Thanks to Social Internet Networking, People Will Now Believe I Had a Date With MC Hammer

I am always behind on internet 'anything and everything'. But slowly, like the evolution of planet earth, I have 'come-to' with this social networking thing.

Linked-In
First for me it was Linked-In about a year ago. I was resistant to try it. Why? I don't like learning curves. Call it lazy if you want, but truly the reason is that I do not have a half day's worth of time to learn something new.

But somehow I decided to give Linked In a try because I had heard that I would be able to find people that I needed to talk to in order to get going on my own personal licensing adventure.

I am thankful that I was open to giving it a go, because I was able to get myself in contact with high level product directors at Target. Nevermind, it took me two months to get to the person that I wanted. But the end result was, I found the person I needed to talk to.

Did I tell you I also found two dear girlfriends who I lost seemingly from the first month after giving birth to my first daughter? I lost touch for seven years!!! I have my reasons, but suffice it to say to my dismay, the first year of mommy-hood was nothing like the serene, pastel-colored pictures in Pottery Barn Baby catalogs.

Facebook
The next addition to my internet life was Facebook. Coming in from Linked-In, I thought at first this was another way to connect with other professionals. So that's how I started. Connecting to this CEO here, and this buyer there. And then a flood of grade-school and college friends started contacting me on Facebook.

When they started sending me pictures of me when I was eight, it dawned on me that Facebook for my purposes would be for connecting with friends and family. I feel kind of silly about professional contacts having an inside view of my life with my husband and children. I feel it would be awkward to excommunicate anyone. Here's a good example of a friends and family picture of me and my husband from Halloween 1999--I was a boring cat, but my husband Bill was MC Hammer. He had the over-sized gold rimmed glasses, the baggy pants, the flashy shoulder-padded banded-collar shirt complete with gold threads. I even had my hairdresser put finger waves in his hair.

Not only do I feel awkward in excommunicating anyone, I also hate that feeling of chosing who gets access to my Facebook account. So, I look at the pending friends list, and don't know whether to ignore or just not do anything.

Adobe Creative Suite
I know this has nothing to do with social networking, but definitely worth noting.

Seriously, I had good intentions of learning the Adobe Creative Suite. Hundreds of dollars later, all I know how to do is re-size an image. Kind of embarrassing. One day I tell myself I will hunker down and learn more, but my guess is that the Suite will be so behind the times when I get to it.

Blogging
For the longest time I avoided blogging. I felt like I had nothing to say. Then when I started to receive incredible feedback from my Inventor's Digest year long series, I knew that I could bring the same concept to life but on a more regular basis, featuring more inventors.

Already it is taking off. I have a list of inventors wanting to be profiled, and I am excited to do it for them.

Twitter
The one thing I felt repelled by was Twitter. Oringinally, I was turned off because I thought it was a telegram service which would inform me of my friend's favorite coffee at Starbuck's, or how they were late to work and forgot to put on their mascara.

Then I met with Leslie Haywood of GrillCharms and Mary Kay Russell of Kubit2Me in Chicago two weeks ago, and they were twittering that we finally had all met and were having dinner.

Having reached my non-informed Twitter limit and feeling left out : ( , I had to just ask once and for all what the heck this is all about.

Once they explained the power of Twitter and how amazing it can work in personal and business promotion, it all clicked in my mind. I am not saying I understood how it worked exactly--just that the moment had come for me to accept and implement this information.

After I came home from the tradeshow, I registered with Twitter as @InventorChronic

Yesterday, I felt so proud that I had 22 followers. However, my bubble bursted when I saw hundreds of followers on other fellow entrepreneurs' pages. How does the heck does that happen?

I still don't comprehend how it all works, but I am going with the flow and just waiting for things to happen on Twitter.

Someone told me there's a magical Twitter fairy to make me have a thousand followers over night. That's how it works right?
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Eva Winger
www.TheInventorChronicles.com
TheInventorChronicles@live.com
follow me on twitter @InventorChronic