Archive for February, 2012

Today I was given the opportunity to speak to a class at Bay State College about social media. It was wonderful. The enthusiasm during our discussion was great and before you knew it an hour had gone by. Secretly, I went into this thing trying to figure out what we were going to talk about for an hour. Almost immediately I was comforted by the fact that a few of the students had a real interest in Social Media and we just ran with a Q&A session.

These are my favorite kind of chats. I was sitting down with them, not standing looking down at them. It was comfortable and held quite a conversational type atmosphere. I think this type of talk is the easiest to have the BIGGEST impact in. With a small group hanging on your every word and throwing back questions to something you might just have said. It’s a great way to get the juices flowing and the gears in the head turning. I spent the entire ride home thinking about that talk and what I can do better and how I should go about acting on ideas that are now wildly spinning about my head. I’m going to follow my own advice that I gave to the students: “Jump in, get your hands dirty, if it doesn’t work pivot.” I’ve got a couple ideas that I’ve had in my head for the past couple of years that I’m going to launch and see if they work. You never know unless you take that risk. Hopefully if I go back and talk to these students again I can tell them that the last time I was here they helped me launch an idea that became super successful or perhaps it flopped but here’s why it did. Learning from failure is nearly as important if not more important than learning from success.

Hopefully some of the students will reach out and ask some more questions that they might not have been able to ask and we’ll start a whole new conversation and spawn some more great ideas. Only time will tell.

It was a great day and I’m smiling ear to ear.

Really. I’m sure I’ve got more than one but one that stands out more than the others is my addiction to online gaming. More specifically World of Warcraft. I enjoy playing a gaming an slaying internet dragons. There, I said it. I’ve been playing since closed beta which happens to be 2004. So that’s 8 of years of playing the same game. Do I play every hour of everyday? No, most certainly not. If I did that then my client work would never get done and I’d be homeless. Those two things are for sure.

I often think about why I play the game and why I’ve played it for so long. I’ve never played any other game for as long as I’ve played this one. I’m not a casual player but I’m also not a hardcore player. I’d rank myself somewhere in the semi-hardcore bracket with a whole ton of content completed in game and just putting the finishing touches on the end game. There have been times where I stepped away from WoW for a bit but for no other reason than I’ve had other, more important things going on in my life that had to be handled. No I didn’t get the sweats or the shakes or the crack itch. Sometimes you just drift in and out of a game. I’ve seen it happen for years on end. Good players/friends come and go and come back again. New games come out and a month later those folks that left WoW to play it generally return back to the drug that is World of Warcraft.

I thoroughly enjoy the social aspect of the game. Getting together for a few hours every night with 9 other people, who share a common interest and get pretty much the same satisfaction you do out of the game is fun for me. What else would I be doing on a Tuesday or Wednesday night? Watching TV? Same thing really and I’d rather play the game than sit and watch TV. Back when I first started playing WoW it was all about you could be whoever you wanted to be. I started on a Roleplaying server and was there for a couple years. I did get tired of it and wanted some more action so I transferred when I could and ended up on a PVP server which was a massive change in direction than what I was used to. No more carebears it was all about “if it’s red, it’s dead”. Currently I reside on a normal server but remain PVP flagged 100% of the time. It’s fun and I enjoy the challenge. The raiding end of my guild is a pretty close knit group of people. We all have a common bond in that this is what we do on our downtime. Most of the folks on my raid team are out of college, have jobs, families, etc. And this is what they do when the kids are asleep and they have time to themselves. I love that. Are they my friends? If you’ve read my blog you’ll know that I don’t consider myself to have many friends. Acquaintances sure but not friends. All these people are good acquaintances. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t share a beer with them though. I absolutely would. Anytime.

So I pay $15 a month to play this game and have done so for pretty much the better part of let’s say 7 years. That means Blizzard has gotten about $1250 of my money in order for me to play. I’m ok with that because there are plenty of other things that I could be addicted to that would cost me a whole lot more than that a week or month. What’s interesting to me is I’ve always been cautious about telling people that I play WoW. It seems that once someone knows this about you they see you as some sort of basement dwelling, hot pocket eating, sausage fingered, lives with his parents, fat kid with nothing better to do than play games all day. I’m not that person, at all. I live on the third floor actually It wasn’t until I found that a Social Media Giant that I look up to Chris Penn plays WoW that things finally clicked for me and I felt it was ok for me to spend my time playing the game when I wanted to. It’s weird to me that I needed validation from someone in the same industry as me to make me feel ok about admitting that I play the game. It’s almost childish now that I look back on it.

So I’ll keep playing until something new comes my way and manages to pry $15 a month out of my hands. I think I’ll do more updates on WoW here and other games I’m playing. Diablo 3 is coming and I still need to start playing Skyrim. The new WoW Expansion should be out this year and the new Starcraft 2 Expansion is slated for release as well. It looks like I might just have a lot to talk about.

Want to find me on WoW and say hello? Here’s a link to my armory: click here – I mainly play a Holy Paladin on the server Turalyon, Alliance side, named Seltzers. Stop in game and say hello. If you’ve got questions I can answer I’ll do my best to do so.