Everthing you always wanted to ask about social media

My generation is jealous. We call our students, who were born in the late 1980s or early 1990s, “digital natives.” That means you grew up after the internet had been invented—in fact, you grew up while it was booming.

Me—I remember sitting down at my first Macintosh computer in 1984 or 1985. It had all of 128K RAM, no hard drive, no ports worth doing anything, and modems (you remember—the hardware before wifi?!) that took a degree from MIT to figure out how to hook up. Overly-ambitious salespeople told us that a box of a dozen 400K floppy disks would store enough programs and data to last us a lifetime!

But I’m willing to bet that there are holes in your knowledge. A lot of stuff has been invented and taken off in the past decade which you might not yet know how to run. If you’re 22 now, Facebook was invented when you were 15—you’re probably all over Facebook, because it was marketed to your age group.

But what about LinkedIn, blogging and QR codes? Can those help you? If you’re not sure, today’s link is to a site you might find useful: http://www.socialquickstarter.com/. It’s designed for small business owners, not college students—and probably for people in their 30s or 40s. If you’re feeling like there is a piece of your digital repetoire you ought to use, but don’t know how or why—this site has short animated videos which can show you.

And if you already know all this stuff—at least it’s a handy link for you to pass along to your parents or grandparents! (Assuming you want them to be able to read your tweets.)