Keeping up is hard work

As I spent my lunch hour today updating myself on entire month's worth of friends' blogs, I was reminded of a time about two months ago when I did what every close to graduating college student should do: I googled myself. With a name as unique as my own, more than half the results that show up really are me. About half way down the page, I discovered (gasp!) that LiveJournal I created at age 16, the one where I poured my heart out on the Internet through a mess of bad grammar and emoticons, yeah- THAT LiveJournal- still existed in the realms of Cyber Space. And, was still linked to my name no less! After 45 minutes, and racking my brain for every possible password I had used in the past half decade, my account was finally deleted. And, in a mere 30 days- the Journal was erased from any searchable history.

The moral of this little story? People can find out a lot about you simply by going to google.com. But let me digress. I am an avid user of social networking tools. I would almost go as far as to say that I am addicted to their convenience. From Facebook and Twitter, to LinkedIn, Del.icio.us and Digg- I have it all. At any given point in the day, a perfect stranger could know where I am, what I am doing, what I look like, my likes and dislikes. It's scary. Yet, this scary convenience is something I could not live without. There has never been a better time to be involved in the world of PR and Marketing. We have a brand new social networking front to discover, the Internet is our sand box and my oh my have we begun to play. My latest discovery? PROpenMic. This site not only allows me to connect with friends, colleagues and classmates, but it is industry specific, too.

So, what's the catch? By creating accounts on every site under the sun, you can essentially lock yourself in a networking box. I used to wake up every morning and read the New York Times and my hometown's local newspaper. But with the advent of social networking, I discovered other ways to spend that extra 20 minutes I allot every morning. Why read a newspaper (or a newspaper site) when I have Digg? And really, when it is that important, I'm sure someone will have a post about it on Twitter. I lost my own nack for figuring out what is actually going on in the world. And so I propose to you, and this is certainly a resolution for myself as well, keep in touch. Blog, tweet, facebook (yes, we've turned all of these into verbs) but make sure you still pay attention to the OUTSIDE world. There's a lot going on out there. And a facebook post isn't real news- it's really only a tid bit of gossip for the most part, isn't it?

Comments? Complaints? E-mail me, Callista.Conzett@gmail.com