Sunday, January 20, 2013

First Blog

Attempting to create a blog is definitely something that I have never considered to by one of my strong suits. I don't think of myself as the kind of person that can easily put my thoughts into words, especially without an extremely well defined theme. However, after really starting to look over other blogs focused on the topic of social media I am slowly beginning to realize how important it is and how helpful the idea can be for a company and brand. Since one of the most important things I have learned at Terry about getting noticed in the world of careers is marketing "my brand," I am beginning to see this as a great opportunity to better define myself and what I consider important.

Before I started, I went through many blogs of influential people who have many followers to better understand what I should be focusing on. The more I attempted to learn about social media through blogs, the more I realized just how little I actually know. The subject is so wide and diverse and involves so many more things than the average person thinks of. Most consider social media as Facebook and Twitter, simple ways to connect with others around them and to learn more about the world, but it is really so much wider and more complex. On Heidi Cohen's blog I found an interesting post containing 30 definitions of social media. Every single definition is different and brings in a new perspective of the idea, but they all have the same basic foundation, focused on a series of media platforms and tools that allow people to interact and share information. As simple as that may seem at first, it is clear that there is really so much more to the topic and I greatly look forward to learning more about it.

Although I am still quite a beginner when it comes to social media, I am greatly looking forward to being able to take advantage of all I learn and put it to actual use in my work. Right now I work for a very small sports company that runs soccer camps. I am basically in charge of all marketing for the company, and although it is very new and small, I think that with social media I can definitely help the brand to grow. At this point, the social media is limited to a company Facebook page that I really don't know what to post other than about the camps being offered. With the knowledge from the class and from the blogs I will continue to read, I think I will be able to get a much better grasp of how to use this platform as a way of not only reaching out to current customers, but also to future customers who might be interested in the company. Overall I think that this class could be one of the most helpful and relevant classes I may take while in school.