I am a big fan of crystal clear communication in part because I really feel like I should be much better at it myself. As I delve into Social Media and really try to separate the hype from the really useful I happen to come across this post from a fellow EMCer Len Devanna - Social Media 101 by Common Craft. That Common Craft video is right up there with the UPS whiteboard guy

Last month, I caught up with an old co-worker that had hung up the sales bag and decided to start a business in the Sales Productivity arena. His company is http://www.whiteboardselling.com/ and I can see the potential.  Ever since I first learned of X-Plane from Business 2.0 magazine, I have been a big advocate for visual communication. YouTube, Flickr and the sort have provided an open platform for this type of communication.  To take it a step further I will relate something I was turned on to recently by Paul Taylor during one of his presentations in FL.

Paul was providing a bunch of State & Local Government employees with a bunch of ideas that they could openly “steal” i.e. borrow from other similar organizations around the US. He cited the Library of Congress’ efforts to publish some of their photography collections on Flickr. One of the goals was to leverage the use of Folksonomies to get better meta-data on the pictures by letting a broad set of viewers comment on the photos. The idea was that a crowd could help provide better background information faster than one or two employees at the LOC doing all the research themselves.

While that is cool in and of itself, it was the broader point that LOC didn’t pay a dime for this infrastructure where they might have 5 years ago. Paul got the audience thinking about leveraging existing Internet platforms rather than building your own. There were lots of other examples cited where citizens stood up their own sites and back-filled for services that they were not getting from their local government.

Visualization will become so important in the education of our next generation of kids because we need them to learn more, faster and the concepts will be that much more complex.  3-D browsers are around the corner and new aggregators of information such as Cooliris‘ Previews and PicLens are giving us really cool ways to present and review image and video. So, our ability to “Splane” ourselves and the information we are sifting through will increase exponentially. For a good summary of new browsing tools see Rummaging through the Internet.

In my last post, I had closed with the idea that we would delve into some of the potential opportunities from the ideas I had posted and then I digressed above. But, lets take a stab at the opportunity presented from the trends above. Some night clubs already have the ability to post text messages up on a screen and Disney has a Monsters ride that meshes text messaging into it. I could see people sending in pictures and videos as well and using PicLens and a Video DJ to drive the content up on the walls of Social Media Theatres. AMC is going digital so it isn’t that much of a stretch to see this in the pre-show. OK – that’s freebie #1 but I hope you kick back some shares in the company you start to develop the idea. (Let me know if this is already under development)

I will pick up where I left off from the previous post on the next one. I’m finding that I am going to need some good theme mapping tools to keep all this stuff straight and link all of my communications appropriately. I don’t know if something like that exists yet other than mind maps.