Career Coaching Backstory #4: Catching The Social Media Bug

In November 2008, a childhood friend came to visit me in Cleveland. We’ve known each other since the Reagan Administration, and every presidential tenure since. We trust each other impeccably.  So when she told me one night, “You’ve got to get yourself on Facebook. I’m not going to sleep ’till you do,” I was like, “What?” Are you kidding me?”

This seemed like a lot of pressure. At the time I’ve heard of this college social network, but didn’t really recognize its purpose in my life. Between emails, texts and calls, why on earth would I need yet one more platform to communicate on with people I  already do? This just seemed nonsensical. And too much noise for this publicly social/privately quiet extro/intro vert.

The only social media platform I had been on at the time was LinkedIn. Don’t recall when I first joined it, but when I did, and for several years after, it was a stagnant resource. Once your Resume was up, all you could do was connect with people. And that was pretty much it. And while the activity was passive, it felt like the right thing to do for myself professionally. But Facebook? Meh. My friend, though, she wasn’t kidding. She put her two-year-old to bed, then sat next to me and stayed up as late as it took to get me to register.

The next morning? We all woke up, had breakfast, I opened my computer and bam! Forty people sent me a friend request. “I’ve been on Facebook for months and you have more friend requests than I do!” Suddenly my friend wasn’t so excited anymore.

In the seven years since, LinkedIn has evolved into THE career meeting place, Twitter as the news source, Instagram as the photo receptacle, Pinterest as the lifestyle e-zine, YouTube as the video channel and Vine as the micro viral video channel. Other social media sites continue to sprout. Snapchat appeals to the Millennials. My 20-something cousin explained it to me: the content deletes just as quickly as it goes up. I just don’t get it.

But it was Facebook where Gen Xers and eventually Baby Boomers grew the conversation. Suddenly high school reunions became less mysterious. News of births and deaths spread globally. Connections of people from your past felt present. And the whole six degrees of separation began to boil down to just one or two people.

Back in 2008, I had no idea that my friend staying up with me that one evening and pressuring me to get onto Facebook would, in my near (and not so far) future, impact my wallet. But it did. And on the eve of the disruptive economy the disruptive technology of social media forever flipped everything we MBAs studied, practiced and knew knew about marketing.