Lois Kelly On Social Networks

Washington DC

I met Lois Kelly last month in San Diego. Her new book Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing is a useful treatise on social networking and social marketing. She says young people today are actually indifferent to technology, belying a sense among some boomers that the "kids" are born technophiles. Instead, Kelly says, young people care much more about what the technology enables them to do and, in her words, they "just do it." "If a new technology creates something better, they'll just do that too and move on." That sounds right to me.

Kelly also offered the opinion that there is no such thing as "best practice" in this fast-moving, ever-changing world of ours. In her thinking, "it's really a living world of beta out there." I see her point, but it is just too glib and post-modern for me. As one who routinely studies best practices in leadership, organizational development, strategic planning and brand strategy, there is simply no question that best practices are alive and well and worth studying. We are not moving in most circles so fast that we are unable to reflect on excellence, learn from it and apply it to our own domains.