I opened my Facebook account in 2007 and mostly shared random and obscure quotes from movies I liked. Social media was still so new and I was trying to work out how to use it.
If you look through my timeline, go all the way back to 2007, you’ll see photos of me with my classmates, most likely from the graduation drinks where I had grown (sorry attempt at) a moustache and was doing my best Tom Selleck smile. Scroll a little further into the future and you’ll find me working in a Graphic Design Studio, photos from when I was part of sketch comedy group or the trip my now wife and I took when I knew she was the one I wanted to marry.
Sure, I have photos from before then, they’re on a hard drive somewhere that might still work or they’re in a photo album that’s at the bottom of a box stored somewhere in my garage. But from 2007, I have this easily accessible gallery of my life that I can browse from anywhere, on my phone.
If you told me back then, that in 10 years I would be a social media strategist I would have said “You’re crazy!” But now I couldn’t imagine doing anything else! Somehow, I managed to combine my years in retail and passion for customer service with visual communication skills learnt as a graphic designer working in advertising. Partnered up with my talented wife Alex and her writing, blogging and marketing expertise to form a business in an industry, that until only recently was obscure and now mainstream. To put what I mean about that in perspective, when we started Fletch Digital (Fletch Digital, 2018) in 2014 we’d tell people we were social media marketers only to hear “That’s a job?” now we hear “I need to talk to you!”
In my life so far, I’ve watch records become cassettes then cassettes become CDs without really understanding the significance, but I’ve had a front row seat watching the birth of the World Wide Web and 56k modems to high speed mobile broadband and social media go from chat rooms and blogs to a mainstream form of communication. My enthusiasm for this incredibly social world has led me to think, write and now podcast about how social media is making us better, more human and more connected.
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