I am a person who enjoys learning new information. I am also
lucky enough to be alive in an age where information is virtually unlimited and
at my fingertips through a wide variety of social media tools. I can learn
about different places, social issues, my friends and national influencers all
by unlocking my phone or opening up my laptop.
In my role as a communicator for Army organizations, I have
established and maintained several social media sites for the purpose of a
professional presence for groups I have served that role in. However, I have
only recently begun to cultivate my own online professional identity
online.
Though I have had membership on
sites like
Facebook and
Instagram almost since their inception, I have up until
now only used my online presence for for social purposes. To change this I have
looked to the micro blog site,
Twitter.
In the past, I have enjoyed Twitter’s very simple privacy
settings; it allows me to speak my mind freely amongst friends without the need
to censor for potential employers, clients or colleagues. It’s not that I have
things to hide, but some conversations should be had on safe spaces – my
private twitter feed is one of my safe spaces. I now have, what I am marketing
as my “professional” twitter feed. I am using it to share things that I post
from my organization’s account and to follow groups and people I am connected
to or a fan of in industries of interest.
To grow my online professional identity, I also rely on
channels both internal and external to the Department of Defense. The military
has a great online collection of all photos, video, audio and articles produced
by service members called
DVIDS. I have a profile of my professional Army work there that is
assessable to the public, media and Service members. Additionally
I use my presence on
LinkedIn to highlight my professional background and
capabilities. This site is great for connecting to former colleagues and
perspective employers, providing and receiving references, and for sharing
profession products and findings.
Having
a complete profile on this site allows for so many professional opportunities.
Lastly, since I’ve been spending so much time on my personal
computer lately with classwork, I find the online distractions are endless! A
short break between writing or reading is a necessity, but it is easy to get
sucked in to the endless possibilities, and loose track of time. I have been
looking for a good social bookmarking tool to use so that I can place all of
the interesting articles I come across on hold for later consumption. I created
a Stumbleupon account and a Reddit but found that it was difficult for me to
just perform the simple function I was looking seeking – a place where I could
bookmark an article to come back to it. While digging through “this site versus
that site” articles on Mashable, I came across a simple App to solve my
problem -
Pocket. This application allows
me to save articles from all of my devices in one place and then go back and
read it when I have time – a great way to not waste hours on the Internet
trying to read everything at once.
