Have you heard about Aston Kutcher twitter incident recently? You can check it out here and here, if you haven’t, and his post in his blog.
What is social media anyway? And why is it such a big trend now?
I’m not a social media expert, nor working as a social media spokesperson. But I use them, not only one but quite a lot.
Let me share how my “addiction” is started.
Personal branding
I started working professionally as web developer, because that’s my passion since I was graduated.
My exposure to the Internet in late 90, made me experiencing creating a unique email address like als9_kar which is a abbreviation. Later, I learned that email address should be professional, so I revised it into kartika9. And I’ve been using that since my university year.
I use kartika9 for almost my online identity, because I feel personal branding is important.
Having an online profile, either it’s professional or merely for fun, has advantages and disadvantages.
One of the biggest challenge is privacy. Because we don’t own the platform, most of the time users are at the mercy of the platforms. Which most of the cases, it tends to put user at disadvantage because of they want to “sell” the users’ data. Some of my friends don’t exist in social media platform because of this. Some of my not-so-tech-savvy friends doesn’t really aware what they can do and what they shouldn’t do. So, simplest approach is not even entering it.
The advantage? Of course, you made yourself is more reachable in this digital era.
I always think that existing in different platforms is, I can connect easier with people from different interests. That’s the benefit of social media I perceived.
Facebook and Twitter era
I joined facebook in late 2007 while I was in Australia and I learned about twitter around late 2009 while I’m working in Singapore. And I’m still learning how to make my connection grow.
I use facebook to connect with my childhood friends, share photos or creating events. Basically day to day interaction with my friends. Then I used twitter as my knowledge source, I read tweets more often than I read newspaper or watch news.
Then started to groom my profile for other social media (and blogging) platform, like LinkedIn, Google+, Quora, Tumblr, and the most recent one is Diaspora.
The connection
Despite that I think I’m not that social in my real life, surprisingly I found that I can be social in those network. I open myself easier in those network, maybe because I feel I still have some space? I also think that networking in social media starts to replace networking in real life. You can find lots of different social media nowadays with their different markets. But I can be wrong, because some people are just not comfortable with engage online-ly with whatever reason is.
In fact, I found my new role through linkedin network.
So, to close this post I’ll ask you, how do you see yourself in social media? Do you use it or do you hate it? And what is the reason behind it?