So I find myself a year into another technology consulting gig for “the big client”. It’s an interesting thing after spending a couple of years working both the corporate IT world and growing a community for social media professionals.
While I’ve grown a little tired of social media for its ability to enable too much interaction, I do find I miss the action. Sometimes. As you may have noticed, I’ve backed away from the social media space in the past six months or so. It’s a conscious decision on my part to get back to basics, and focus on life directions.
Sometimes I forget how much a technology career has rewarded me over the last two decades. With the ability to work with new things, and see the potential within an early product design. I love looking at something new that someone has built, and not only see what they’re trying to do, but see the hidden potential, the part they haven’t grasped yet. That’s one of the things I love most about technology – and about social media. There is still so much unexplored territory, and I can’t wait to see what other new things come along.
If you’ve ever been to CES (Consumer Electronics Show) or SXSW or another similarly large and impactful trade show. There is so much excitement, so much going on, that you can’t sit still. When you’re there, it’s exciting, it’s new, and you’re a part of it. That’s how I view technology every day.
But here’s the thing I’m getting to. I’m back to doing the deep thinking for large organizations on standards-setting processes around technology. It’s something I’m good at, and something I enjoy doing. It’s also allowed me to neglect blogging. More importantly, it’s kept me from writing… nearly anything that isn’t a technical manual, and it shows.
That’s what this post is really about. Simply making myself sit down and write something, even if I cringe when I hit ‘Publish’. In the end, it’s the passion for social media and technology that keeps me thinking of blogging and sharing crazy ideas and opinions.
It wasn’t so long ago, not quite a decade yet, when I first discovered what a blog was. The idea of sharing ideas and publishing them to the world was new to me. That was what journalists did, and story tellers. Not some computer guy from Minnesota.
Yet I was wrong. I read blogs from all sorts of folks, from all walks of life. The blogs with topics furthest from my own experiences were the most interesting, of course. Through the months and years, the people I knew grew from a couple dozen to hundreds, then a few years later, thousands.
The impact personally, was tremendous, allowing me to start publishing my own ideas on how to approach a problem. Allowing me to present my ideas, which I shared with hundreds of others, on communications and social communication in business. I found my voice in creating my own personal brand, and launching forth a new, second, career in sharing these ideas.
Eventually, these things lead us all back to where we came. I started branching out from Information Technology, and find myself bringing new ideas back to IT in the last couple years. The last four years I’ve worked on multiple solutions with three different fortune 500 companies. All in different ways. All for different reasons.
Today, I find myself looking back on the experiences from the past decade. Not only the technical ones that have dominated my career, but also the social, marketing, and communications ones that I’ve had the pleasure of learning from. I find myself doing what I said back in 2008, bringing social media oriented ideas back to my core skills and incorporating the important and relevant bits.
I think this is the key to social media as we move forward. Instead of the next network, or the next viral video to learn how far – how fast something can travel, it is how much more that we’ve communicated. It’s how we’ve articulated our ideas. It’s how much we’ve listened and learned.
So it seems that I’m constantly talking about blogging rather than actually doing it. A lot has been done since my last post where I talked briefly about changing hosting providers (here’s my InMotion Hosting review) and getting that work done. Along with this site, I had three others to move over. That’s been done for a while, and I’m pretty pleased with the service so far.
The challenging thing is making time to get back to writing, sharing thoughts and ideas through this blog. That, of course, is where I’ve let work and life pull me in multiple directions. As usual, one of the first things that’s affected when too many tasks and projects demand more time are activities that don’t seem to support those task and projects. So it is with my blog from time to time.
It’s been a busy couple of months, and I’m finally catching up on a number of life challenges that randomly occur, especially with the economic changes that have been in play. So while I am saying I’m returning to blogging, I am certainly going to be working my way back into it. Easing my way really, building new habits into the days and weeks ahead instead of setting a hard schedule that would inevitably not follow.
Also, I plan to include a bit more personal experiences and items of interest rather than just talking about social media in business. That is still my core focus, but I believe there’s more in that by getting back to some of the original reasons I started blogging… as an outlet and ongoing record of creative ideas and points of view.
All in all, it’s been a long time since I’ve sat down and really thought about blogging again, and I hope to reconnect with those that wish to do so. Some say life is about challenges, but I prefer to look at it as a series of adventures. Each one building on the experience of the last.
Seriously though, I’m in the middle of switching hosting providers and obviously I hadn’t finished by 1pm last night… so check back tomorrow and see how things turn out!
Working on something with actionable tasks, and tangible outcomes can be highly rewarding for the creative mind. The trick is to realize the need to back away from a roadblock and do something that helps you get past it. Turning to a task that someone else has given you, or that you’ve taken up responsibility for can sometimes be the ticket you’re looking for.
So go ahead, do something else for a day, a week, a month or more. Let the experience help generate new ideas, and rekindle that creative soul lurking inside.
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