I’ve been joking that Saturday Night Live is going to do a fake Colorado Ad Campaign: “Wildfires, Six Foot Lizards and Batman Villains Live: Come Live the Adventure”.

The reason that hoke’s even worth trying is that every one of those items had the reach they did because of Social Media. That there is “Social Media” isn’t news. What is news is that networks built on Social Networks are literally overthrowing old school governments, companies and ways of solving problems.

Waldo Canyon Fire burned an area larger than Manhattan. Before it was out, it was already the most expensive natural disaster in Colorado history. It’s out, but unless the tourists return, the long term damage is going to be far higher. Someone’s six foot tropical lizard chewed through it’s leash and escape. It’s where abouts are still unknown. And, now, up the road in a Denver suburb, a man who described himself as “The Joker”, now charged with 142 different counts, showed up a movie premier, leaving 12 dead.

Two of the three events were national and international news. That’s nothing new. What’s new is that many people found about them via social media before they hit traditional news services. The hashtag #WaldoCanyonFire on Twitter was the center of the action around the Waldo Canyon Fire. For the self-described Joker’s #AuroraShooting, it was Reddit.

With our dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousand followers, friends and readers, everyone is a journalist. We can instantly break into our follower’s (and some friend’s) lives, their regular programming, for instant updates. And, sometimes, the best reporting doesn’t even come from the same time zone. During Waldo canyon, in some cases, I received breaking news tweeted by someone in Massachusetts that originated from a Denver TV station. In other cases, I alternated between pictures my wife tweeted from within the evacuation area and TV station’s live streams from cameras just outside it.

GigaOm and others have called it crowdsourcing the news. For some people, the first time they saw this phenomenon, was with the Arab Springs. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other social media are being used to report and respond to news immediately.

We seem to have mastered the immediate part. If you can get the need out in 140 characters, people respond. Massive rallies appear in Tahrir square, sleeping bags materialize at an evacuation center before the evacuees arrive, donations pour in for shooting victims.

A lot could be said about how, since everyone is a journalist, there’s a massive need to learn to be journalists: to question things before retweeting, to have ethics about how they shoot their mouths off on Facebook, etc.

And, I think the more interesting story is what happens after the immediate, after the wildfire is extinguished, after the Egyptian government collapses, after the horror at the latest mass shooting fades. We don’t seem to have a mechanism to continue to harness the energy of Twitter.

In the case of Egypt, it wasn’t the twiteratti that won the election. It was an old school political organization: the Muslim Brotherhood (official site, wikipedia). Here, Waldo Canyon Fire is over but the effort to organize an grass roots effort to help local businesses has gotten very little traction.

But, the most incisive summary was probably “Sadly, Nation Knows Exactly How Colorado Shooting’s Aftermath Will Play Out” in, of all places, The Onion:

According to the nation’s citizenry, calls for a mature, thoughtful debate about the role of guns in American society started right on time, and should persist throughout the next week or so. However, the populace noted, the debate will soon spiral out of control and ultimately lead to nothing of any substance, a fact Americans everywhere acknowledged they felt “absolutely horrible” to be aware of.

I don’t think that state of affairs will continue. It’s not a question of “if” the internet and social media will be used to supplant old school political organizations (like the Egyptian Brotherhood) by organizing the power of the massive numbers of engaged Twitter, Reddit and Facebook users. It’s a question of when.

Last December, a piece called the (B)end of History in Foreign Policy argued that we’ve entered a new age. At the level of governments, the piece argues, like we once shifted from empires to modern nation-states, we’re now shifting from nation-states to a world of networks. International news —for example Al Queda and the Arab Spring— has been driven by loose networks for at least a decade.

Bringing that back around to life here in Colorado —and yours— the Social Networking challenge in our business and, more importantly, in the lives we work to live, is to master social media to build comparable networks. While old school hierarchies still lumber on, that’s not where the action is and that’s certainly not how we’re building the future.

A start, perhaps, is to not stop discussing this issues when the horror fades. In that vein, I plan to write several follow-on blog entries in the near future. If you have ideas and thoughts, contact me via Twitter (@Coyote4til7) or our contact form. If you’d like to comment, I’ve cross posted this as 4til7.com/beyond-social-journalism

For many people, disaster stories are told in stats. For them, Waldo Canyon Fire has burned over 18,000 acres —an area larger than Manhattan— destroyed 346 homes, damaged 50 and killed 2 people. In direct costs, that becomes numbers like  $110M (the value of the homes lost) and $13M (the cost to fight it through Tuesday). Then you add in everything lost in those homes, the cost to rebuild Flying W Ranch as well as the trails and other things that this area is known for, and the direct costs are going to be much much higher.

Today, I spent time at the Waldo Canyon Disaster Recovery Center. I heard an entirely new side to this fire.

Marge and her family own a Days Inn in Manitou Springs. When Manitou Springs was evacuated, they had to refund every one of their customers. Now, even though Manitou Springs is open and the city wasn’t damaged by fire, the tourists haven’t returned. After three years in business, they were about to expand the hotel. Instead, today, she spent a lot of time shaking her head and staring into space.

Another person I met this afternoon was Nan. Fifteen years ago she and her husband bought the Pantry restaurant in Green Mountain Falls. The Pantry has been there for sixty years. They’ve been able to re-open but the number of customers each day is far less than half of what it normally is this time of year.

From there, their stories were almost exactly the same. The fire didn’t damage their businesses or towns but the tourists haven’t returned. Business is so low, they can’t pay their day to day expenses. Like many of the businesses from Old Colorado City to Manitou Springs and up the pass beyond Green Mountain Falls, tourists are the majority of their business.

Many people know that there’s a basic fact of life in most retail businesses: you make most of your sales in the month before Christmas. For some businesses, a bad Christmas means they won’t be open for the next Christmas. For the stretch that includes Nan and Marge’s businesses, the middle of June to the end of July is their Christmas. This is the stretch that lets them catch up on bills, work like mad and save enough money to almost make it to the next summer. If they’re careful, they can borrow a little bit to bridge the time until mid-June when they’ll start the cycle again. And normally, it’s a good cycle. Enough for Nan and Margie’s businesses to employ over thirty people.

This year, there’s a big left curve in that cycle. When Margie kept shaking her head and saying they were about to expand the hotel, it was the closest she could come to saying what was really on her mind: if the tourists don’t come back —if people don’t come— and come soon, her family won’t be running their Days Inn soon.

July 4th isn’t a day anyone expects an office, even a disaster recovery office to be open. But, I heard these two stories back to back. In fact, when I was talking to Margie and her daughter, Nan was already waiting. How many more businesses are living the same story right now?

At times, there were over a thousand fire fighters battling the fire. Many of those fire fighters, their equipment and their air support came from outside the city and outside the state. Those fire fighters have done (and are doing) an incredible job. In the next few days, they’ll probably contain the fire. In the next few weeks, it may be gone entirely. But the wave of fire that rolled out is doing something else as it is rolled back: it’s pulling hard below the surface. That pull is being felt far beyond the burn line, trying to pull things under and pull them away.

In the bleakest stretch, when some worried the fire would explode across a much larger of the city, Jerri Marr of the U.S. Forest Service echoed that back to the press: “someone said you guys were talking about the fire going in so many different directions, are you discouraged by that, have you lost hope?” I remember her pausing before answering the question. “Boy, I just want to let people know, we have not lost hope. At no point in this fire have we lost hope. We have nothing but hope and nothing but belief. ”

We’re going to work long and hard to rebuild what’s been lost. We’re going to recreate it as something even better. But, people are missing all of that. All across the area, people feel the pull: the tourists that haven’t returned, locals who are staying home and businesses are holding back. The power of the undertoe is fear. But, of what? Of the fire? The fire fighters have won the war and are in mop-up operations. The fire’s teeth have been pulled. We beat it.

And now, we have to beat the undertoe. Unlike fighting the fire, it doesn’t take any special skills to beat the undertoe. Nan and Margie really only want one thing: people to return. Beating the undertoe means calling a friend that cancelled their trip and asking them to come now; there’s a Days Inn that’s waiting for them. It’s inviting a friend from Denver to come down for dinner in Green Mountain Falls. It’s taking the kids downtown to Uncle Wilbur’s fountain and an ice cream.

Colorado Springs is a beautiful, wonderful place. Many of us moved here because this place is where we’re alive. That same thing draws friends from across the country to visit. To beat the undertoe, all we have to do is remember that. We have to live the life that brought us here and that brings our friends to visit.

Beating the undertoe is simple: get back to living.