It sometimes seems crazy to me to think that a year ago, I was unaware that working in social media could be a full-time career. In the past nine months, I’ve learned so much of this industry, and I’ve grown as a professional in the process.
However, the downside of working in such a new industry is that I don’t have many professional peers to share frustrations and ideas and successes with on a day-to-day basis. I came across this post after a local Des Moines professional, Emilee Richardson, tweeted a link to it, and though I wouldn’t identify so many statements as “problems,” I did identify with a few of them, listed below:
The problem with working in social media is …
that you’ll need to personally invest and be detached simultaneously.
that you won’t have resources to bring all of your strongest ideas to life.
that some of your ideas will be out-of-sync, out-of-reach, or out-of-date before you have them.
that being social online means you’ll have to be social offline too.
that each day will require that you focus fiercely, that trust yourself so that people can trust you, and that you learn more things faster than ever before.
For those of you who work in social media, do you see these statements as struggles, or do you embrace them as challenge and opportunities?
In my few short months as a specialist at the local Apple Store, I have become no stranger to customers’ inquiries about future products and release dates. In our training, employees are taught not to speculate, and to be honest, it wouldn’t do us much good — we learn of new products and product updates at the very same time the general public does, and for the most part, my speculations are wrong. The iPhone on Verizon? I’d bickered with my coworkers about that one for weeks before I was proven wrong.
Working at the Apple Store has been an incredible adventure thus far, and I couldn’t be more proud to work for such an innovative company. My good friends know how much I love insignia, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love putting on that Apple logo every day when I came to work. My coworkers are some of my best friends, and I truly believe that Apple customers are the greatest people in the world — but for goodness’ sake, I do wish they’d believe me when I tell them I don’t know if there will be an iPad 2!
Design by Simon Fletcher. Powered by Tumblr.
© Copyright 2010
