In the 90′s I started using the new and trendy (as it was then) IRC.  For those people who have no idea what that is, IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, chatting to people all over the world via online chat rooms.  Through IRC and using mIRC (a then and still popular IRC client) I got my first taste of coding new scripts and adding mods to applications.  I became a mIRC developer and loved every minute of it.

I became an operator and moderator on various chat rooms and steadily my profile grew within the IRC world, through chatting to people and making contacts.  It was about that time too that I started to chat on ICQ – this was, at that point in time, THE messenger to use. I had various websites and I used both IRC and ICQ to let people know about them, I was also a web designer then (still am) and used this method of communication and networking to find new clients.

Now it is 2008, I use Twitter these days to chat to people in a massive chatroom, because let’s face it, that’s all the timeline is really.  I also use Yahoo Messenger and Skype to chat too people in a ‘messenger’ format, i.e. one to one chatting online.

But what’s really changed?  Back then we were making new contacts, networking, chatting and sharing information, isn’t that what we do now?  Perhaps social media has been around a lot longer than a lot of users may realise and does that make me an ‘early adopter’ or somewhat prehistoric?

We never really took IRC that seriously back in the 90′s but we still used it to our advantage.  You certainly didn’t have so called IRC experts or IRC managers to help raise your profile.

It also proves that a lot of social media marketing is just using your brain.  If you want to network - talk to other people, if you want to get your latest blog post seen – share it,  If you want people to come back to your blog or website – give them something worth coming back for.  The basics are common sense and have been since the good old IRC days, nothing much has really changed!