Spangles!

Who remembers Spangles? Unashamedly showing my age now but furthermore, who remembers Olde English Spangles? Urban dictionary describes 'spangled' as 'A term used when a person has over-indulged, be it with drink or drugs' and when I googled it, I found a DJ called Johnny Spangles - love that name! Spangles - incase you were wondering, were square fruit flavoured sweets with rounded edges and a dimple in the middle - a bit like Tunes but without the 'makes you breathe more easily' bit.

Things move on, times change, Marathon becomes Snickers, Opal fruits become Starburst and suddenly we stop dialling numbers on a round dial, we email instead of speak aloud and everyone's on the social media bandwagon. 

Maybe because it was my birthday 3 days ago but it got me thinking about how people used to run businesses in the 70's or 80's. Before email, Twitter, the Book of Face, Google, blogs, websites. When they got up on a Saturday morning, instead of firing up the laptop, did they fire up the Granada like John Thaw in the Sweeney and drive to the office to meet and call people? Renew their ad in the Yellow Pages? Wait for the calls to come in? Did they even work on Saturdays? How did they get anything done before the internet?

When you think about it though, the pace has changed and so has the platform but everything else is still the same. Whether you're trying to make your ad stand out from all the others in the Yellow Pages or be heard through the white noise of Twitter, it's not very different.

Don't get me wrong, I love Social Media, it satisfies the chatty, nosy geek in me but there are so many posts every day on Twitter telling you how to get the most out of your social media. some of it is very interesting but I'm not gonna lie, a lot of it bores me to tears. The internet has enabled the world and its mother to become a social media expert and use words like glocalisation and disintermediate long-tail mashup. I don't have an issue with specific terms or over used phrases but it doesn't seem to go anywhere. There's no original thought.  

I may be about to go out on a limb here but I don't think there is a divine science to social media. If you are lazy or a self indulgent bore, your social media will reflect your personality eventually. Whether it's your own or social media that has been out sourced to you. Unless you have imagination and direction, you will never cut through the busy market place of the 'me me me, listen to me' social networking sites. I would never proclaim to be an expert. I'm just good at it. Confident, yes. Arrogant, no.... and for the record, Olde English Spangles were awful and are no longer in production. Some changes are very much for the better!