First, because the weather is undoubtedly warming and there is nothing dull about that! Last weekend I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival parade to get some interviews and enjoy the scenery.
Later, Alex and I enjoyed a lovely spring night at the first Nationals game of the season. It brought us back to fun SUMMER memories of Twins games, and that's a good thing.I am so pleased about the weather!!
But more importantly, I am excited because of what I learned from class last Friday. In order to understand why I'm so excited, there are a few things I need to explain.
Throughout the semester, our program assistant, Andrea Michnik, has been teaching me and a few interested others about social media, specifically Twitter. Twitter is kind of hard to understand for "non-tweeters," but I have found it to be a very fun and helpful social and professional resource. I won't go into the ins and outs here, but if you're curious about it, you can go to www.twitter.com/jclynes to see what some "tweets" look like (without having to sign in). I've gotten some really cool opportunities, advice, and connections through it though.
ANYWAY, Andrea has been an advocate and mentor on issues of "social media" and, as we learned on Friday, this is an aspect of journalism that is quickly developing and expanding. Andrea found 3 interesting speakers to come in and talk about how they use social media in their life.
The first was a TWENTY TWO year old, named Meg Roberts, who has this incredible job with New Media Strategies as a PR rep who works with her clients (such as Disney) to advertise/promote their products via social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, myspace, etc). While her job certainly sounded exciting, what was probably more interesting to me was that she graduated in May '08 and was so driven and impressive in her internships and interviews that she's already been hired to this incredible job at such a young age! Her advice really spoke to me because she talked less on "traditional" journalism, which many of our other speakers tend to stick to, so it was more applicable to my focus since I'm likely not going to end up in mainstream journalism. Anyway, she talked about how to use twitter as a professional resource and she also said that she used her blog (while interviewing) as leverage. Once she picked her topic of interest (PR in her case), she would blog about it and promote her blog to her interviewers to show her interest in the subject, as well as her writing ability. This is seems like such a good idea!
Next, two other social media pros came in (for those of you on twitter... they're: k8michael, and cheeky_geeky... rather famous in the "twittersphere") to talk about the way they use social media in their careers and extracurriculars. Mark is a government scientist who recently ran the Government 2.0 Camp and Kate Michael was Miss DC 2006 and has a blog that has become so popular that she'll be giving up her day job soon to dedicate her time to all the videos, posts, tweets and social stuff that's almost 100% online! Hard to believe, I know.
None of these 3 individuals has a life that I would like to directly emulate, but they did show me how to apply personal interests (writing, news, promoting certain issues, etc) into something professional, productive, and even lucrative. Kate gave good advice about how she's promoted her blog: www.kstreetkate.com, into the online success it is. I won't tell you specifically what I learned from her, but hopefully my new blog (coming soon), will teach by example!
It was just very exciting to have a new task that I can focus on before I worry about finding my place in the real world... and something that may even help me GET to my place in the real world. So, I'll be starting up a new blog into something that will hopefully be much more green and professionally focused. I don't know that this will happen before the end of this semester, but I'm excited about the opportunity.... and I'm more excited that I don't need someone else to give it to me! I get to make it on my own! How convenient. It just basically works out well because I love to write.
Anyway, the end of the program is going to be so busy and go so quickly. I'm bracing myself by cutting back hours at work, especially because I really want to be able to enjoy DC in the springtime! I'm excited for the stuff we have left, but I'll admit, I'm excited to be done!
Alright, I've got work tomorrow and then I'll need to mentally prepare myself for another crazy week ahead.
I realize this post may be difficult to understand, but Friday just gave me a sense of direction that I had been looking for since the semester started. It may not be a final direction, but it'll definitely do for now. Anyway, Andrea, if you're out there... THANKS!
