Do you find that trying to learn social media is confusing, confounding and generally flummoxes you? Do you wish for a time when you didn’t have to worry about whether you needed to buy a book a Kindle, or download a PDF or just get the hardback version?
Don’t feel lonely or left out. There are thousands – probably millions – in the same boat as you.
Look at it this way. History has left some of our most famous folks in the same boat. Benjamin Franklin never sent out a tweet. Alexander Hamilton never checked in to his favorite watering hole with Foursquare. Franklin D Roosevelt never used a credit card. Jonas Salk never used a Pentium II computer.
So if they never had to deal with a Facebook update status, why should you, right? If Ansel Adams never had to post his latest shots to Flickr, why should you?
Actually, I think a lot of those historical figures would have felt right at home. Imagine John Lennon hanging out on Twitter. Think of what Ben Franklin would have done with his Facebook page. Picture Pablo Picasso showing off his latest artworks using Instagram.
The thing is…it’s all been done before. Everything got shared before. It just was done using different sharing methods. Social media gives you a new method to do the same old stuff, on a much wider scale.
One senior citizen executive was heard to say once, “I’m too old to learn social media.” Actually, no, you’re not too old. You’re too lazy. There are senior citizens doing social media every day and loving it. Just like there are young people who don’t give a hang about it. If you don’t want to do it, admit it. Just don’t say that you’re too old, or too busy, or too distracted, or too whatever.
Ernest Hemingway would have loved Twitter, after he got through making jokes about it. The 140-character limit would have fit his writing approach perfectly. Of course, most of his tweets would probably have been crap, as he put it:
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Ernest Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
But hey, he did come up with some masterpieces along the way. As we all will.
