'nixie' by teclasorg

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.

Finally, all done.

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

For evenings and weekends on the patio.  Yes, I’ll stack it.