Social Media Tools

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.