This is a guest post by my good friend, Beth Oppenheim-Chan. She is all kinds of awesome, and I highly suggest that you read her blog and follow her on Twitter. Also, I should mention that she chose the topic of this post herself. You’ll understand the reason for the disclaimer when you read it 
Six months ago I was confused. Confused about direction and about the way my career was heading. I came across a little network that had just started called Brazen Careerist. It was a place where bloggers congregated and networked – shared ideas, thoughts, resumes, and other things about the career path (and life in general).
I began slowly – not wanting to commit to a paid blog platform, and not knowing how to interact with all these new people. Pretty soon, it became a bit like second nature. I would log on in the morning, and figure out what to write about. I bought a domain, I figured out some basics about network capabilities, and then…I even joined Twitter. I couldn’t believe it. Who was I becoming?
All of a sudden there were people who I didn’t know – whose lives I was following, and whose work I was interested in. We starting talking in groups, compared resumes, and have continued to this day. Then, something strange happened. I found a friend.
Sam and I were in the same “circles” of the social networking universe. We started off with a little RT action here, and some @’s there. Pretty soon we were gchatting. AAAH!
Back up. Confessional: I have never ever met someone online. Before Brazen Careerist, and my active interest in social media, I had confined my internet space to interacting with the people I already knew. Little did I know that I was missing THE WHOLE POINT. My excuse lies in the fact that I went to one school my whole life, and after that joined a very close community at NYU in college. AND I’m an only child. Making friends was never the thing that I was first in line for.
I am 100% aware that what makes social media possible is….the socializing. Before recently, I was like the old-lady hermit of the internet. I wrote a blog that was pretty good. Or at least my husband thought so, since I was too shy to give anyone else the web address. I talked to friends online, but only the ones from college and high school.
Sam was like a pro. She knew all about these weird things called HTML and knew how to make things change colors on the screen (CRAZY). Her awesome blog had a lot of readers, and she was able to write about really personal things. In short, she was someone I would be friends with OUTSIDE of Brazen, the blog world, and all these other things that had brought us together.
When we started chatting, we just clicked. Sometimes I would joke with my husband that she was just called “Blog Friend.” He was fairly certain that for a while, she had no actual name. Until one day, we actually met in person and double dated our way to “in-real-life” happiness in NYC. To this day, Sam is the person that I feel most connected to online – but she’s taught me a valuable lesson. You wont always be the coolest blogger on the block (even though I think we both SO are). You wont need 1,000,000 Twitter followers to make you feel recognized. Part of the beauty of social media is the HUGE pool of people to choose from. You don’t always find a perfect blog friend like Sam, but you usually find amazing people to connect with that will give time and attention to your thoughts.
They will help you become a better writer, and maybe even a better person. Even though I still consider myself a newbie in the ways of the media world, I think that strong connections are why I haven’t given up. And the way things are going, I don’t think I ever will.
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