… and so are you!

There is a meme developing in my online tribe where people engaged in selling social media services are calling out other practitioners of social media who are making claims to be social media “experts”. The caution seems to be against some un-named other social media helper-person out there preying on businesses by claiming unearned expertise.

Let’s get this straight – if you made it to this post and you are reading these words, pat yourself on the back and give yourself a fancy gold star because you are now a social media expert. Anyone with the ability to get to this paragraph has all the qualifications to claim expertise in social media: You can read, you have some interface to read these words, and I assume you can type with your interface to leave a comment below (very subtle hint, huh). The entire premise behind social media is that the threshold for entry has been driven so low that everyone can play. It is exactly because everyone can Tweet, blog, comment, text, and in general get connected that this whole thing works. I’ve been throwing crap against the Internet wall to see what sticks for over 12 years. My mom just got her Facebook account about 3 months ago as an initial foray into social media. We are both experts at what we are doing online because we all create our own social media universe. No one can be me within my world better than me. Continue reading »

There are some folks having an interesting conversation about Gen Xers selling out on their ideals from our generational platform of slack and nihilism and fighting THE MAN. I was born in 1967 so I am on the leading edge of what most would consider Generation X so I have a pioneering spirit about my generation. I have a brother who is 4 years older than me and I can literally see the generational divide sitting between us in terms of world views, culture, and spirit – it’s like he’s my uncle more than my brother in the way we relate to each other. I have something to say about selling out and what it means to be a Gen Xer in 2009.

I sold out in my 20’s when I spent a several years working in an industry that treated me and everyone else like crap because it made me money. It was also easy and predictable. It wasn’t hard to go in every day and not think and just feed the machine and focus my real energy on my social life and music and things that really mattered. Like all easy and wrong things, I came to an impasse so I shifted to another phase of my life. Continue reading »