Are Southern Accents Contagious?

I am in Savannah this week for a talk with teachers at the city’s fabled school of arts and design. It’s my second visit tot the city, and almost as soon as I set my bag on the ground at the airport taxi station, I was overcome with the irresistible urge to speak in a Southern accent. I almost did — a lady on line ahead of me asked a question, and it was all I could do to hold onto my New York/New Jersey/Northern California cadence, a 50-year plus work-in-progress that one might think is undoable. But undo I almost did. I’ve seen it happen to others. Years ago, a college girlfriend, whose family hailed from New England, moved to South Carolina and 18 months later she easily could have passed for a lady in a Tennessee Williams play (”lemonade, lemonade … made in the shade”). Didn’t make sense — and it didn’t seem right. But over the years I noticed the effect on other people.

So what is it about southern accents that make them contagious, if in fact they are contagious. I’ve decided to crowdsource this question, here on this blog and through several social networks. But to get things started, here are a few pet theories of mine, developed at different times over the years, reflecting the different stages of evolution of my cynical self, which leans neither North, South, but probably East.

Bubble Bathing on the Harvard Business Review Blog

Very interesting entry yesterday on the Harvard Business Review blog (one of my new faves). Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, has posted a short, sharp screed about the “social media bubble,” complaining that it is “largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.” I’ve got many issues with the logic of Umair’s argument. At times, I can’t tell if he’s complaining about the failure of social media to live up to its own hype or the failure of social media to live up to the early hype of the Web in general (as when he writes, “there’s this old trope: the Internet runs on love. Equally, though, it’s full of hate: irrational lashing-out at the nearest person, place, or thing that’s just a little bit different.”). And I can’t yet tell if Umair wants to save social media from itself, or whether he just wants to burst the bubble (he’s in the industry, so I am betting on the former). But I do like the he’s chosen a forum like the HBR blog to launch this conversation. At the moment, I see 57 comments from what looks like a broad range of readers. And he’s promising a follow-up on “we can do” about this sad state of affairs. I’m waiting for the next post impatiently. This is an important conversation and I hope Umair guides it well.

Innovation by “Design”: The Case for Social Media

Good post by Roberto Verganti on the Harvard Business Review blog. Topic is how “user-centered innovation” is not sustainable…. It’s an interesting perspective, and one that might add depth to the discussions many businesses are having today about the design and implementation of social media. The bias in this world — and it’s a good one — is for user experience. But our rational obsession with the user can easily obscure the difference between the work that UE/UI professionals do and the work that social-media innovators do. Both are important, but it’s important to see them on different horizons, to borrow from the old McKinsey model for corporate growth. Even Facebook — a company that has developed the gold standard for user experience in social media today (a standard that CEO/founder Mark Zuckerberg proudly calls “elegant organization”) — will sometimes ignore the crowd and bet on a feature, a functionality, a concept that will play big in the future (i.e., across a later time horizon).

Enterprise 2.0, Games, and the “Two-Year Lag”

Hutch Carpenter, VP of Product at Spigit, has a nice post about the “two-year lag” that separates Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 adoption. I like the lineup of technologies in this review — from wikis, to blogs, to microblogs, to location-based mobile apps, etc. But it really gets interesting as Carpenter wraps up, noting that the latest stuff is not just about tools but the rules of social engagement. This has always been the case — and social media tech consultants have lectured on the topic ad naseum — but what’s new today is how game logic is getting woven into the user experience.

Do IT People Matter?

Recently, I attended a workshop at a management consulting company where a very smart social media practitioner blithely dismissed IT as an important stakeholder on social media projects. There was a time when many agreed that IT doesn’t matter (Nicholas Carr’s argument that IT is no longer a competitive differentiator, because every business has it), but lately the rap is that the IT professional doesn’t matter. It’s an unfortunate view — it’s not only disrespectful, but way short-sighted. Yes, many great, emergent Enterprise 2.0 projects can be launched in the cloud, on a personal credit card, without the knowledge or consent of IT. But that’s just a snapshot of where we are today, and it would be a mistake for people to conclude that all things 2.0 and in the cloud leave IT on the sidelines.