Social Media Experience

I’m no stranger to using the Internet to connect with people. A week after first getting home Internet access in 1997, I was creating my first website on GeoCities — a “girls’ club” that… well, I don’t remember what the purpose of it was, exactly. But with it and the other sites that followed, I started meeting other kids from all over the U.S. and the world, a handful of whom I’ve met in person and still keep in touch with.

When I moved to Wichita in 2008, I used social media — everything from Twitter to Tumblr to a knitting site — to find new friends. I quickly realized it could help me connect to professional contacts, too, and marveled at how it was changing the media and service landscapes. And it has its serious uses, too; for example, in March 2011, I used Facebook and Blogger to stay updated on a friend who wrote about what it’s like to live in a foreign country when an earthquake hits.

I maintain my own Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and use tools such as Google Reader, Instapaper, podcasts and mobile news apps to keep up with what’s going on in the world around me. Other social media platforms I’m familiar with include Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr and Bloglovin’; however, to safeguard my own sanity, I try to limit my personal participation to a handful of favorite networks.

In 2009, a group of friends and I launched verb [ICT], an online daily news magazine for Wichita that built its audience and advertiser base from the ground up using social media. At the site’s peak, about 1,000 Wichitans were following our daily content – many more than most other local magazines and blogs. I also participated in a blog and Twitter project called ict2dc, in which I and five friends – most of whom had met one another as a result of social media – traveled to Washington, D.C. for President Obama’s inauguration.

I currently manage a number of social media pages for my employer. Since I joined the company in August 2011, our social media participation and audience has grown over 500 percent.