Focus on the Here and Now

By Hanna Erlandsson, cb.Socially Social Media Intern

A couple of weeks ago (on 11/11/11 to be precise) was the two and a half-year birthday for Collective Bias and the amazing Social Fabric community. With a birthday comes celebration and luck wishes from our IRL and online friends, wrapped gifts, hand written cards, wall post messages with smiley faces and most likely a birthday cake.

A birthday also marks a milestone of another year that has passed. One year older with a great deal of new memories that we will spend our time reminiscing over. We not only tend to look back – we love to look forward and try to foresee the future. There are the expectations of what will happen in the years to come. New opportunities and possibilities. How will our lives look? Will there be any major changes and/or events and how much can we really control of our future? I believe we all at some point wish we had a crystal ball that we could gaze into once in a while to look for answers, guidance and try to make some sort of sense of what will come and how our future will evolve.

Similar to our wish to foresee our own future, we want to know where Social Media will be in the next couple of years. We all want to be standing ready with our forces waiting at the front line, positioned the correct way, when the next big “thing” arrives (and it will probably arrive quickly, as many other Social Media phenomenon…)

We obsess so much about the future that we manage to forget what is here and now. Personally, I believe that we can tell a lot about how Social Media is going to evolve just by looking at what tools we have to work with at the moment, and what roots we have been growing and nurturing in the past of Social Media and the building of our online relationships.

Humans have always been social beings, turning to each other for advise and company. By building STRONG and TRUE relationships with friends, consumers, and with our surrounding environment we can get closer to the answer of where Social Media is heading. Consumers have, through Social Media, been given a sharp and clear voice to express the way they truly feel, how they are observing the “right here and now.” By listening and understanding a subject’s secret, intentions and true feelings – see their humanity behind/through their Twitter handle (watch them in the eye digitally) – we can build stronger relationships and get return on them (RonR,) pay forward and be more social than ever before.

The dynamics of Social Media can be understood by the most of us. We can simply sit back and try to make sense of what information is thrown towards us, choosing to interact or not. But why not jump right in to the ongoing dialogue? We don’t necessarily have to be “die-hard” creative and elaborate with our output; instead we should be what we were born to be: humans, social beings. Reach out to someone you do not know, offer someone a helping hand, call a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while, try to understand how it feels to walk a mile in another persons shoes. Turn to one another, celebrate each other (not only on birthdays), and let Social Media be truly social without obsessing too much about the future.

Happy two and a half Birthday Collective Bias and the Social Fabric Community! Let us continue to celebrate each other, every single day!

Follow Hanna on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/hannaerlandsson.

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