For many the direction of social media in the digital age has opened a whole new world of opportunities in which vast experiences culminate, and the pieces start falling into place. It is this new direction that has also called into question the merits of traditional professional experiences, resumes and skills. This is especially true in the social media world where a whole new set of rules is being written.

Let’s take my resume as an example. On first glance it will seem lacking to many. Over the past 12 years I have moved from experience to experience, gaining skills that seem unfocused

and perhaps disjointed. Though some may see this as a hindrance, in fact this robust and varied background is exactly what makes my resume shine above many of the rest, most especially when it comes to the challenges inherent in social media efforts today.

Over the past 10 – 12 years despite difficulties, side tracks and obstacles, I’ve never given up. I always see opportunity at every path, and have taken advantage of the chance to learn a diverse set of skills. I have always yearned to soak up knowledge and gain significant skills along the way. In the process my background affords me a macro-level business perspective that many managers and even business leaders lack.

As a business consultant I’ve managed projects, clients, and even entire businesses. These clients may not be Fortune 500 companies but they represent the backbone of business today – they are entrepreneurs, small business folks and mom and pop organizations. They are students, single moms and individuals just going out on their own, or trying to get their business to the next level. They are the folks who drive the economy, spend their money on corporate business wares, deal with their own client/customer relationships, and still expect their own needs to be met.

Their needs are far more robust than a typical corporate stakeholder, however, therefore more dynamic and challenging. Every manager and corporate executive should be required to have experience with clients like these before truly considering themselves a business success.

As for social media experiences, I bristle every time I hear an up-and-coming self-proclaimed social media expert say something to the effect of “don’t trust anyone who says they have been doing social media for more than 3 or 4 years, because it didn’t exist”. Of these entrepreneurs I can only ask — where were you in 1989 when me and hundreds and thousands of others logged onto bulletin board systems each night, connecting with one another through “the Internet”?

In 1995, as charter members of Match.com everyone was offered lifetime memberships to encourage growth in what was hailed the most exciting social development of its time. Can this experience not be considered “social”?

Although these new social media experts may brag about how they’ve been blogging since the advent of WordPress, how about those who were charter members of the first real blogging site, Diary-X.com?  I blogged under the auspices of Grasshopper Musings for nearly three years starting in 1993 before the company’s hard drive crash essentially ended the site in 1996.

How many others have spent hours painstakingly learning HTML and later PHP in order to hone and refine the newest geek craze – websites, complete with chat room plug-in, forum board add-on, or cool widgets and additions that would help us interact with others around the globe in the new and exciting virtual spaces we were developing?

What is social media after all if not an extension of community in a virtual world? If these community experiences are not the fabric of those developments then I’m at a loss for what is. If social media truly is the future, as I believe it is, it seems these macro-level, experience-driven skills and experiences will do society far more good than the cloistered, focused thinking of the past, however we must not lose sight of past developments simply to reinvent a new professional direction.

More importantly today it is clear that the exact audiences that many businesses wish to tap in the online world are these same social media pioneer audiences; the “community” in a very real sense is the grass roots of the digital age. These developments didn’t begin in a vacuum, but have developed over the years to culminate into what has become our future.

This new world of social media consciousness can be one of the greatest development of our time. If in the end we recognize the merit and skills of those who manage our communities, small, large and otherwise, both virtual and real, professional and personal, as well as those who grow, build, and develop those communities, we will truly be moving in the right direction.