The Hartsock Agency

You don’t have to be fans of Lost to get what I’m about to blog, so don’t stop reading here.

“How Lost and Social Media Are the Same: Or How We All Survived the DotCom Crash and Landed on a very mysterious island called Web 2.0.”

The following are the ABCs you need to know to thrive on 2.0 island as paraphrased from Lost commercial:

A. Survivors are strangers but they must rely on each other to survive. “But if we can’t live together, we’re going to die alone.” (Matthew Fox aka Jack)

B. “There is a reason these people survived the crash -despite being strangers their lives are somehow still connected.”

C: The island is special, hard to find, has the power to heal, and it’s steeped in mystery. “It’s not an island, it’s a place where miracles happen..”

If you think of Web 2.0 in this metaphorical sense here are the key takeaways:

A. Social media relies on transparency, link love, viral buzz and the freely elicited aha’s from the island 2.0 community. To truly survive in Web 2.0 we have to be willing to share the abundance with one another, champion one another’s efforts and feast together at the collective bonfire.

B. There’s a reason we survived the dotcom crash (I did as a tech journalist), and many others did as technology leaders. I think the reason those of us, flying in our infancy on the Web survived was to take the lessons learned from the crash and have the opportunity to participate in Web 2.0 with a new focus on transparency, and feeding the community with strong, nutritive and resource-filled content.

C. Web 2.0, for folks who are scrambling to understand it, might seem foreboding and mysterious, but it really is a place where miracles can happen. Marketing miracles, community miracles, Twitter miracles, non-profit and for profit miracles all can co-exist and thrive on this island.

Stay on the island, join the bonfire and feed your soul.

P.S. For those of you who are spending way too much tweeting, facebooking, DIGGing on the island, and need a break – check out this link on LOST.