A few months ago, I went to a PRSA luncheon on social media. Being a Millennial, I thought I would be head and shoulders above the rest of the (Boomer) crowd. Afterall, I knew what YouTube was. I had a Facebook account. I’d connected through LinkedIn. The rest of the crowd would be impressed and amazed at my Web 2.0 prowess. They would ask me cute questions like, “What’s a wall post?” Glory would be mine.

I think it was about three minutes into the presentation when I realized how wrong I was. The moderator began by asking who was on Facebook. I proudly shot my hand in the air and looked around. So had everybody else. He then asked who knew of YouTube. Everybody. RSS? SecondLife? Wikis? Technorati? Flickr? Digg? Twitter? The Boomers kept their hands raised, while I sat there: face red, eyes wide and hand down.

I left that luncheon scared, embarrassed and motivated to get my behind in gear. If I was going to succeed in PR, I’d need to know about this stuff, whether I wanted to or not, and use it to my advantage.

The thing about Web 2.0 sites/applications is that they’re all easy to learn. The trick is learning why the heck people use them, and there’s not always a clear-cut answer. Probably the biggest mystery to me was Twitter. If you aren’t familiar, Twitter is a micro-blogging site. You set up a profile and update it with 140 character snippets that answer, “What are you doing?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a super cool girl. People to see, places to go, whatnot. But honestly, I don’t even care what I ate for breakfast. Why would anyone else? But I was confident I would get the hang of this thing, I mean, the old people had, why couldn’t I? So, I set up a profile, uploaded a picture, and made my background all pretty.

Though I’m not particularly sure what I posted first. It was probably something to the effect of, “I’m not sure what the heck I’m doing here, but hi?” I “followed” some co-workers, a few social media types, Ron Paul (I know, right?) and hoped for the best.