-by Collyn Floyd
Social media and I got off to a bad start. It started a few years ago when my college-age brother told me about MySpace and how I just had to be on there. After all, he already had like 110 friends. It’s not that I didn’t already spent a lot of time online, I just didn’t want to spend it picking out background wallpaper, theme songs, and whatnot (& the same could probably be for most of my friends). I saw the point, but MySpace wasn’t for me.
Then last year, there was the Digg phenomenon. I checked it out, but I like a friendlier online environment without all the incendiary comments. There was also Twitter – you know, so I can tell my friends, “I’m going to the bathroom right now”? Um, no thanks.
So, it came as a surprise when social media recently came to my rescue. I was stumped as to how to remove some decorative shutters from our home’s exterior. Google produced no help. I thought about driving up to Home Depot, but didn’t want to deal with the Saturday crowd, hunt for someone in an orange apron to help me, etc, etc. On a whim, I logged into Yahoo! Answers and asked my question, “How do I remove/uninstall exterior shutters?” Within several minutes, I had two answers. Within a couple of hours, I had several more.
These were good answers, mind you; a contractor responded, as did someone who had clearly gone through the process before. In total, I got eight responses. Even better, Y! Answers invited me to vote on the best response, and the answer with the most votes moved to the top of the page.
The size of the Y! Answers community is astounding. You can ask just about anything and get a response: Does butter spoil if left unrefrigerated? What should I do about the annoying guy at work? How often are there general elections in Britain? Of course, you could go to the USDA’s website to find out about butter or an online encyclopedia for British election info, but getting those experienced-it-myself, community-driven responses on Y! Answers makes for much more fun.
So I guess all is not lost for me with Social Media. It was just a matter of finding the right community.