SPWD

Over the past year I have been, off and on, trying to wrap my head around this phenomena we call “Social Media”. At my past employer there were talks of how to incorporate social media, and sadly I left before anything moved forward on it. However, in the past few months I have really tried to take a look at this and grasp what social media truly is, why it is important to individuals, and businesses and how to capitalize using it. In this post, I am going to look at several popular social media technologies, sites and products, as well as examine the writing of others who are very active in social media, providing links to their ideas that have inspired me to take a deeper look into “social media”.

I first started to blog, half-heartedly, haphazardly and very much pointless in late 2005. I started a small little blog called South Platte Enterprise Notes – it was to be short postings about the business I was operating at the time, in an attempt to gain traffic to another web site, and potentially more clients/customers. Yeah, I made one post on that blog, and let it die. Then a few months later I made another post, and let it die again. I was a blogger, right? Wrong. I am still not a blogger, even though I have four or five blog properties.

I started this blog soon after moving and taking my last position as a web developer. I was going to blog about web design, modern techniques, PHP, Apache, give tutorials and all kinds of great information was going to be posted. Umm…yeah, Ok. I posted a few times….then let it die. Then posted some more, and let it die again. Do you see the pattern of death here? I do. Explanation comes later.

I had been using MySpace for a good number of years, but seen little value outside of entertainment and the ocassional reconnection to a friend from long ago. I still don’t see MySpace for much good outside of that. There are other tools that are much better for a number of reasons, the list is too long for this post, that’s for sure. Somewhere in there I started using Del.icio.us for saving my favorites online. Then came StumbleUpon. I didn’t even realize that these were considered part of the “social media” atmosphere, yet they allow a creation of a network, or groups, or followers…..hmm…community maybe?

Twitter was an accident for me. I believe I found it through reading Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog, regardless, he was the first person I followed. I then added my worship pastor and wife…though they don’t update much and since I see them face to face so often, it is kind of pointless, but I digress. Twitter, in the past two months, has really come to make more sense. A few short tweets about being unemployed had me several replies from users who have searches setup for keywords…they found me, provided some resources and I evaluated those resources. Even if I didn’t take advantage or use the resources, they still had my attention, and I was seeing their message, their product, their service. Interesting….

I also have had a Facebook account for a number of years. Do you remember back when you had to have a qualifying .edu educational institution email even to be able to sign up? Yeah, I don’t think it has been that way for a while now….I have done absolutely nothing on Facebook – and I mean nothing. Do I even remember the password? Do you know my password? Another item to update, keep track of and follow along with….now it’s just getting to be too many.

So what is all this social media anyway? Find out in part two.