Diving In

I keep telling school and higher ed colleagues that the only remedy for their anxiety about social media tools is to dive in and start using them. But diving in also means you're going to have some belly flops along the way. For me, someone who really wants to "do it right," those flops can sting. Little things have tripped me up: not realizing that I had to put a space after "retweeting" on Twitter so that the person I quoted would see the message as well RT@bobjohnson for example. Not knowing that the comment I posted to a blog and then pointed others to would not appear until the owner of the blog okayed it. Not adding tags to blog posts to increase the chances that anyone would see them much less read them. Tethering my Facebook and Twitter updates and then not knowing how to untether them. The result being several erroneous and irrelevant updates on both sides. All of these are minor slips along my learning curve. No doubt there will be more.

I still vividly remember the day I learned to dive as a kid. Lots of belly flops, but I wouldn't let it go until I got it. Then once I had the hang of it, all I wanted to do was dive in again and again. With social media it's the same feeling for me just a different pool.

Photo: Mike Warren