The day after President Obama addressed Congress I was watching CNN at my local gym the next morning at 6:00AM. The lead story of course was the address itself, but what happened next was surprising even to a guy who has been pounding the social media significance for three years now. The second lead story was the fact that Facebook and Twitter registered nearly 250,000 users during the course of the address and how powerful this medium and platform were becoming. Imagine that! Traditional mainstream media recognizing the impact of social media and how powerful it has become.
Later that day while traveling to meetings in Center City Philadelphia, National Public Radio held a one hour discussion from callers all over the United States offering their opinions on the power of social media networks. It seems sometimes like the world takes years to catch up to reality, but we finally are seeing the fruit of a long seeding period.
I remember my first gig in Hollywood in 1976 at Paramount Pictures as a gopher (production assistant =fancy name) running from the producer’s office to his office on the studio lot…………watching Fonzirelli on Happy Days and falling in love with Melissa Gilbert while she performed on “Little House on the Prairie” set……….then while driving hearing that a man named Ted Turner was going to change the world with an all news network. The host of the radio show was laughing, the guests were mocking and the entertainment industry responded through its trade papers, Hollywood Reporter and Variety with disbelief that anyone would propose such a ludicrous idea………..that people would watch news during the day instead of the Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
