Tools don’t mat­ter, and the best ones get out of the way, allow­ing peo­ple to con­nect more eas­ily and effec­tively. That was my big take­away from last Friday’s second-annual Blog Potomac.

Obsess­ing about “what’s next” in online ser­vices and tech­nol­ogy saps too much valu­able atten­tion away from what’s really impor­tant: con­nect­ing with peo­ple. We need to stop obsess­ing on what comes after Twit­ter and focus instead on how best to con­nect to, com­mu­ni­cate with and relate to our clients, col­leagues and consumers.

Here’s why: The inter­net, with all of those fun time-sync tools, is sup­posed to make con­nect­ing with peo­ple more effi­cient. Social net­works, blogs, microblogs and forums destroy the pre­vi­ously pro­hib­i­tive bar­ri­ers to effi­cient com­mu­ni­ca­tions: mov­ing peo­ple phys­i­cally around the planet and mak­ing sure they’re in the same place at the same time. But the down­side of all of this effi­ciency is that too many of us lose track of the for­est for the trees.

Imag­ine obsess­ing the way we do about cool tools in the ball­room at the local Mar­riott, where many a meet­ing is held. The phys­i­cally con­ve­nient, afford­able hotel with rooms for vis­i­tors and plenty of elbow room and resources is not the focus, but encour­ag­ing con­nec­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, brain­storm­ing, relationship-making and busi­ness is.

Hotels, con­fer­ence cen­ters, mes­sage boards, instant mes­sen­gers, social net­works and blogs are just com­mu­ni­ca­tion aids — the jour­ney, not the des­ti­na­tion. Even Sec­ond Life, World of War­craft, Xbox Live, MMOGs and MMORPGs are more about real peo­ple spend­ing their real lives with each other than about wan­ton sex or video games.

So, why has asyn­chro­nous global com­mu­ni­ca­tions reduced liv­ing, breath­ing peo­ple into user IDs and han­dles? At Blog Potomac, folks like Shel Holtz, Liz Strauss and Scott Monty all men­tioned how per­sis­tently impor­tant to their prac­tices the hum­ble, hundred-year-old tele­phone is when it comes to con­nect­ing, espe­cially dur­ing a cri­sis. I moved back from Berlin pri­mar­ily because folks wanted to get me into the room, take a look into my eyes and see how firmly I shake hands — all things I believed didn’t mat­ter as long as I did the work. Not true!

I had started think­ing about these sort of things at the Social Media Camp NY in 2008 when I heard a talk by Howard Green­stein and Dean Lands­man on “What Old Media can teach New Media: Media Con­ver­gence & Inte­gra­tion, Social Media, and Pro­fes­sion­al­ism.” Long story short, Green­stein and Lands­man posit there is a direct evo­lu­tion­ary link between the Las­caux cave draw­ings and the blog­ger. I agree with them.

The con­clu­sion is that what makes dig­i­tal PR and social media mar­ket­ing chal­leng­ing and new is not the tech­nol­ogy or the tools, it is the unique cul­ture of online con­ver­sa­tion. If you focus too much on the tools, you might for­get that vir­tual com­mu­ni­ties are not vir­tual. If you don’t learn to love, respect and appre­ci­ate vir­tual online com­mu­ni­ties as real homes to real peo­ple, as real as the vil­lage square, the parish hall, the Paris Tabac or the alumni group, then you’re under­es­ti­mat­ing the pas­sion, loy­alty and deep per­sonal rela­tion­ship found there.

This lack of under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion will almost always result in a tragic faux pas, the likes of which may result in brand sui­cide. You can eas­ily avoid this if you under­stand the oper­a­tive word in the phrase Vir­tual Online Com­mu­nity is “com­mu­nity.“Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post