15th
My use of technology…
Corvida just asked me to describe how I use technology, and I thought a repsonse was worth a little navel-gazing —
As a PR person, a lot of my life revolves around so-called “client service.”
As a result, in tech PR (or in my case more specifically, startup tech PR), you use whatever your clients use — they use Jabber, you use Jabber, they use ICQ, you use ICQ, they use FriendFeed, you use FriendFeed, if they use Google Apps, you use Google Apps, if they use Basecamp, you use Basecamp, they use the phone, you use the phone…your workflow has to be supremely flexible and maleable. They use Sharepoint…you start complaining (there are limits, people).
And it’s even more complicated than that. If the people/influencers they care about talking to use Skype, you use Skype. If they use Mag.nolia, you use Mag.nolia.
See where this is going?
As a result, my use of technology isn’t structured for efficiency or usefulness, it’s structured for comprehensiveness and redundancy in the name of client service.
And…half of my clients make the stuff in the first place so I need to use Twine and FriendFeed every day just to stay intelligent on their business, trends, usage patterns, evolving attitudes towards the service, etc. or maybe even it’s just that a given service competes with my client’s own, and I need to understand each completely so as to be able play ball and compare/contrast and talk features, value prop, backend, overall strategy etc. with an analyst or journalist who I want to take a meeting.
I often feel left out of the lifehacking conversation, or for example the conversation going on right now about the Facebook Lifestream — it’s besides the point for me in practice (even if I do have an opinion on the matter). If it exists and has any degree of meaningful traction, I’m going to use it, end of story. This seems similar (but different) when compared to the problem that blogger friends of mine have — they try out most everything in order to review it, even if just in the context of a news-oriented post — but very few of those services actually make their way into their daily lives, even despite intention. Why? Because things move so quickly that it’s hard to sleep 7 hours a night much less give Social.IM another go-round, even if it rocks (and it does).
In that sense — journalists and bloggers are a great use case in figuring out what is most sticky — and PR people are a great use case in figuring out the relationships between various services and applications (and why whomever uses whatever in a given scenario).
Thoughts?
