The other day I was having a cup of tea with Kim White, co-founder of Marketing Media Hub, at the airport. She had a layover in Seattle and we had just enough time get together. The thing is that I had never meet Kim before and up until a couple of months ago I didn’t even know about her and her new company. We actually had a lot to talk about including strategic partnerships and working on the internet. There are actually a lot of people I am connected with now. Just take a look at my LinkedIn InMap. I am not only connected with old classmates and coworkers, I’m connected with people who I wouldn’t recognize on the street unless they looked exactly like their twitter avatar.

I’ve been having an ongoing twitter conversation with Jack Brumm of Pixel Wire Media in Boston. I’ve meet Jim Teresinski through a LinkeIn group and had a number of very interesting online conversations, and now he’s running his own LinkedIn group: Mendocino Wines. I’ve communicated with social media folks in Denmark, beer enthusiasts in Australia, a nonprofit in California and an aspiring film maker in Africa. It is also easier for me to stay connected with people I worked with years ago who now have new careers and business.

It is not that I am bragging about my connections. Many others have more connections than I do and I have always had a large circle of associates and colleagues. The internet has just given me a way to maintain connections and connect with new people I never would have met otherwise. For those involved in online social media the benefits are obvious but for others it is hard to explain how this all works. I think I have found the perfect video that ties all this together and it is not one of those slide shows that tell you how many cell phones are in China or how fast Facebook is growing. It is actually the perfect analogy of the convergence of art and technology.

I am not going to tell you the details of Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 2.0, go to this NPR report for that. The essence is that Whitacre, a composer, received a YouTube video from a young girl singing one of his compositions. This inspired a collaboration with over two thousand singers from all over the world that created something unique and amazing. When art that inspires and communicates is not only distributed via the internet but is also conceived and made in a virtual space, shows me that this whole internet thing is real. It is real for community, for art, for politics, for science and for commerce. Like anything else, some of it is good and some of it is bad but with artists like Eric Whitacre and his Virtual Choir it all is more enjoyable.

Let me know what you think of this video. I am all about the convergence of art and technology as well as social media marketing. Let me know if you would like a free analysis.

Photo Credit: Eric Whitacre