Friday, July 6, 2012

Social Media is Brave like the Hulk

Hi Everybody,

Today I became brave; from behind a computer. I shared my blog on facebook and invited people to become 'followers'. It was important to get past the cult-like feel of it and possible embarrassment of expressing my inner-most technological feelings, but barriers need broken down, and lines need to be crossed. Are you feeling brave my friends?

Despite the Hulk complex I have regarding my daring blog accomplishments today, I wanted to discuss what I have learned so far about creating a blog:

1) It's really not that difficult- Blogger is very user friendly and has a great help search engine appropriately entitled "Blogger Help." Help You can type any question or key words you have and it will direct you to the most relevant answers and information to your question.

2) Take it slow- Do you remember how long it took you to learn all the different functions of facebook? I have so many ideas and visions for this blog. I want to learn everything right now! The reality is that life gets in the way, so prioritize what is most important for you to learn, and become really good at it.

3.) Listening- If you want to learn a lot, ask a lot of questions. I have this part down : talk, talk, talk, blah, blah, blah. But then out of nowhere it came to me like an urgent news flash: you have to listen to learn. I've heard about this theory before. So that is what I did:  I talked to professionals, researched blogs others have created, and went out of my comfort zone to learn a new trade. If I didn't listen to the advice people gave me, this blog would likely be very political. Here is an interesting article about listening as the next social media frontier: Listening as Social Media

Maybe this blog won't go nation-wide because let's face it, this idea isn't original and there isn't an enormous constituency that cares about my blogging mission statement. The idea is as followed: I use this blog to learn the best blogging techniques so when it comes time to use these skills for a professional endeavor, I have worked out all the kinks and am ready to  produce results!

Next blog: Getting Techy Wit It- Adding more sophisticated features



Thursday, July 5, 2012

Blog Introduction

Day 1

I decided that today I will get the ball rolling with my social media blogging experiment. So I thought to begin by asking myself what is social media anyway? The business minds tell me that it’s a catalyst to keep followers engaged; an outlet for current happenings, and opportunities for informative dialogue and networking.

I have Facebook and Linkedin, and have even tried my hand at Twitter. But Blogs??? I spent a great amount of time deciding what the content of my blog will be, and even agonized over whether I should keep this strictly professional, or if I could entertain the masses with my amusing thoughts. I'm sure both will happen in the future, but for now, I want to learn the bare bones of blogging. 

As I learn more I plan to incorporate the following (subject to change as my understanding deepens):

 1.) Resources- I will be seeking out the finest to assist in the creation of this masterpiece. I have already been given a wonderful list of how-to sites that provide information by way of: seminars, webinars, ebooks, reports, and personnel.

 2.) Community Forum- I crave discussion and inventive minds! I envision this portion of the blog to have a Q&A, best practices session, and any relevant information in designing this outlet.

 3.) HTML- No this isn’t the alphabet, this is Hyper Text Markup Language used to describe webpages. I will be using W3 School tutorials to learn this material. Google Blogger has an option to use this plain text format and I will eventually be trying my hand at it.

Stay tuned to find out what kind of nerdy conundrums I will be confronted with next time.