The lure of sharing my children’s photos was too great. And to all of you with your snide little comments about me finally joining the 21st century, I’ll be “unfriending” you soon. So here’s a question:What’s up with the instructions?

 

There aren’t any! True, it’s not hard to create your profile, and there are tons of FAQs in the help center — and other users are only too happy to answer your questions — but it’s intriguing to me that there are no step-by-step instructions, tips or best practices. It has to be a generational thing. I see my kids jump into their video games without so much as a glance at the manual.

 

And maybe there’s something to the FAQ formula — you can just look at what you’re interested in whenever you need it. But, still, what if you don’t know what you don’t know? Are you getting full use of the product? For instance, I looked at my nephew’s profile (dear Lord, I hope my sister never sees it!) and he has “bumper stickers.”What in the world is a bumper sticker? Where did he get them? How do I get them? I think that’s the thing about social media — whether business or personal — you just have to dive in.

 

Sure, you should probably have some semblance of a strategy on the business side. But you don’t have to have every duck in a row and dot every “I.” The online world is very forgiving, perhaps because it’s moving so fast. I remember my father getting upset with me one day when he saw me handaddressing an envelope. In his world, all business envelopes were typed. Compare that with the standard signature you see now on many e-mails: “Forgive any typos, as this was written on a Blackberry.”

 

Just dive in. Set up a Facebook page, start blogging, start Tweeting. You’ll make mistakes. It’ll take a while before you’re a really active participant who knows “everything.” But speaking from my vast experience of three weeks, it’ll be a lot of fun.