Seeing Malcolm's earlier post, "Rady Social Media Marketing: Social Payment," inspired me to actually try the idea out. I downloaded the book by the developer of the "Pay with a Tweet" app, amusingly entitled "Oh My God What Happened And What Should I Do" - unsurprisingly, the price was a tweet. It's actually not a bad book. I was going to blog about it on my personal blog, but since I'm going through a massive PHP upgrade right now that will probably take all weekend, I want to share a particular page I really liked called "Live the Media." It boils down to this well-trod point: there are 1001 free tools out there for you to experiment with. If you want to understand social media, you can't ask someone to do it for you, you have to try things yourself.
This point is probably obvious. Nevertheless, I understand a lot more about Twitter than I did 8 weeks ago. I think one of our unfortunate tendencies is to dismiss social media as "a waste of time." But think back to your shop class, when you made your first little wooden puzzle or doodad or whatever. That puzzle/doodad was, of course, entirely worthless and is probably now sawdust. But in making it, you learned how to use a bandsaw. So was the process of making the puzzle/doodad a waste of time just because the end product didn't add any value to your life? For a lot of us in this class, I think this is a metaphor worth considering.
I couldn't have said it better. I think in the end you have to just go out there and start playing around with the different tools. That is the only way you will know which ones are useful for you.
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