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Bruce Hammond has a nice post about how communicating through social media has just become like second nature to him. So much so that he pointed out the irony of his debating the usefulness of social media using one of the primary social media outlets: A blog. I suspect I had the exact same strange sensation as Bruce did as I read the gobs of comments on this Acronym post about the number of educational offerings about social media.

Last night I got my election news by hitting refresh at Twitter’s mobile website. No television, no MSNBC.com, no radio: Just Twitter on my cell phone. And it was perfect. There were several people on my follow list tweeting about every 30 seconds, and I was as up-to-date as anyone else in the neighborhood. Perhaps more up-to-date, as my tweeple were watching all manner of news stations: CNN, BBC, all the major American television affiliates, etc.

Increasingly I find myself going to search.twitter.com for news. Did the Redskins win? A quick search there will tell you. A few members message me through Twitter more often than they call or e-mail me. And I know a Realtor who has gotten two clients from it.

Twitter is one of those tools that has now become invisible to me, probably like e-mail has become invisible to the average office worker. There are other tools like it that are invisible to their users.

Clay Shirky says "Communications tools don’t become socially interesting until they become technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when the technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen … and invisible is coming."

For many of your members, invisible is already here.

Tags: associations, social media, Clay Shirky, Twitter

Originally posted @ Ben Martin, CAE