The Bell Has Rung

When the bell rings it is time to be in your seats and facing the front of the class. At least that is how I remember the first day of school. It has been a long time though, and I wonder how my student felt.

 His name is Bob. Ok, that isn't entirely true, his name is not Bob, but we shall call him Bob from here on out. Bob is a very smart guy. He is in his late 60's, has a ton of connections within the TV and Publishing industry and now wishes to make a go of it in PR. He is understanding of what it takes to get people, to take notice of a company or product, is incredible.

His understanding of computers and social media in the 21st centuary is, well, abysmal. This is a very smart guy, who before tonight, didn't know that "control - c" was a short cut for copy.

He has been on Twitter and didn't get it. He is on Linkedin and surprisingly enough, not only gets it, but excels at networking. He has over 1000 connections. His situation is a paradox, wrapped in a riddle, covered in a glaze of uncertainty. As he told me tonight in an email, after we had finished our first session, "It has been a long time since I have been a student."

He found me on Linkedin. I had responded to his question in Answers. Apparently he liked my views and decided to send me an email. We talked a couple of times and I volunteered to bring him up to speed on all that social media has to offer. I make my living managing social media. I love to teach. And I find that when I do, I learn quite a bit myself.

So over the past weekend I formed a plan. It was only tonight that I decided to chronicle the journey here. I don't know where it will end, but I look forward to the sights along the way.

Day 1: We started by picking a Twitter handle for him. We found a good one and he signed up. He asked a good question right off the bat. "Should I use my main email?"

The answer to that one is no. Pick one, or get a new one, that can be your dedicated social media email address. Twitter was but the first stop on our journey, there would be many more tools and all of them would require an email to register.

I had taken his picture off his website and fixed it up in photoshop. It is important to have a professional looking picture on your Twitter avatar, because if you leave the tweet bird, people will assume you don't know what you are doing. Anyone serious about social media will change the avatar to their picture or something interesting immediately. It doesn't have to be a photo either, it must be destinctive and not look stupid or cheap.

This brought us to our first educational hurdle. It took me 2 minutes to get the photo ready and send it to him.  I then spent 20 minutes trying to explain how to save an attachment to his desktop. In this exercise, I ,the teacher, failed. I could not convey how to do it, in either Firefox or Chrome. We solved the problem by having me sign into his account and uploading the picture myself. Not the best solution, as he didn't learn how to do it, but he was getting frustrated and we both wanted to move on.

It was time for recess, so we took a brief brake, as I had to answer a call.