There’s an age-old analogy that keeps coming up in social media talks I hear. “You don’t need to know how it works,” the analogy goes, “just like you don’t need to know how internal combustion works to drive a car.”

It’s a fine analogy for a consumer using social media. It doesn’t wash for communicators.

The very fact that communicators need such knowledge shouldn’t surprise anyone. Most communicators working 20 years ago, for instance, knew how an offset press worked so they could manage the production of the best possible publication. The inner workings of social media are no different. If print is giving way to digital, we need to have as thorough an understanding of digital tools as we had of print tools.

Without this intimate knowledge, our use of social channels will be limited to the most common uses to which everybody puts them. With such knowledge, it becomes easier to innovate compelling commicatins that influence people and produce results.

RSS and Posterous are two examples.

RSS

An increasingly loud chorus has proclaimed that RSS is dead. “I don’t need RSS any more,” the argument goes; “I get updated on all the information I need with Twitter. Twitter has replaced my RSS reader.”

Twitter hasn’t replaced my news reader, but I can understand why a lot of people feel this way. Nevertheless, what these folks really mean is that the consumer use of RSS—subscription to feeds via a reader—is dead. RSS itself is very much alive, a vibrant protocol that has been woven into the infrastructure of the Web. News moves through the Web largely because of RSS. Even more noteworthy, RSS is undergoing an evolution to accommodate the shift of the Web to a real-time environment.

RSSCloud and PubSubHubbub are two protocols that turn the current RSS model on its head. RSS readers poll all of the feeds to which the user has subscribed on a regular schedule—usually every hour—to see if any of the feeds have been updated. RSSCloud and PubSubHubbub notify users of any updates to feeds instantly, pushing the update to the reader rather than having the reader pull it.

Several services have embraced PubSubHubbub while every blog on Wordpress.com (the hosted version of WordPress) produces RSSCloud-compatible feeds.

So far, there’s only one reader that can take advantage of RSSCloud, but these are early days. The use of these protocols will improve your ability to deliver news and information instantly, whereas today you may produce it instantly, but delivery waits for a user’s reader to check for updates.

Buying into the inaccurate “RSS is dead” meme simply limits your opportunities to find new and innovative ways to deliver content as quickly as possible.

But understanding RSS opens possibilities beyond those presented by the most nascent technological developments. I’ve been working with a client looking for an easy way to deliver news to employees globally that allows employees to tailor the kind of news they get form the company—personnel news, product and brand news, industry news, and so on. Without much budget for expensive server options, I advised that they use a simple WordPress blog as the back end, creating separate categories and delivering the posts through RSS feeds delivered via the employee portal. It’s a simple solution that lets employees select news by category as well as geographic region. It helped to know RSS could do that, and that portal technology makes it drop-dead easy to incorporate feeds into portlets.

Posterous

As for Posterous, most of the people I talk with who know about the service get that it’s a ridiculously easy way to post just about anything to the Web. Some also get its potential for distribution of information. For example, everything I publish to Posterous is automatically tweeted (the headline is the tweet while the shortened URL links to the rest of the item I’ve posted.) But the Austin American Statesman’s use of Posterous was eye-opening. The newspaper invited readers to email photos showing how they were spending a 100-degree-plus day. More than 70 photos were submitted that were repurposed into a gallery on the newspaper’s website and a page of photos in the print edition. The experiment left editors hungry for more; they shared ideas for using Posterous to chronicle a local sports team’s season, for instance. Again, the potential is huge for soliciting content from readers and then repurposing it in the paper’s other outlets.

How could communicators use Posterous on behalf of employers and clients? You won’t be able to figure it out if you’re not aware of its capabilities.

Understanding the technology that makes communication channels work isn’t rocket science. Twenty years ago, it was no big deal to hear communicators talk about publications they were producing “going two-up, four over four, with spot varnish, embossing, and full bleeds.” None of these communicators worked in print shops, but they knew the technology of the offset press because that knowledge helped them plan the most effective publication possible.

If the Internet is the printing press of the digital age—if the world truly is shifting away from tangible to digital media—communicators need to develop the same level of understanding of the tools or our ability to innovate will be severely limited and clients will look to non-communication alternatives who are able to innovate.

I’m not suggesting we need to be able to write code, program RUby on Rails, or manage a server any more than we were expected to create negatives or burn plates for print. But we need to grasp all the capabilities of the tools we’re using to communicate.

Am I wrong?