In his TED talk, “How Social Media Can Make History,” author and technology expert Clay Shirky explains: “Tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It’s when everybody is able to take them for granted.”

Shirky’s comment reminds us of two technology mistakes companies make:

1. They focus on attention-grabbing technology when they should focus on people. Serving people is technology’s purpose, and it should act as a facilitator rather than a star attraction.
2. They ignore emerging technology and stand pat with older technological solutions that once worked, but no longer do. Technological ignorance puts them behind the curve when these “shiny new tools” become socially adopted and engrained.

Shirky closes his presentation with a reality check and a call to action:

“Media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals. It is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups. . . And the choice we face, I mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world, isn’t whether or not that is the media environment we want to operate in. That’s the media environment we’ve got. The question we all face now is, ‘How can we make the best use of this media? Even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it.’”

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