This week was all about learning practical ways to apply our learned knowledge of the social media landscape to our customer assignments. The first thing I considered was who I know would consider a college student to control a portion of their social media. An immediate answer was my father, as we have a very close relationship. I did do a little bit of digging around for other options thought. I talked to my supervisor at work a bout setting up a department-focused twitter account or something of the like. He liked the idea, but the time restraint was just not realistic, so I chose to go on with helping my dad and the audio/video studio he runs at Lawrence High School. This is one of my first exposures to working with a family member as a client and it was very interesting. I set up the tumblr account for the studio which can be found here: http://studio125lhs.tumblr.com/ It is very bare bones at the moment but there is more to come. The next step is a Facebook and Twitter page, as we found out this week these two sites serve different audiences and fulfill different purposes. Facebook has a very wide global presence and Twitter has been shown to not only be useful for individuals, but brands as well. Twitter especially will be good for students to get quick updates from my dad about the going-ons of class. This semester is moving along quickly! It’s time to move onto the next week already. 🙂

For this week in class, we were asked to set up our Hootsuite accounts that we may access all the cool resources Hootsuite has to offer. After browsing the site, I was surprised to find the vast amount of helpful information Hootsuite provides on how to succeed in a social-media driven world. Our first assignment, SCMD 121, was a series on videos on a few popular social media sites. Most of them, like Facebook and Tumblr, I already knew a lot about because I am a veteran of those sites. Although, personally I disagreed with some of the things the video had to say about Tumblr being user-friendly. The majority of people on Tumblr are very fed up with the ways Tumblr keeps changing and making it LESS user-friendly and more and more of a coding nightmare, but that was the only nitpick I have about the videos. What I did learn a lot about was the more adult sites such as LinkedIn and Foursquare. A lot of people think of social media as a very young-person only type of thing, but that is far from true. LinkedIn is helpful for working professionals and Foursquare is helpful for businesses and their customers. Through this course I discovered their really is a social media network for everyone out there. On an unrelated note, I really enjoyed the video player on Hootsuite. I thought it was very clean-looking and easy to use. That’s all for this week!

For this week’s assignment, our goal was to google ourselves and take note of what we found. We were supposed to take note of any patterns and evaluate our overall online presence. My online presence was about what I expected. I had my Facebook and Twitter of course, but there were a few things that also surprised me. I had a profile on a shopping site called Storenvy that appeared quite high on the search results. My profile on a dating site called Hot or Not was also among the results and as it was quite old it was a little embarrassing. I noticed that if I switched between my legal name (Abigail), and my nickname that I am most often referred to (Abby), that i got slightly different results. My goal for this semester in terms of my personal is branding is to keep streamlining myself. I need to update the information on the important sites and cut the fat from the rest. I hope to familiarize myself with privacy settings on certain sites to protect myself as well. I have already made my twitter private but I’m wondering if there are other smaller things I can do. Onto the next week!

Hell there! My name is Abby Sostarich. I’m 20 years old and currently a student at JCCC. Immediately following high school, I attended Pittsburg State University, but found myself not enjoying it. So I transferred here and I feel much more at home. My extent of marketing experience was my senior year when I was the Ads Editor for the yearbook. I am taking this course because as a millennial, I am very personally invested in social media and I would like to learn more about the business aspect of it. Three things I hope to learn from this course are the ways I am being marketed to daily, the ways I can market myself better on social media and things I can avoid when traversing the internet. Thank you for reading and I hope to have a great semester!