So after I wrote my recent post about Hova and his adventures in Twitter etc I got stuck on one of his lyrics and how I had always thought of it in terms of how to interact with the world of social media – and then a couple of other lines popped in to my head so here we are – the start of the Jay-Z school of social media (Zak – I’ll be expecting you to contribute!)

A wise man told me don’t argue with fools
Cause people from a distance can’t tell who is who

Takeover, The Blue Print

This has always been the line that stuck with me – particularly in relation to Twitter. It has been a long time since I got involved in any kind of social media feud or argument. The reality is that even with the best of intentions you inevitably immediately get drawn to the lowest common denominator and end up looking just as stupid as the person you are trying to call out. Especially on Twitter. I don’t jump in to arguments where I don’t know all the facts and even then if I do feel strongly enough about the topic I write about it here or elsewhere – where I can take my time to make my point.

“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business.. man.”

Diamonds from Sierra Leone Remix, Late Registration

Now clearly I ain’t no Jay-Z but the reality is that increasingly your entire online persona is your business. People I have never met judge my professionalism and knowledge (or lack of it) based on my social media activity. This blog and my Twitter is my calling card to a much wider community than I could have ever expected to be a part of. I have never been someone who believed in the ‘dual personality’ thing of having personal and professional Twitter accounts but I can see why people do it. My reality is that I am more comfortable with a single voice out in the world (which isn’t much different than me in person – just a little more confident) and I’ll live and die (professionally) by that.

Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first
And my thirst is the same as – when I came.

My 1st Song, The Black Album

I’ve always taken this as saying that you should never stop learning and trying to get better than you are. It is easy once you have being doing something for a long time (six years on Twitter for instance) to get complacent and just think your way is the only way while all around you things are changing and moving on. I believe you have to really embrace this world to get the best out of it and as soon as you find it a chore – or lose the ‘thirst’ then you start to lose out on the insights that makes it so valuable.

So here endeth the lesson. Well the first one anyway – we’ll see if I can loosely frame a blogpost around anymore lyrics in the future 🙂