Rex Miller (who I recently had the privilege to share lunch) wrote a thought provoking book, Millennium Matrix, where he describes the “eras” of change.

From Oral to Print to Broadcast to Digital. As I observed these eras, I realized that we went through these changes based on benefits. If we wouldn’t benefit from the change, we wouldn’t probably enduring the change problems.

What are the benefits?

1. Each time we move forward; we increased the impact/size of our audience. And 2) we save time reaching that audience.

I believe we are now in another era that’s not talked about in the book. It’s perhaps an extension of the Digital age. It’s the “social” era.

And even though we believe that the Digital age allowed us to have a limitless audience potential and the fastest speed delivery; social expands that. Allow me to introduce the words: limitless-er and fastest-er.

Social media is just that. The potential is so huge; we don’t have the words to describe it.

So why should we be doing social media communication? It extends our audience at such a huge rate and does it so fast that there’s no other way to do it.

But it’s got to be done right (strategy) by the right people (the best people on the bus in the right seats) with the right content (following the 80/20 rule of entertainment to marketing ratio).

But then again, that formula has been necessary for every era.