If you grew up around the same time I did, you probably know that this 1979 song from the Buggles is the answer to a trivia question. The trivia question is, of course, “What was the first video ever played on MTV?”

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Graph Expo just wrapped up in Chicago, and after a few days walking around the show and talking to customers at our booth, I’ve come to some conclusions about the state of the printing business. First and foremost, despite all the discussions and questions about the need for print in the digital age, the industry is alive, well, and innovating at a staggering rate. Printers were walking the floor looking for new techniques and technologies that would continue to push the limits of what we can do with ink on paper (or plastic, metal, wood, and a thousand other substrates). There are still lots of instances in which a computer monitor, smart phone, or iPad won’t get the job done.

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I just returned from a Social Media Strategies Summit sponsored by GSMI in San Francisco. Interestingly, among all the discussion of tools, strategies, case histories and metrics, no one brought up the subject of how to deal with the added workload.

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I have seen a number of posts about the differences between the relevance and effectiveness of B2C (Business to Consumer) and B2B (Business to Business) social media. As someone who has been employed in marketing for many years and used just about every communications tool since Morse Code, I think these discussions miss the point. Social media is all about P2P – i.e., Person-to-Person communications. If we’re treating our audience like we would with a commercial, print ad, sign or banner, we’re not listening, we’re merely generating additional noise.

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