One of the great things that social media has created is the ability to integrate all your activity. Facebook brings in feeds from so many places and then allows you to share just about anything you can find online. See a great video on YouTube, share it. Write a blog that your friends can enjoy, share it. You see the trend in my story. Share it.
That is what is great about social media, sharing. This simple gesture can have a positive influence on someone's day...or even life if you hit just the right message.
I am fortunate to have friends from so many different parts of my life, which also makes me fortunate to have had so many different aspects to my life. How do I share in this with them? I use Facebook as the center of my social world. If you dig into Facebook enough you will see that it has some really powerful tools that are fairly easy to use.
Facebook is not the only tool/community to focus on. This would be suggesting that social media ends with only one tool/community. What else can you discover? There are sites popping up all the time and there are also sites dropping off as well. It is a fertile environment for building and composting of ideas and technology. The future of these developments will more and more be leveraged on how well the teams share ideas and open themselves up to collaboration. Facebook was not built alone by Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter is not the result of a programmer's stroke of luck. These tools come from collaboration and teamwork. Can you imagine Microsoft opening up its API to developers in the way that Twitter has so far? If this did not happen, I don't believe Twitter would be "TWITTER".
Get out there and relearn to be social and drop that "all for me" attitude. Me, me, me is dead my friends. You do need to look out for yourself, but the dynamic has changed. You don't step on someone to climb up. It may be tempting in a down economy, but it is actually the worst time to do it. People have long memories and needing that favor may be closer than you realize.
Here's to you walking past the body and starting a new you, unless the current you is fresh like social media. Cheers.
These images are from Flickr. Click on each to see the photographer's that were kind enough to share them with us all.