If you haven’t heard, some social media services have been cavalier with users’ privacy recently. There are investigations, changes in terms of service, and media coverage with talking heads expressing everything from complacency to outrage.
It’s also the 25th anniversary of AOL, the service that gave us all that wonderful welcome to electronic connections, “You’ve got mail!” Everytime I heard that, even on my sloooooooooooooow rural connection of 28,000BTS in the beginning, I felt welcomed, comforted that someone was reaching out to me. With time, that feeling passed into concern then distrust as the level of spam increased. AOL is now a struggling company, a relic of the not so distant online past.
Fast forward to the present and there has been a torrent of new social media services emmerging lately, and those that have been around only a short while have numbers of users previously unimaginable, which is why I’m writing this post. We can’t see the future!
If you are doing business of any kind on line, it is imperitive to learn how to use the tools and services available. It is also imperitive to understand NOTHING, and I mean really NOTHING is FOREVER! What is popular, top of the search results, most talked about, highest number of users, WHATEVER! may only be “all that” for a very short period of time. Even more important is that when you are connecting online, it is the individual relationships that you develop that have the real value.
I treasure my online networks! The relationships that I have developed with my followers and friends are positive, uplifting, inspiring, and encouraging. My focus has been and will continue to be to promote my brand, my core principles and be open-minded when connecting with social media. My service of choice is Twitter (I’m @bgreen) and I can be found on many others as well.
If you have any comments about this topic, any news on up and coming services or tools you would like to share, or have a question about social media, please share below. Thanks for taking the time to stop by!
