This may seem a long post to share about social media in just a few sentences, so if you’re looking for a paragraph with few tips to use social media to help grow your business, let me warn you, this isn’t. This post is more about sharing my insights on social media and what I believe it still is.
I remember the first time I went online to share with one of my friends and my brother what was this Internet movement all about. It was beginning of 1999, and now that I see that big picture from another point of view, I had to admit I didn’t really knew what I was doing. I though I was teaching them ways to travel the world with the most accessible options. I showed them how to register to chat online, how to visit airlines’ websites, how to get tickets, send pictures, and search any related information about traveling. Downloading music was the most coolest things at that time and one of the most demanding tasks; my friends and classmates use to gather and learn how to download bunch of music songs and burn them on a CD. I still remember my brother shouting me, “make sure we have at least 250 songs on that CD… save memory space.”
Even when being social at the end of the 90s involved sharing with others and wow your friends in front of the computers, I sure never thought that what I’ve told them was what they had really understood. I mean, I saw the Internet potential based on my interest, and sure they did, with their own. As much as that one day they told me about the long hours they spent connected ‘discovering’ new things. There, in that precise moment, we started remarkably to separate from each other because of interest and things that really appeal to us, individually; but at the same time we were together insatiably surfing and endlessly devouring any cool idea we came up with and felt we could create something beneficial or take advantage of.
Today, more than a decade has passed and there is no much different on attitudes or behaviors from how we were those days. Social media is that insatiable desire to share with others the coolest things we believe could help them solve a conflict. Social media is even a more supportive net of people able to fight for convictions, beliefs, and dreams but now feeling proud to use or ‘wear’ their real names on what we call ‘tags’. We are in our houses, workspaces, libraries, alone maybe, but a few inches of a keyboard or cell phones to ask for advice, or give comments and suggestions to our fellas out there. We still travel, search information, download music, and now we can add to this list that we cook, we post pictures, we share every crazy or nice idea that came to our minds, and we do this believing that somebody in this vast network of Internet will find our articles, blogs, or messages so worth reading.
Definitely social media has brought openness into our lives helping us become, yes, more social. I used to wander how the other people I chat with looked like; now, when this may not be the case – at certain point – I think and act based on how I perceive my conversations flow in an environment of honesty and integrity. Those past days were harder to socialize while using technology: many people tended to disqualify this technology (computer and phones) and they even took time to categorize it as a way of corruption to our whole society. Today, this technology may be the same or worse base on the hands of those who use it. Good and bad things happens everywhere at any time; technology won’t make people different. How you use technology just will help you grow and extend your thoughts the way you work for it. In the 90s people were too skeptical about sharing their lives or anything to people through ‘machines’. Now, people are still cautious in the way they share their personal and professional lives – and these thoughts are what common sense brought in to this social game. what I’m trying to say is we all are the same persons just trying to cope with recent mediums to deliver what we believe, desire, and expect from this world.
As a personal experience, I’m happy being able to Skype with my sister, to tweet my friends and clients and let them know about their interests, to receive romantic messages when my husband Facebook me about where to travel or have a dinner. And what is funny about this whole thing, is that we all still have or find time to post in different blogs and people subscribe to us. that’s cool, isn’t it?… this social media is helping us to get what we want and ask for, faster. Believe it. Make good use of it. Next time when you’re wondering how useful this virtual social media can be for you, or your ideas, think no longer… just like it 🙂