Social Media - why the hype?

One of the great gifts I was given for Christmas was the Social Media Bible. This isn't some sort of interactive Bible but actually a business book on the best uses of social media in promoting your business.

I am very interested in Social media and have been since I first logged onto the Internet in approximately 1995/6 at University.  


I have been thinking recently about what being connected through social media means to me and these are some of the questions I have come up with.

• What does social media mean to me?
• Is it more than just writing endless blog posts or posting annoying Facebook status updates?
• Do I have a social media strategy?
• Am I trying to get famous (or more worryingly infamous)?
• Is social media a way of earning money? (you may have seen the adverts on this page already)
• Do I ever think about the trail I have left on the web which one day a future employer might see and put them off me? (I hope not)

I read recently a great article on how to succeed with YouTube by a really popular American guy called  David Di Franco at Teksocial.com. This got me thinking about some of the questions I posed above.

I want to share some of my passions, interests, thoughts and experiences with like-minded people around the world.  I want to create high-quality, meaningful content that people will want to read, enjoy and hopefully learn from.

By doing this I have to be very careful.  Being a teacher I have extra responsibility about what I produce and the opinions I share.  Also there is a world of trolls out there, and while my motto is "Don't feed the trolls" by replying to them, this is sometimes hard to do.