One of the things that comes up for me and my coaching clients regularly is fear and intimidation around social media, particularly twitter. With all the hashtags and bitly url’s, it can be confounding and overwhelming.

What I recommend, and practice myself, is the drip method of adjustment. Try a little at a time, when you feel ready, and at your own pace. Ten minutes today, then again for 20 minutes in a week or two. Remember when email seemed daunting? Eventually the look of the medium and the gradual adaptation and acceptance of the form became second nature. Soon enough,  seeing 140 character missives will get under your skin in the same way and become a part of your normal day’s work.

I’m reminded of a quote I have referenced by David Pogue, a tech writer for the NYTimes, about using digital cameras. The acceptance, use and comfort with that technology is nearly universal. When you read this quote, written for the Circuits section in 2002, you can nod in appreciation of how far you’ve come and trust that the same will happen for your comfort level with social media.

Just connect the camera to the computer with a USB cable; copy your multimegabyte JPEG files to the hard drive; open the photos in an image-processing program; rotate and crop each one, adjusting the color; calculate the pixel density and desired output dimensions — and then click on print. What could be simpler?

My apologies for any of you who received a tweet from my hacked account yesterday. The brilliant hackers knew to appeal to our self-interest and claimed that a photo of me/you was to be seen at the url that created that damage.