Posts Tagged ‘ Twitter ’

Personal Project Drumbeat – Matthew German

Strategy

1)What is the goal? My goal is to create a Personal Brand for myself. Before I can create a personal brand I need to figure out who I am. Both on the Internet and in person; even beyond that who I am on what different social media places. With a personal brand I can be a presence on the Internet in social media that is more than just someone with friends on Facebook, or someone who follows some celebrity’s Tweets. Social media is an ever growing market with untapped business potential, and I want to be on the forefront for that. I also want to learn how social media can help with sales, mire than just spamming users with adds.

2) What already exists? What already exists are the social media sites themselves, such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Flickr, StumbleUpon, and so on. With these sites there is limitless potential for one person to make a name for themselves, it just requires more work than collecting Facebook friends. Another resource that exists is the fact that there are some people out there doing what I wish to do, which is beneficial for me because I can learn from them, as well as expand upon or improve their methods/ideas.

3) Who trying to reach? Essentially, my target audience would be a potential employer or possibly clients if I do this on on my own one day. I am trying to reach those who know that social media is important, but just do not have the know-how or time to utilize it themselves. Also, I am trying to reach others in the social media realm, because they could potentially be helpful, or even partners, who knows.

4)Why passionate? I am passionate about this because I enjoy playing around with technology and learning the ins and outs of a product or service. Therefore social media is very interesting to me, because it allows people to interact and network in a whole new way. Social media is fascinating in the way that anyone can find what they are looking for provided they know what outlet to use. Social media is so much more than Facebook and Twitter.

5)How does idea make things better? This has the potential to make the web better if I can find a good and organized way to determine someone’s personal brand, then I can share it and help people become more successful in whatever it is they wish to do.

Story

1) 5 Sentences. Social Media is constantly growing and changing. Many people do not understand how important social media can be to their lives and careers. With a personal brand I will have more opportunities to tailor things towards career or personal life. Social media is quickly becoming an essential tool for networking, both in business and socially. A personal brand allows you to know what tools to use for fun and what tools to use to get ahead, and why.

2) Story.

Social Media is constantly growing and changing. There are new sites being developed all the time that allow users to share information a new and unique way. Even the services that already exist are improving themselves all the time, just look at how far Facebook has come. It went from a simple college friend service, to a social media giant that most all other social media services are centered around. If it can be shared, there is a link to do so through Facebook.

Many traditional business owners do not understand how important social media can be to their business. Through social media a business can grow in a number of ways. Once a business has created a following, there are strategies for turning those followers and fans into customers or clients. Just creating a network and facilitating communication correctly can lead to growth.

With a personal brand I will have more opportunities to tailor things towards career or personal life. This works in the sense that social tools like Facebook and Flickr are fun, and are a great way to keep in touch. However, they are not great for branding yourself professionally; there is too much room for error with what can be posted to those sites. Sites like Twitter and LinkedIn are incredibly useful for professional applications; LinkedIn is obvious because it is a professional networking site. Twitter is good because it allows people to follow those in the same industry or with the same ideals; as well as create content to send to those same people.

Social media is quickly becoming an essential tool for networking, both in business and socially. Networking is an important part of finding the job or career you want. Social media is an essential tool for networking; LinkedIn is an outstanding way to become connected with the right people. With a LinkedIn profile you can connect with the people you need to network with in order to be successful. On the other end, sites like Facebook are great for making new friends, and perhaps starting a professional connection, but it should not continue there.

A personal brand allows you to know what tools to use for fun and what tools to use to get ahead, and why. If you create your own personal brand, you will know the type of person you need to be in different media outlets. In my case Facebook and Flickr are great social, fun tools; LinkedIn, blogs, and Twitter however are powerful tools for getting ahead. Each person may be different in the way in which they have to tailor their social media lives in order to get ahead with what they want to succeed with.

 

Tools

When creating my personal brand the tools that I will need will be the social media services that I will utilize.

Facebook will be used to keep in touch with my friends and make posts about things that I care about like cars and technology. Beyond that, Facebook is not a site that I would like to broadcast myself professionally on. It feels like too much of a social place instead of a professional place. Therefore, I keep my Facebook private and visible to only my friends.

With Flickr I also use socially; not quite as much as Facebook, but still not to any professional extent. I use Flickr to make my photos public for people to see. I do keep them as Copyrighted instead of using Creative Commons, because I like them to remain mine. I also use Flickr to follow my friends’ photos and comment on others’ photos that I like. I really enjoy photography, so seeing great photos that others take is fun.

StumbleUpon is a fun tool that allows you to tell it your interests and it will give you back a randomly generated site that follows your interests. I enjoy this because it makes browsing the internet much simple, because I don’t have to weed through garbage sites to find good ones. It also allows me to save the sites, as well as post them to Twitter or Facebook if I so choose. Which is great because I enjoy posting things on my Facebook that interest me, such as car photos or information.

LinkedIn is an essential tool for professional personal branding. With LinkedIn I have my resume uploaded into my profile so that someone can see all of my experience and work history. In addition to resume elements, I have used LinkedIn to link out to other sites that I think may be helpful in showing employers my interests and knowledge; such as both of my blogs (including this one) and my Flickr page. I said before that I am using Flickr for fun, but my car photos just show my interests in another place. LinkedIn also allows me to put things like my goals, and achievements, and other elements that aren’t typically put on a resume.

The blogs are another aspect of my personal branding; with this blog “Matt’s Blog” I keep up with the Comm 200 class “Using Social Media” and post updates on social media technologies that I am using and learning about. As well as state ways in which these services could be used personally or professionally. My other blog, which is based around my 1999 Ford Ranger, keeps track of the work that I do on the truck, on a project-to-project basis. I have done work between the time that I bought the truck and created the blog, but I do not have photos or specific details about them. I am however keeping up to date information about the current work I am doing. This blog is useful in showing my interest in cars, and working on and maintaining them. It is my biggest hobby, and has been since I was young.

Twitter is another social media tool that can be useful professionally. Twitter has the potential to create useful connections, as well as serve as a constant updating stream of news. I follow the Twitter feeds of professionals in social media, and many technology websites feeds. This allows me to stay updated on technology news as well as social media news.

 

People

In terms of people, there isn’t really anyone I can reach out to, as I am creating a PERSONAL brand. I have and can read articles about personal branding, but I do not need anyone to create anything for me, nor to I need someone to create content. Because I am the only one who can use my profiles correctly and honestly.

 

Prototype

Prezi Presentation on Personal Branding


2011
04/04
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Learning Journal
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Springpad.

For the Comm 200 Co-Teaching assignment I have been working on and preparing to teach social notesharing. Specifically, the service I have been using most and have a great understanding of is Springpad. Springpad is a service that allows users to save almost any information that they want to remember.

Say you are on a website, and want to save the page, and wish to access it from any computer, not with just a bookmark on your personal computer. You can simply go to the Springpad website and paste the link into a new item in one of your notebooks. Notebooks work like a physical notebook would, they allow you to categorize your information making it easier to find later. There is also an extension for most of the major web browsers that allows you to “clip the page” which adds it to whichever notebook you choose.

However, Springpad is not only for saving webpages, while on the site you can search for anything you want to remember or have for later, and save it. For example, if you search “chocolate cake recipe,” a list of recipes will appear, with the most popular being at the top. Once you have found one you like and save it to a notebook, when you view the recipe it will show the entire recipe, not just a link to the original destination.

In addition to being able to save and categorize things like recipes, webpages, products, movies, music, etc. you can tag your saved things so that all of your related items are saved together and can be easily accessed using the list of tags on the left side of the page.

You can also find friends that share similar interests as you and share your saved things with them or with anyone by making it public. There is also the option to find friends through Facebook, your Gmail contacts, or Yahoo! contacts. In addition to finding contacts, you can share your saved things through Facebook, Twitter, Diigo, and over 300 other services.

Springpad is available on any computer on the internet, or on any iOS device, and on Android devices.

Here is a link to a short YouTube Video about Springpad.

2011
02/24
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Quora Experience

I posed a question on Quora in relation to my personal project in Comm 200. For the project I wish to do something with using social media as a job or a career when I graduate in May. So i asked the question “What types of jobs are there in social media?” I received one response that was very helpful in terms of jobs available in social media without actually working for one o the social media companies. He explained the title of Social Media Manager, which I knew existed, but he went into slight detail about what they do and how to go about doing it. He says that there are two ways to go about it, one is freelancing and offering my experience in social media to multiple companies, or finding a company that needs social media and a social media manager. He also mentioned that many companies are still unaware that they may need a social media manager, therefore it would take some extra work and convincing on my part, which I think I could do very well as social media is becoming an integral part of the Internet in todays society.

 

Here is a link to the question and answer(s).

2011
02/16
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Co-Teaching Experience

So far the co-teaching assignment has been very informative, both in the presentations given by the groups who have already gone, and also in my own research on social notesharing. Social media is quickly becoming the framework of the internet, as almost everything is centered around social media. Even if it is just the ability to share something from another site onto a social media page.

Social notesharing is a very interesting form of social media, I’m not sold on the title of social “notesharing,” but who am I to change it. Yes it allows you to share notes to friends or to anyone, but it allows for so much more than that also. I have been working with Evernote and Springpad for this project, and I have to say, I prefer Springpad. This is mainly because it is more user-friendly. For example, until you have really played around with Evernote, it is a little intimidating, with Springpad it is incredibly self-explanatory as soon as you login. I had heard of both Springpad and Evernote prior to this project, but didn’t know what they were all about, and now that I have been using and researching them, I will be using Springpad all of the time to keep track of pages and segments of pages that I want to keep for later use.

One great feature about both Evernote and Springpad is that they are not only for use with computers, they have applications for multiple mobile devices; iOS, Android, Blackberry, etc. And they have extensions for most of the common web browsers that allow you to save information without leaving the page. When using Springpad on a PC or Mac, there is no software to download, which is nice; however with Evernote, you have to download the software. It is accessible on the web from a remote location, but the best experience is with the software. Which can be nice for offline use, but I prefer to just got to Springpad’s site or use the browser add-on.

 

2011
02/15
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Twitter.

Initial Thoughts

Twitter is an online social media site that allows users to “Tweet,” which is a sentence or two containing a certain small amount of characters. With these “Tweets” users can essentially say anything they want to, about whatever they want to. There are a few way in which users can actually utilize the features of Twitter.

Twitter mainly, is a place to make small posts about your day, or to voice an opinion, etc. However, if one were to just Tweet then it would be available for anyone to see. Anyone who was following the user who Tweeted could see it, anyone who was following a list in which it was contained could see it, anyone who was following a search related to content of the Tweet, or a hashtag could see it. There are ways to make sure that a certain person will see a Tweet, and that is to put @theirusername in front of the message, then that person and anyone following them can see it. Those who are following @theirusername will see it in their @mentions tab. Finally, users can send private messages to one another using the direct message feature.

Follow-up

I have been using Twitter for about a week now, and have begun following people, companies, and lists that I am interested and that may help in the co-teaching project. In terms of a way to communicate with people, I find no benefits to Twitter personally, because it is way too public, and can be often times confusing as to who said what to who, etc. However, I do find it useful for sharing information, such as links to websites. Also, I primarily follow technology or automotive companies or magazines, because those are the stories I am most interested in. The posts these users make, usually contain links to stories on their webpages, but the nice thing about seeing the posts on Twitter is that I can see a quick blurb of what its about, followed by the link, so I can filter out the articles I would rather not read, as well as the ones I would like to read. In terms of the project, I don’t know that Twitter provides a service that would be terrible useful in terms of teaching something to the class, however, if the class wished to share links, or if I wished to share links about the topic, it would be a great place to do so.

2011
01/27
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Online Dashboards

Initial Thoughts

I have previously used iGoogle as my online dashboard, not knowing that there were any similar services. I have just recently started a Netvibes dashboard and definitely prefer it over iGoogle. Both dashboards offer essentially the same services in terms of adding feeds or email inboxes, as well as a whole slew of widgets and other fun things to add to your dashboard pages. However, I prefer Netvibes over iGoogle simply because of the user interface. iGoogle is rather boring and has very few quality themes that change very little about the page. With Netvibes, there are multiple, well-made themes that change the appearance of everything. In addition to the theme appearance, Netvibes has better widget for linking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Both allow users to add feeds and other widgets to aggregate all of the data they usually surf the Internet for into one place. Users can add pages, and organize them as they please, online dashboards are a very useful way to use the Internet, because instead of going to many pages, users can go to one website, with as many pages as they desire, and get all of their information in one place. They are simple to use, all you have to do is register for free, add your favorite widgets, feeds, and other information you wish to see. The easiest way to use a dashboard is to set it as your homepage, that way it is always right there when you log onto the Internet.

Follow-up

After using Netvibes for a week, I have actually decided to switch back to the less-attractive iGoogle, simply because Netvibes takes much too long to load. They both essentially offer the same services, but iGoogle loads almost instantaneously, whereas Netvibes takes quite a long time to load, compared to the majority of webpages today.

As for using the dashboard for a project, it would be extremely useful, because it would allow me to have a place in which I could have all of the information websites, or blogs that I am following for my project together, instead of having to search for them every time I work on the project. It is also useful to quickly access Gmail, Google Docs, etc. which would all potentially play an important role in the completion and success of the project at hand.

For the FYE program, dashboards would be an excellent technology to show to incoming freshmen because it would show them a simpler way to study, follow news, follow their friends, etc. However, if there were a way to make BannerWeb or BlackBoard accessible through an online dashboard that would be an amazing benefit to students, not only first year, but to all students. Because they could keep track of their records and courses all in one place.

2011
01/27
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