are going to social media and now the politicians are coming. They arrive, as the current presidential campaign demonstrated, to send messages out, and to take money in--not to listed as the technology enables them to do.
They come at a time when there are far-reaching and important pieces of legislation regarding online technology, and some of these may be decided by a currently ignorant Congress in ways that are not good for the people the serve.
But I think Robert is opening the door in a way that will not allow the door to close again.
The thing about social media is that the people get to talk back. And talk back they will. Just as a few enterprises have learned that customers who talk back are good for them, politicians are about to learn that voters who talk back in the long term are good for them as well.
But when it happens, there's a little shift, a shift of power from the people inside the Beltway to the people they serve outside of it. We gain access. We gain a new way of talking, shouting, pleading, harassing and persuading the people who are elected or paid to serve us.
I think this is a good thing and I than Robert for breaking ground on our behalf.
