There's a new online social media site called Respectance where you can create your own tributes and share your memories of the dead. I first learned of it from this article by Will Reisman of The Examiner.

There are at least 500 tasteless jokes to be made about this idea. I won't be making any of them. That's because the more I thought about it, and about this whacky world we live in, the more I decided this is probably going to be quite successful. These days people leave flowers and memorials along super highways. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people will gather in Paris and London today to mark the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana's death. The father of the man killed in that same accident will observe two minutes of silence at his famous department store.

This new site was co-founded by Richard Derks. And here's the positioning of it as provided in Mr. Reisman's piece:

The combination of an available emotional outlet with social networking features has led Derks and company to dub Respectance a form of emo-social media.

Whether or not Respectance will achieve escape velocity, it is nevertheless a very clean and appealing site with Google-like simplicity and none of the gladiola, funeral home, crucifix, and gravestone graphical schmoltz and related design weepiness and clutter you might expect to find in the emotional social world.

But I have a question. Can someone go there and lay down a tribute to a person they wish were dead?

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Here is a link to a very thoughtful, well-written item I saw this morning by Rob Paterson on The FASTForward blog. He opens with this:

Why is collaboration so hard in organizations? Every organization that I know tells me that it is hard. Hard - all but impossible! Why? Why? Can Social Media help improve collaboration? I have had no success with just the introduction of the technology. Is there something missing?

Mr. Paterson then offers the start of a very interesting discourse on the importance of context in the succesful adaptation of new technology. I think he's quite right. But I don't have a high enough IQ to further the discussion at his level. Alternatively, however, I can offer my much more visceral impression about why so many otherwise intelligent and well-run corporations are reluctant to embrace the new social media technology, for collaboration or any other pursuit. 

1. Fear. Implied in social media marketing and communications strategies is a loss of message control.

2. Lack of knowledge: Never having actually created a blog, wiki, collaborative site or other online community, the corporation doesn't know the first thing about how it is done.

3. Bad Advice: The people that corporations turn to first for advice about marketing, messaging, and communications – their traditional, establishment, mainstream PR agencies, for example — have a vested interest in the status quo. After all, if you make your living doing media relations, any substitute technology that sidesteps the old media is a threat to the existence of your establishment world. This is especially true since the new social media technologies are wickedly cost-effective, inexpensive to acquire, rapidly implemented, and easy to drive without wordsmiths, lawyers, and marketing mavens ten deep left and right and all around.

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I'm not saying television sportscasters are superfluous. I'm just saying some of them talk too much and say too little. So around here anyway, lots of people tend to mute their sets and watch the game while listening to the radio commentary of the same game. This is especialy true around here when the NFL gets going. The radio sportscasters on WBCN are terrific. People at the game tend to throw stuff, like snowballs, at the network booth crew widely believed to be in love with every team except the Patriots.

But last night there was a five to ten second delay between the Red Sox and Yankees baseball game in real time being broadcast over the radio and the near-real-time game being televised. Think about that. Thanks to the radio, I'd know the outcome of the next pitch before it was pitched.

Now I'm wondering, is this new? When did this happen. Is this being done to discourage us radio/tv combo types? Is it being done in case something happens in real time on television that would offend a nation? Is Janet Jackson in attendance? Are the television advertisers demanding this? That would make the most sense because no one un-mutes their TV to hear the ads. No body.

Please note that my posts this week have been way off the usual subject matter. That's because I think this part of August leading up to Labor Day is slower than even the time around Christmas and New Years. Even the email spammers seem to have gone off to the beach! Come September I hope to resume writing about the same old boring stuff, like the revolution in social media that is changing the world as we know it.

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