The top two things about a recently completed weeklong stay in Myrtle Beach were definitely the 4- and 2-year-old boys who made the trip our first true family vacation. They had a blast while navigating lazy rivers and jumping from queen bed to queen bed. Their dad, meanwhile, had an even better time, bonding like he’s never bonded, with nary a worry in the world.

Which leads to the next-best thing about the mid-September vacation — a complete disconnect from social media. No email. No Facebook. No forums. Heck, no computer to begin with. I left it at home. Sweeter still, I just as well could have left my cell phone next to the Mac. The entire trip accounted for just two phone calls (and, eureka, no voice mails!).

It’s not that I dislike social media, which CBC heralds in this issue for its networking capabilities. Or digital media as a whole. I can’t imagine being a journalist and not having the ability to connect with people so efficiently —which is saying a lot, considering it wasn’t that long ago (1997, for me) when editors and reporters somehow managed without email, let alone Twitter.

On a personal level, social media platforms, particularly Facebook, have allowed me to re-connect with friends whom I had not heard from in 25-plus years. I’ve learned of deaths that I’m positive I never would have known about otherwise. The sense of community that comes with social media is very reassuring.

My beef with social media is that it too often poisons our focus. When someone is writing on Facebook via Blackberry about the great time that they’re having at Olive Garden, in good company, how great of a time could he really be having? How good could the company really be?

It reminds me of when I would get chastised at the work lunch table about 10 years ago. My crime? Reading the Plain Dealer and supposedly not paying attention to my colleagues. That was apparently a no-no — yet a decade later we now accept the 24/7 use of our social media tools or, worse yet, some of the actions that come with it, such as texting and driving.

Two days after finishing a vacation that included nearly 1,400 miles of highway miles, I awoke to news that the Transportation Department had proposed to bar truck drivers from sending text messages while hauling hazardous materials.

I realize that social media can be a great thing. But when we have to legislate a trucker from surfing the Internet instead of worrying exclusively about the 12,000 gallons of gasoline that he’s hauling — with just a white broken line separating him from my family — we really have to reevaluate our priorities.

Tis the season for strategic planning, which, in the world of publishing, can mean only one thing: Reader surveys!
By the time you read this, you’ve likely already been invited to fill out CBC’s reader demographic survey (cbcmagazine.com/survey). Soon behind will be our annual editorial survey. So, what’s the difference?
The reader demographic study helps current and potential advertisers determine if CBC’s audience is a good fit for their products and services. We ask readers to reveal everything from bare census-like facts, such as gender, age, and number of children, to more targeted characteristics, such as what type of day-trips you plan on taking in the next year.
In-between are several questions that focus on employment. It’s important for advertisers to know what industry you represent and where you’re at on the company ladder. We also try to get a grasp on how often you partake in networking and corporate events, which have been bread-and-butter topics in CBC since the magazine made its debut nearly four years ago. And new this year are several queries specific to your CBC tendencies, such as how you receive the magazine. That’s worth asking these days, considering we’re now available at 10 retail outlets — a major coup the last 12 months.
As much as Jackie Van Meter, our ad sales director, wants to see the answers to these demographic questions, I’m just as eager to learn what exactly you want to read about on the pages of CBC. That’s the intent of our editorial survey. Some of its questions are similar to the demographic survey. For instance, we ask what industries you want to read about. That is especially important to CBC, considering every issue of the magazine is dedicated to a theme, such as education this month. We also solicit your opinion on specific sections of the magazine. Which departments do you prefer? Which ones don’t float your boat? What are we missing?
A question on the minds of several readers last year centered on whether CBC was getting away from its networking and corporate event planning coverage. We weren’t. But at the same time, we weren’t packaging it effectively. Hence, we solved the problem by creating our Centerpoint section in 2010.
With that in mind, we can’t stress enough that you, as a CBC reader, dictate content. At the end of the editorial survey (as well as almost every survey we present), we ask for interesting and untold story ideas. We also ask you to suggest networking groups you want to read about. We’d like to think we listened to you last year. As we plan for our 11 issues in 2011, we’re all ears once again.