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!

Commenting

In Chapter 73, Brogan makes a lot of really good points about commenting on people's blogs.  There are a  ton of blog posts being read everyday and people rarely leave very many comments. It can be especially sad if you have a really great blog and get no recognition.  However, Brogan points out that lack of time is a reason for this and that if you really enjoyed a blog post you read you can still bookmark the post or pass it along to others through other social media sites in order to help that blogger out and get notice for something great that he/she has written.

It's definitely something I want to keep in mind, therefore, I decided to comment on a few of my classmates' wonderful posts. Here they are:

Meg Owens
Adrian Andrade
Doug Trein

What the BLOG?!

As I was looking at other people's blogs today I came to a few different conclusions. First of all, people are super creepy and second of all, people really need lives! I say this because the first 3 blogs I came across were all about cats. Yes, cats. People like to make blogs and pretend it's their cat's blog and write their posts as if the cat is writing them. Odd. The 4th blog that I came across was not much better. The first 5 posts or so were videos and pictures of Hitler. 

Finally, the 5th blog that I came across when I pressed "next blog" was actually really neat.  This blog is called Frances Castles' Illustration Blog. If you couldn't tell by the name it's a blog about her illustrations. I'd put it in the category of an Art blog. After looking through it for a while, I was really intrigued with how neat her work is. I even found out that she's won some awards. 

Her blog is very neat and she's got a really nice layout and image at the top of her page that really encapsulates what her work is all about. The one thing that she's really missing is an About Me. She has a link to her website, which I went to and checked to see if she had an About Me there, but she did not. I think it's really important, especially in her case, for people to know who she is. Her blog is all about her work and it is hard to connect to her as person without knowing anything about her. 

Frances' blog is pretty simple and doesn't have too many extra things added.  She does have her Twitter  off to the side as well as a way for people to follow her. She has a lot of pictures of her work, which is the best part.  That's what everyone wants to look at anyway when she's writing about it in her posts.

So many tools!

There's so many different tools that are available to use when it comes to social media. There are listening tools which are for the purpose of making searches on different topics, brands, companies, etc. easy for you. An example of this would be Google Reader. There is blogging, of course, such as home base blogs like WordPress and scratch blogs like Tumblr. These can be used to communicate all sorts of different information whether it's news, responding to something, or just feel like posting a short video or text. There are a lot of other tools out there as well like Facebook, which we use for just about everything and LinkedIn for business purposes.

Another very popular tool that is used is the Wiki. Wikis seem to be made for collaboration. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about wikis, because I've never had to use them...except for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is actually an extremely useful site, because you can get all the information you need as well as post information yourself. When it comes to uses wikis for business to be used as a collaborative tool I'm not so sure if they're worth using.  The thought of communicating to business partners through a wiki is kind of unappealing to me. I'm sure that it is a tool that works, but I just prefer phone calls or face-to-face communication.  I think that you are able to grow more as a business team if you get to know each other in person rather than through a wiki. However, one of the really great things about the ideas of wikis are that you get credit for what you're doing. Sometimes people don't get credit where it is due when your work can't be tagged to you like it can in a wiki.

As I was just saying, I don't think I've ever really used wikis. Therefore, I decided to check out Healthy Recipes Wiki from Wikia.  This wiki is actually really great if you're into finding recipes for healthier dishes to eat.  You are able to upload your own recipes as well as use the search box to search the wiki for different recipes.  It has a section for Featured Recipe, Ingredient Spotlight, Food Poll, The Weekly Dish from Eat Life Whole and Healthy News.  The wiki is really lighthearted and simple.  It doesn't really talk about anything other than good recipes for Spring and has articles in the Healthy News section.  I think this wiki is really useful if you are like me and try to eat healthy and also try out new recipes!  Maybe I'll change my mind about wikis after all. 

ah, social networking

So, social networking is a pretty big deal these days. Quite frankly, I can't get enough of Facebook. This is probably the social networking site that I tend to use the most often because it literally has pretty much everything on it.  You can talk to your friends, post things, look at pictures, videos, etc. Not only that, but you can link your other social networking sites to it as well such as Pinterest and Twitter. It's extremely convenient to share information and conversation. The reason I use Facebook so much is because it has everything and it's incredibly addicting. I don't think that they need to add anything else to it to make it any more functional. The weird thing about my habit of using Facebook is just that; it's a habit. I would love to stop using it, but it's almost impossible for me. If I stopped using it I wouldn't get group notifications about different films I'm working on, I wouldn't hear from a lot of friends anymore, and I would lose all of the photos I have with friends that I don't want to save on my own computer. Overall, I have an intense love-hate relationship with Facebook.

Another social networking site that I use somewhat often is Twitter. The thing about Twitter is that I go on it often, but I rarely ever post anything. I kind of made my Twitter because my friends told me to, but really didn't understand the purpose. The reason I do go on it at all is because I like to follow people who post funny or positive things. It's nice to go on my Twitter and have a nice laugh once or twice a day or read something positive.  Sometimes I think that is where Facebook is going wrong. From my experience, people tend to complain a lot in their status posts on Facebook, but for some reason everyone likes to say really positive and fun things on Twitter. Who knows. As I already said, however, I don't really USE Twitter. I don't think I've ever posted anything of use on there. In fact, I think the only things I have posted on there are just quotes I enjoyed. I still don't know if I get the point of Twitter. I don't think anything really needs to change on the site, though. I think it just is what it is and if you enjoy it, you probably use it.

Goals 'n Gadgets

The goal of my blog, as touched on in my first post, is to kind of get to know how blogging works. I want to get a good grasp on how to get people to read what I have to say. One of the main reasons is because I want to consistently blog over the summer about all about my experience interning in LA. Along with that, I want to know what is appropriate for me to say regarding that internship and not get myself into trouble. Not only that, but I want to explore social networking and how what others and myself write can affect people's ways of thinking about the subject. Basically, I want to have fun writing this blog and jot down my own personal experiences and thoughts on different things! :)


I added two gadgets to my blog.  The first being the Share It gadget, which I've added to the right side of my page. This allows people to share something I post onto their Facebook or Twitters.  I thought this would be a neat addition, especially because I want to blog about my experience in LA and I know my friends and family might get a little excited for me and want to share some things I post! In addition to that, I added the Followers gadget. This allows people to follow my blog, which I thought might be useful because I'd love to have followers first of all. Second of all, It's always cool to see who is following you, because they might be following you because they blog about similar things and I might end up enjoying their blog as well.

A little bit about myself

My name is Carly Straight and I am currently a video production major. I'm hoping to someday move out to LA (as typical as that is) to become active in the production/post-production side of the film industry. Currently, I'm quite obsessed with editing, but I don't want to say for sure that that's what I want to do for the rest of my life...that is a pretty big decision. So instead, I plan to continue gaining experience in all areas of production/post-production by doing some internships out in LA this summer and maybe next summer and then make a decision to hone in on one area.

Some interesting facts about me that are unrelated to my major
(and that you can't find out from my facebook page) are: I love making mix cds (even though they are outdated, I still prefer them), I paint in my spare time, I try to take a yoga class 1-2 times a week, I really enjoy going to bars to listen to live music even on week nights, and crab rangoon is one of my favorite foods. Also, I have a ridiculously cute dog. He's a little cavalier king charles spaniel. If you don't believe me, just look at this picture.

To be honest, I signed up for this class because I needed to take a management class.  However, this is one that interested me a lot because (let's be honest) who doesn't love social media?! Not to mention, I really want to clean up my profiles and social networking sites so that I don't have anything that could deter me from getting a job or internship. That's something I'd really like to get out of this social media class. I want to know what is appropriate and inappropriate as well as knowing what I should and should not be saying about myself and/or the jobs and internships that I will be working for.  The last thing I want is to get myself into trouble. The internet can be quite scary nowadays with all the ways people can find out your location and personal information just by typing in a search. Also, I really wanted to get into blogging (which is awesome that we are doing this!) because I want to write all about my internship in LA this summer while I'm there.