Guagua Pública

For you kids, this is a rolodex...

A few days ago, inspired by a recent article on young new filmmakers in Puerto Rico, I became curious about this new generation. I wondered how well they were connected and how aggressively they were using social media. According to industry trends, and personal observation, I expected this group to be highly connected.

What I found was shocking! While they might be connected and very active within their group of friends and family, outwardly, they didn't appear to grasp the importance of social media for their careers. Of course, it's also possible that they have their career and personal lives separated, but that still flies in the face of the new rules of social media.

When I was a young upwardly mo-bile professional, I was told that my success would be directly proportional to the size of my Rolodex. Of course, with the advent of social networks, everything has changed. Now, I'm here to tell you that "your success is now directly proportional to the size of your social graph."

Now it's hard to be definitive about my informal search for these creatives, but I think that highlights a corollary to my new rule of thumb. Your success is also directly dependent on your findability. One of the things I've learned from Twitter is that it makes you very findable. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a great website (or preferably a blog), with a lot of relevant content.

It also helps to have content which cross references other content. Like for instance, I tried to collect as many local creative types as I could find, and I put them onto a new Twtter List called Puerto Rico Creatives. Follow it, for the latest from some of the leading creative people on the island. I just realized that I forgot to add the creative people that I already knew, to the llist. Doy.

This brings me to probably the biggest surprise of my hunt. Out of 12 I think I found three on Twitter.  These three provided me with leads to find many more creative people in Puerto Rico. However, many that I found in my search had their Twitter feed locked. I was like "What the...?" For me, this defied explanation.

I had never even heard of most of these Twitter users and based on their follow counts, not many other people had either, so what gives? In general, the percentage of Puerto Rican Twitter accounts that lock their feeds was significantly higher than any other community I have encountered. What could be going on here?

The only conclusion I could make from my experiment, was that, in general, there are too many people who still believe that they live and work in an economy built on scarcity. Of course, that would be a really disempowering belief. In my opinion, accepting that most of us live, work, and play within an abundant economy, is the hardest paradigm shift for people to accept. Unfortunately, it's probably the most fundamental change in the content industry since the invention of television.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: TOKY Branding and Design