#Social Media Management is #Ruining my #Life! (rt @toddhamann)

For the last few months, I’ve been focusing on the Social Media and the Small Business posts.  It’s been an education and I hope it’s helped some small business somewhere.  As a Matter of Fact I’ve been focusing so much on introducing small businesses to the power of social media that it’s most of what I think about.  As my poor wife knows all too well, if I’m thinking about it, I’m talking about it.

I thought I would take a couple blog posts as a deep breath.  I am enjoying social media management so much that I worry sometimes of burnout.  So, a healthy breather is probably a good thing.  I have decided to ramble…just a little.  You know, just close my eyes and type and see where my thoughts take me.

I am getting ready to graduate in May 2012 from Utah State University in Public Relations.  I am gearing that toward, you guessed it, social media management.  It’s fun. Plain and simple.  We’ll see what comes down the pipeline after graduation, but I am doing everything I can to gear my career toward Social.

I’ve been working with a small one man company out here called Mikey’s Balloons (No explanation needed).  Mikey is increadibly talented and has utilized word-of-mouth advertising up until about three weeks ago.  Facebook: non-existant.  Twitter:  nope.  Flikr/Youtube/Google+ were all resoundingly absent as well.  Mikey is a performer by nature.  He is fantastic at what he does.  I’m going to see how fantastic my team is at what we do.  Trying to build something from nothing with no budget…well, hold on to your seats!  I want to do this from here on out with the blog watching, completely transparent.

Argh!  There I go again!!!!!  You see, it is a fever.  It’s a hobby turned into a sick and twisted obsession toward promoting all things facebook and G+. 

I heard a story about six months ago of a world-renowned Chemist who asked his son how college was going.  His son, who was majoring in chemistry, told him that everything was ‘fine’ and left it at that.  The father sat his son down and looked him in the eye.

 “You never talk about school,” he said.

“So,” his surprised son replied, “I talk about school at school.”

“You need to study something that you love enough that you talk about it even when you don’t have to talk about it.”

The son took it to heart, changed his major to Business Administration, and crafted a highly sucessful career.

I relay that to you so you can ask yourself, “What do I talk about?”  What makes you tick?  What is that one thing that you can talk about for hours at a time?  That thing that you don’t mind researching because it’s just that fun? 

I’ve found my thing and it’s taken entirely too long to find.  In my situation however, when I started college Social Media wasn’t Social Media.  It wasn’t accessable.  It wasn’t invented!!!!  I was forced to feel my way blindly through most of my college education until my thing found me.  It was a long, tedious, process full of dead ends and broken dreams, but from this side of the tunnel finding my thing, my major, my passion, is that much sweeter. 

So, to end my rambling, Social Media is ruining my life.  Short and sweet.  Just like Mickey Mouse ruined Walt Disney’s.