The End is Near/What I’ve Learned (#J360)

Well, here we are folks, we’ve made it to the end of the semester. First off, I want to thank all of you that have stuck around to read my nonsense and my reviews, whether you are my classmates, professors, my friends, family or any others that were/are passing by. I’ll try to continue posting somewhat regularly since most of these were for a grade, but I won’t make any promise to those who read my writing religiously (if there was anyone out there reading these to that degree).

So, I guess I’ll go ahead and get right into the heart of this week’s topic: What I’ve learned. Most of you know that this was for a class and for those of you who don’t know, the blog posts marked “#J360” have been used to monitor my social media activity for a class focused around managing social media. Anyways, I came into the class expecting that this would be no problem and would quickly earn an easy grade by posting to my preexisting social media outlets. I soon came to find out that it wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be. Check-ins on Swarm, posting a weekly topic to blogs, posting 3-5 articles to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, five photos a week on Instagram and the nearly 30 tweets a week on Twitter became quite the load to deal with. Sure, some postings came easier than others, but majority had to revolve around public relations/social media to some extent. As stressful as it seems, I got the overall gist of what to course was trying to get across.

The core of the course was trying to get across the idea that working for a company forces one to manage several media handles by posting only materials related to that company. Work for a medical company? You’ll find yourself posting about breakthroughs in medicine or medical journals. Work for a technology company? Articles on TechCrunch or CNET might be right up your ally for all technology news. I don’t think I need to continue my examples. Social media isn’t all about the posting, but it’s also about having a conversation with your audience. What’s the point in posting your statuses, tweets or links if you can’t engage your publics in the process? If you don’t engage, it ends up being like your company talking to a wall.

In the end, social media isn’t exactly as easy as it seems on the outside looking in. What I’ve learned in managing my own media handles I can use to better my current position as social media administrator at my job and in future jobs. And if that isn’t the point in the class, then I apologize for all these empty words and all of those who read my #J360 posts. This has been an enriching experience and will continue to carry on my work. Be on the lookout for more posts in the future and don’t forget to follow my other social media handles, which you can find by clicking here.

Now if you excuse me, I have a web video to go work on.