It's no surprise that I deal with a lot of social media. I mean, considering that I work in a place completely devoted to the web and all the uses of... social media is something that I'm bound to have fallen into at some point. Just look at my footer. As big as social media is, social marketing is just as big right now. I have a fair few SEO people who follow me on twitter, I've signed up (a bit regretfully) for biznik, and even Facebook is engulfed in a social marketing phenomenon. I get it, I really do, but that doesn't mean that I actually get into it, and I often really feel lost in the crowd.
On twitter, I follow a lot of local people. I like to see what the locals are tweeting, get to know who they are, and even keep in touch with what some of the local businesses are doing or... local events like the Bellingham Farmers Market. Lately, though, I've felt like the tweets I see are very bogged down by networking for the sake of marketing. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I can't say that it's really my thing. I like to network not for the sake of networking, for the sake of marketing, or for anything like that - I like to network for the sake of knowing people, and for the sake of allowing people to know me.
I've been deep into the realm of the web since I was about 16. If you count the amount of boyfriends I had before I met and married my wonderful husband, Nick, the majority of them were online relationships with boys that I had met who lived in other cities or who I had never met at all. I played an online free-form roleplaying game and made many friends there - a few of whom I now retain 10 years later. I play World of Warcraft with a wonderful group of people through yet another social media - Massive Multiplayer Online RPGs (Or MMOs) and I've known some of them for almost 5 years now and consider them to be very, very close friends.
I'm finding it very difficult to filter through all the twitter posts lately with links to business things or with things that are just for the sake of saying "Hey, I'm out here! See me! See my business!". I want to be known, personally known, and I want to know other people, the people I follow personally.
I don't really want to go through my twitter follow list, but I have a feeling that the axe will be coming down soon. I want to genuinely meet and discuss with people, not feel like I'm filtering through a bunch of unimportant shit to see who everyone is, and it's inevitable that people out there are not going to want the same things I do - being different is what makes us unique after all. But I think I may need to start looking for the people who do want the same thing I do, good friends.