Getting Back to Where We Came From

The Gate by mx2-fotoIt 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.

Photo credit: mx2-foto

Your first tweet – here’s a tip on how to find it.

I have to immediately thank Dave Delaney (Twitter: @davedelaney) for this tip.  Revealed in his 5,000 tweets and counting post earlier today, he suggests the following to find your first tweet:

  1. Browse to your Twitter profile page
  2. Click on the “Archive” tab
  3. Scroll to the bottom
  4. Click on the “Older” button
  5. Notice that the URL is now something like http://twitter.com/rickmahn?page=2?  Change the “page=2” to “page=200”
  6. See anything?  Start decreasing that number until you find your first post.
  7. Or, if you’ve been especially productive, you may need to try higher page numbers! 😉

Mine just happens to be on March 4th, 2007 at 1:13pm (found here) where I tweeted the very informative “Reading RSS feeds” to the world.

So, thank you Dave for that tip, and congratulations on crossing 5,000 tweets.  I had been curious about that first tweet lately because I know I was starting to get close to a full year on Twitter.  Just over a month to go!

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