Through the Doors and Beyond the Lobby...Welcome to the New Company

Recently, Vincent Hunt of SurfaceBurn wrote an absolutely brilliant post explaining Social Media entitled There is Nobody in the Lobby…Intro to Social Media. When I say brilliant, I mean absolutely, positively without a doubt brilliant. He explains social media with a visionary, and yet simple, scenario of an office building.

From his post:
An orchestration of web services all tied together, powered by the individuals who have something authentic to say, and are not afraid to say it. Each door on this corridor represented a service. MySpace was room 101 and Facebook was room 102, Twitter was full of clamor, it was room 105, and with THIS revelation I understood even the more, that IF we do not get off the couch – and start walking into these rooms and saying something, we will be left in the lobby.

I found myself envisioning the office building. This massive steel structure filled to the top with people. People of all ages, race, personalities, opinions, and ideas running from room to room in an exuberant, mind-altering speed… Conversations bouncing from wall to wall… Ideas forming in one room, only to disappear and explode in another.

I wanted to expound upon his idea of the office building analogy. I wanted to put more thought into the idea of Social Media being an endless steel structure jutting high into the sky, the steel and glass glistening in the sun before pushing into the clouds above.

Welcome to Social Media Corp. The largest non-Fortune 500, non-commercial, non-capitalistic, and utterly EXPLOSIVE company on the planet.

You can leave your money outside because ideas, content, community, and collaboration are the currency. It is the only company in the world where you are CEO and deep-pocket commercialism is clamoring to get inside. Where they find themselves handing each other business cards in the lobby and trying daily to join in the hallways.

You will find that every room and every floor is different and yet oddly connected.

We are all employees of this new company. We choose to spend time investing in the rooms we deem fit. There is no upper-management or lunch break. There is no 401K or vacation time. There is only the content and the community behind it.

And the community is building… stretching…expanding. There are daily breakthroughs in architecture to build it higher, stronger, and wider.

We are the employees, the architects, the CEOs, and the investors. We are the company.

I cannot do Vincent’s post justice. He wrote with a touch of clarity that I could only hope to mimic. Read it. Write about it. Build on it.

This is where we become explosive…through the doors and beyond the lobby.