Gotta love the Internets: 4,925 “friends” on Facebook, 2,407 “likes” for the salon page on Facebook, a smattering of followers on the website, Twitter, and Instagram, and an unknown number of readers for this blog — but any given post on any given account never fails to result in at least one person who is utterly convinced that that post was totally directed at them personally.

Generally speaking, I ascribe to a “if the shoe fits” philosophy. Seriously. If it doesn’t have your name on it, or you’re not tagged in it, it might not be about you. Even if it seems custom-made for you.

*sigh*

As much as I love what I do for a living, the addition of social networking leaves me rolling my eyes on a daily basis. If it’s not the comments that people make to me, it’s the comments that people make to other people, or the comments that people make about other people. So much talking about each other, one wonders when we have time to get any actual work done.

But going dark and leaving social networking behind you isn’t realistic. Social networking has taken word-of-mouth advertising to the next level — exponentially. If I were to walk away from the Facebook and the Twitter and the Pinterest and the Instagram, I’d not only miss huge opportunities to reach my target audience and interact with them, but I’d fall out of touch with huge chunks of my industry and risk atrophying into one of those dinosaur techs who haven’t seen anything new in nails since 1985.

I’m working on adapting. Rolling with the punches of new generations, the way they communicate, the words they use to do it, and learning how those generations interpret my communication and the words I use to do it.

I am getting old. Some days I feel it more than others. Today I want to shake a few hundred people for being stupid on the Internet. Tomorrow you can shake me for being stupid on the Internet. But we’re all here together...when we’re not busy actually doing nails.