Article posted on May 28
This a a post that I have actually been meaning to make for some time… so hopefully I am able to put to text what I am thinking 
The landscape of communications is changing. But it has always been changing. Something that is new about this change however, is that it is fragmenting and picking up speed. It used to be easy to be “pretty darned knowledgeable (PDK)” about various aspects of communication. Let’s take a web site as an example:
6 years ago it wasn’t very hard to be PDK about the elements of a website. How to do your HTML. How to put in pictures, and have buttons and links.
Then email became more than a communications tool. It became part of your marketing strategy. It “tied into” your website. Add analytics so your can track patterns between the two.
Enter search engines (ya, I know they were around before 6 years ago… but people didn’t start working to manipulate their rankings way back then nearly as much.) Everyone is after “google juice”. So now you have to know meta tags, the importance of domain names. Link structures. The best CMS. How flash or video relates to overall SEO.
Add mobile to the mix.
Then Social. Twitter. Myspace. Facebook. Freindfeed. Blogs.
Each one of these little fragments is a huge topic in and of itself. Now you might be able to reach the PDK level in Facebook… but guess what? You fell behind a bit in SEO, twitter, and something else in the meantime because they are continuing to fragment and advance as well.
It can all be a bit overwhelming.
But does it need to be? Perhaps our real problem is the feeling that we really need to know everything.
It reminds me of when object oriented programming really started to catch on. Old-school programmers hated it. They were used to programming in languages where they know how everything worked and why. Now they were being told, “don’t worry about it. Just call the method. It works. You don’t need to know why.”
They were so sued to being grounded. So used to knowing and feeling the landscape, that when they had to work with objects that they didn’t understand they felt they were drowning.
Perhaps we are the last generation with a hangup on needing to be PDK at so many things. Perhaps we need o come to grips with not being grounded, and instead learn to swim. When you swim you don’t need to know exactly where you are. you don’t need to know the landscape or footing. Just figure out what direction you need to head, and take the necessary actions to get there.
Instant access of data. Power of search. This things allows us to be smarter without having to know the information until we need it.
It may sound vague, but is this the future? Are the best swimmers going to be the people best able to determine the current situation and navigate a course, even if they had perhaps missed out on being completely “up to speed” on a few elements of it for a few months?
I don’t know for sure… but food for though.
When it comes to communicating online, I think the barriers to entry are getting lower and lower. But what that means is you have to become better and more creative at strategy (1), as well as demonstrating why your product or service is better (2) than the upteen million competitors in your midst. In addition, it is an individual’s ability to create and foster relationships (3) both online and offline that makes the difference. If you don’t have these 3 fundamentals down, you can fire all day on social networks and optimize your content till Google comes home, but it won’t necessarily get you over the line.