I recently ran across a hilarious list of instructions from a 1950s telephone directory from Drumright, Oklahoma. It explains how to get the most out of your telephone service, with tips like "Answer calls promptly. It’s courteous to do so and often keeps the caller from hanging up– thinking you’re not at home." They also recommend in the book to "Use a natural, pleasant voice. Don’t whisper. Don’t shout." (See the whole list.)

This made me recall my friend Madeleine’s classic story of a person who, in the early 90s, once phoned in frustration to her association’s headquarters after being unable to fax a conference form. Turns out she wasn’t actually using a fax machine: she was holding the page up to the computer monitor and slowly "scanning" it my moving it upwards.

It cracks us up to think that people once found routine technology so confounding. And yet, all technology is bewildering to start off with. That’s precisely the way I felt a few weeks ago when I started using Twitter and Facebook. I really had no idea what it was for, how to use it, or why I, never mind any of my clients, needed it. I only started blogging a few months ago, after years of summarily dismissing the whole medium as a self-indulgent exercise in time wastage.

Oh, how quickly things change. Now I’ve set up several clients with blogs, I’ve started Facebooking and Twittering, and I’m becoming a convert of all this new social media stuff. I’m realizing that it was starting to make me look like an old foagie to keep shouting "Get a horse!" 

Last week I found out from Chris Brogan about a company called Cherp which bills itself as "an agency dedicated to finding brilliant ways to leverage the Twitter platform and network." Wha…? A whole agency devoted entirely to showing people how to write a 140-character text message? Sounds a little nutty to me.

It may seem awfully limiting to base a whole company on how to use one tool, but on the other hand, it’s a strange new era on the web. Social media really has taken hold, and has spread like wildfire. In the earliest days, a client would come to you and say, "I want a website," and you’d give them something with a few static pages. But today, having an online presence is so much more than just having a website. You need to be actively engaging in conversations with your customers online, and you need to be going to them, not waiting passively for them to find you from a Google search. Using the Web to its full potential means using all these tools that before now may have seemed silly, frivolous, self-indulgent or geeky.

I believe that a well-rounded agency nowadays should be taking all social media into account when building an online presence for a customer. You definitely need a website and a blog, you probably need to be on Twitter and Facebook and maybe Myspace or Linked In. Then there’s Digg and StumbleUpon and Delicious all those other new social bookmarking tools, which give people even more ways to find out about you. And who knows what else may be around the corner.

No, it’s not silly at all in the face of this hurricane of new technology to need a little hand-holding. Just give us a call, speaking directly into the mouthpiece. About an inch between it and your lips is right for best results. Use a natural, pleasant voice. Don’t whisper. Don’t shout.