blogger interrupted

So the new social media business is up and running.  I’m getting some traction here and there, but I’ve started out slow, on purpose – I’ve always got a method to my madness.  I’m pretty confident in the long term, because I’ve got something no other social media consultant can even touch.

You all know it’s coming.  CEO sits across a board room table from me, and asks, “Why the hell would I hire a sex felon to do anything for me, let alone in media, let alone in social media?”   My response is already in the can, not least because it’s already happened.

“Did you ever think you’d be sitting across from a sex felon discussing anything?  Guess how I got here – social media.”

A potential client asked me for a case study the other day – I always wonder whether or not I go into my own case study.  Eight years ago, I dirtied myself up about as spectacularly as anyone can.  If you posited a set of facts designed to insure that one human being would never again earn an honest dollar for the rest of his life, you’d have pointed to me.  Raise the bar, then raise it again to the moon – when I look back on it, I’m still amazed I’m even alive today.

I didn’t have a hope of recovery absent social media.  I started blogging in 2004, and the road was long, bumpy, and dangerous.   Lots of opportunity to curl up into a ball and just disappear.  But at every turn, it was the social media environment, and that alone, which held the potential for renewal, redemption, and return to humanity.  Without the opportunity to engage in an authentic and sustained effort to rebuild, which only the social media environment can afford, I’d be nowhere.

It sounded crazy to a lot of people – you want to blog?  Shoot Youtubes?  Get a Facebook page?  Tweet?  After all that?  Are you nuts?  I always knew the risks were high, but I also knew it was literally the Only.  Way.  Out.  Period. If you’re trying to convince a world hard wired to believe and act upon the worst, most sensational bullshit, and there’s an avenue available where authenticity can prevail over fear, that’s the road you take.  You have no choice.

Along the way, I’ve helped make change in my community when it seemed my community had banished me forever; made some life long friends when I thought friends were for other people; polished skills which I thought I’d never be able to use again; appeared in print, on TV and radio when I thought my last such appearance was from the back of a police car; placed my viral video into the national discourse to the point of changing that discourse.  Absent social media, none of this was possible.

So if I can use social media to turn a sex felon into an income producing, contributing member of society who has a future to look forward to – I can pretty much do anything with social media.  Why wouldn’t you hire me?  Hell, I should be a motivational speaker.