10 Best Social Media Practices

I've learned a lot in MDIA 470B: Social Media Management. In this class, I've been able to better understand where technology is heading in the future and how I can successfully move with it both personally and professionally.  With that being said, here are what I consider the top 10 best social media practices:

1.  If you're going to use a blog or twitter or something where you want people to read and also grasp what you are writing, you must write in a way that is interesting.  You cannot write like a robot or nobody is going to connect with you or what you are saying.

2.  Have a nice layout.  If it looks pretty, it will most likely attract more people. Make sure it is organized and clean so that people can find what they are looking for.

3.  Update regularly.  It doesn't have to be every day or even every week. However, if you want people to tune in, you should really keep your site updated and post frequently.

4.  Comment on other people's sites.  It's a really easy way to be recognized and get your own site noticed.

5.  Use several different social media sites.  Having a Facebook is not the only form of social media and getting your thoughts out there.  There are so many different sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogger, etc.  The list is endless.

6.  Some sites are better for getting your media seen than others. Facebook seems to be the most successful at getting YouTube views versus Twitter.

7.  Making your sites easy to link to.  If you put a button for linking or following somewhere very obvious on your page, you'll get many more people to see your site.

8.  When it comes to businesses, social media can be a great tool.  Wikis are a great way to get everyone in your business connected and share ideas.

9.  Assume everything you write online will become public.  You want to be professional and not say things that are going to cause problems or even get you fired from a job.  It's very important to stay classy.

10.  Post useful and unique content.  If it's the same thing everyone writes about or posts about, nobody is going to actually read it and find it meaningful in any way.

What Has Been Happening

Currently, there has been a lot going on in my life. I'm definitely keeping very busy with editing Life in Adams. In fact, I have to get a complete rough cut of all four episodes by tomorrow and then the director is going to give me some corrections/feedback and I have a week to adjust some things before our premiere on May 30th. I'm a little bit stressed out about it, because the footage I was given and audio was very unorganized and was not slated very well.  That has been making it take about 3x longer to edit, because trying to sync audio and video and compress the footage takes forever in itself, but not being able to find the right audio for the video is making it a much longer process than it should be.  It's really important for the AC's to slate everything properly on set, because otherwise it's a disaster for the editors.  Besides the time consumption, the editing is going decently.  There's just so much to do and so little time.

On a more pleasant note, Here Lies Luther has its entire rough cut finished as well.  Alex and I still have to go in and make some adjustments and do color correction, but it's going really smoothly.  This project has been really fun to edit and be on set for.  I'm really confident that it's going to look really great when we finally premiere it!

If you're interested in checking out Here Lies Luther you can click on this LINK to see our webpage and read a little about the storyline :)

Social Media in Business

After reading a bit about how to implement social media in businesses in Brogan's book, social tools are essential.  With the use of these on several different networks, you can get your business positive notice from many many people.  He lists a lot of different things you can do to help your business  incorporate social media.

When blogging, Brogan suggests "being human" and write a human-sounding profile.  This is so important, because nobody is going to be interested in reading something that sounds overly formal that's hard to read.  If it sounds like a human is writing it, it also comes across as more relatable and personable, which is never a bad thing. This tip can go a really long way in helping a business, because more people are going to want to stay connected and see what's being said in a human-like way.

A second tip that Brogan suggests is to check your stats to see what people are searching for, and address it.  This is a great piece of advice for a business using social media. First of all, social media is allowing your business to get feedback in the first place, but now using a blog, Twitter, etc. allows you to do something with that feedback.  If there is information people want to know, what better way of showing good service to them than by answering to it.

A third piece of advice is to keep a clean theme for the design of your blog.  Some are free and some you can buy, but either way, it will make your page have a little bit more credibility.  When it looks clean and organized, people are more likely to read it since it is so easy to find things.  When a blog is cluttered, people aren't going to waste their time trying to find information on them.  

Another helpful tip that Brogan talks about is making sure it is easy for people to subscirbe to your blog.  That's the key with social media...EASY. You want to make it as simple and easy as possible for people to follow you and subscribe to you, or else they just aren't going to do it. If you put a tool on your blog that just has a nice obvious "Subscribe to this Page" kind of thing, people will click it. When you don't make it easy for people, you don't get the results you want.

Lastly, Brogan suggests picking three social networks to join based on where your customers might be. There's Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  There are so many place to reach an audience and not everyone uses every single one of these sites.  So, the more networks you have in different social media sites, the bigger your chance is of reaching people who your business is applicable to. 

New Technologies

After watching the TED video about all this new technology where you can use your mind to make things happen, I am not sure how I feel about it.  I really get a little weirded out with technology that is so invasive.  I guess it isn't too creepy, because it's only doing what you tell it to do with your mind, but it's still weird to me.  I can see how this would be helpful to to human connection, because it's allowing people to use their minds to do things versus creating robots that are programmed to do something we want it to do.  

There are both disadvantages and advantages to technology like this. However, I think with inventions like these it's just putting the world on the fast track to laziness.  I think it's a much better thing when people have to physically do work.  Everything is being made for the use of simplicity, including inventions like this which can be taken as an advantage and disadvantage.  With simplicity comes laziness, but sometimes simplicity is a good thing because then you are able to get things done faster and more effectively.  

In my personal opinion, I think that it is just another "isolating" feature of our technical world.  Don't get me wrong, it's really cool to be able to come up with technology that actually can connect to a human brain, but when does it go too far? When are we crossing a line with technology like this?

Cooperation and Collaboration

In class we watched Howard Rheingold's TED talks about cooperation and collaboration. He makes a lot of points about how in the coming years we are entering an entirely new form of getting economic success through technology that is very different from anything we have done previously.  With this, cooperation and collaboration are very important.  He uses the example of the prisoner's dilemma game and how people tend to lose, however, with this new open sourcing it kind of defeats the prisoner's dilemma because people are allowed to help with certain projects and software to make it better and this is a win-win situation for companies that have the open sourcing as well as for the people participating in making it better. The whole point of open-sourcing is collaboration.  It allows anyone the opportunity, if they so desire, to alter a project in a way that they think improves it.  It also requires cooperation from the company and the people, because the project is constantly changing, which can be frustrating.

I really don't know how I feel about this open-source movement. It doesn't seem like a very stable thing, because when so many people are going in and making changes to something is there ever a point where everyone agrees that it is the best it can be? I doubt it. In perspective, I suppose it could be successful.  It sounds like a great idea, because people get a say in the product they want to use.  However, the odds of its success don't seem to be very high. I don't think that I would personally trust it. I think that people may move towards it at first,  but will probably get way too frustrated with the constant changing of it and just want their proprietary software back.  I do think that proprietary software companies will always have bank on software development and distribution, because not everyone knows how to do coding and go in and alter software and products in open-sourcing.  I also think that some people, my dad for instance, don't want their programs constantly changing on them.  They want something stable that they know how to use and don't have to be bothered by learning new things.

Overall, open-sourcing could surprise me and turn out to be really successful and give everyone an opportunity to help make software the best it can be.  However, I don't think I'll buy into it.  I don't mind using proprietary software.

What's Going on in that Head of Mine?

Currently, there are a lot of things on my mind.  Most of it has to do with video editing.  Right now I'm editing for the AVW show "Life in Adams" and have 4 episodes to finish by May 11th, which is stressing me out. I love editing though, so I know I'll be a happy camper as soon as I get some free time to sit down and crank out these episodes.

This is just a little teaser I made for the upcoming season of "Life in Adams"

Along with that, every weekend I've been on set for the 419 production, "Here Lies Luther." I'm the assistant editor and DIT for this short film and have been sooo incredibly busy with it. I absolutely love working on it and I especially love being around the crew, because they are fabulous. It's kind of sad that I have to miss out on all of the fests that everyone else is getting to go to, but working on these films is totally worth it.  Plus, I want to be a professional editor someday...not a professional partier. The funny thing about working on films is you never know what crazy things you're going to have to do. For "Here Lies Luther" we literally had to dig our own grave and make our own head stone, which is pretty out there. As someone who gets an inside look at the footage, it looks incredibly professional and I cannot wait until it's finished.

Grave diggin'

Lastly, summer is one of the big things on my mind lately! I am completely excited to be in LA for 3 months working at an amazing company and being in a beautiful place! It's going to be one of the coolest experiences, especially since I got to meet a few producers out there over spring break. We've been keeping in touch and I can't wait to meet up with them and learn as much as I can about the industry. It's really going to be an incredible experience.

What I've Learned

So far I have been able to learn a lot about social media from this course.  Mostly, I am learning how to be more active and also professional with the use of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  The most interesting concept to me has been blogs.  I tried making a blog in the past, but I had a really hard time finding something to write about and also keeping up with it.  The purpose I tried using it for was mainly to just talk about my life. From this class, however, I have realized you can use blogs in professional way to get noticed throughout a company you may work for or just write about your opinion on something you find important. I've also learned how to get your blog seen by more people by making its appearance more appealing and adding different tools people can use to connect to your blog or post it on other sites.

The most boring topic that we've discussed in class is probably the Tag Clouds and Cloud Computing. I understand that it can be a way of storing useful documents and other things online so that you can access it anywhere from any device, but it's not very interesting of a topic to have a discussion on.  It's also a little bit difficult to understand if you have never had a Dropbox or used Mediafire before. It's definitely a neat thing to have available, but definitely not much fun to talk about.

There's a lot of ways I can take what I'm learning and apply it to the real world. First of all, I can use blogging for a professional reason instead of a personal journal type use.  It will allow me to write my opinions and also research other people's opinions on different media topics.  Also, many of the things I'm learning in this class are teaching me how to connect to other people via the internet, which is really a great thing and can teach me a lot in itself.  As I've said in earlier posts, I really want to blog about my summer internship at a film company and I will know how to add interesting photos and make my blog look professional for that.

This is a picture of the city of Santa Monica. I decided to post this because this is where I'll be blogging from this summer!