Deidre Sullivan and Daniel Luxemburg delivered the presentation below to over a hundred webinar participants from government agencies, private contractors, and even academia. It covers how social media can be used in marketing efforts by state travel agencies, the unique role social media can play as an information delivery channel, and also some new directions social technology is headed in the context of travel.

Last Monday Daniel Luxemburg and Deidre Sullivan gave a presentation at the Environmental Protection Agency about trend is social media and how organization can leverage those developments strategically. Click through to see the slides.
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[PROGRAMMING NOTE: I am going to start replacing words hyperlinked to Wikipedia with a hyperlinked right arrow (⇒) following the relevant phrase. This is a temporary solution to an issue with embedded link proliferation that I'll address eventually in a post, but basically I want to distinguish links included for background information from ones that refer to content that a post is "in conversation with" (for lack of a better term).]

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about what I referred to as status updating and digital publishing:

So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

Status updating is a more recent development than digital publishing. For evidence of this just compare the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Both saw plenty of blogging (both by private individuals and by professionals on behalf of publications), but only 2008 saw a huge role for realtime communications (again, and perhaps even more surprisingly, both in terms of individuals and organizations). The previous post linked to above also has some compelling numbers on this questions.

And all this realtime stuff has gotten a lot of attention, particularly from people who think about the evolution or technology and its social implications. Nick Carr⇒, for instance, started a series of blog posts called “The Realtime Chronicles” almost a year ago in which he (somewhat facetiously) announced that “Real time is realtime“:

I’m glad to see that “realtime” is officially one word now rather than two. It’s an update long overdue. That space between “real” and “time” had become an annoyance. Looking at it was like peering into a black hole of unengaged consciousness, a moment emptied of stimulus. It was more than an annoyance, actually. It was an affront to the very idea of realtime. As soon as you divide realtime into real time it ceases to be realtime. Realtime has no gaps. It’s nonstop. It runs together.[...]

Realtime is our natural state – it’s what we share with the other animals – and now at last we’re going back to it. Listen to the birds. They’ll tell you all you need to know: realtime is a stream of tweets. Yesterday, when he announced the twitterification of Facebook, the realtiming of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg said, “We are going to continue making the flow of information even faster.” The first one to remove all the spaces wins.

I think Carr may have been a bit premature, but only slightly. Realtime arrives for real when the technology is in place to make that flow Zuckerberg describes really and truly fluid. That’s finally starting to happen, though it’s still sort of around the bend for the vast majority of users.
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