THE EVOLUTION OF MY INVOLVEMENT IN SOCIAL MEDIA

The most primitive stage of my social media involvement began in seventh grade when I created my AIM screen name. Even though I spent the entire day surrounded by friends at school, it was imperative to sign in every night to chat. Bleep bloop bleep bloop with each back-and-forth message. The most self-defining online identifier was my buddy profile. It had to be the right color, have “cute” quotes, and subtle hints about current crushes.

AIM held steady throughout junior high, high school and even into college. But then as a freshman at MSU, less than a year after its 2004 launch, I discovered facebook. I heard people talking about the site and was skeptical at first. But one night my roommate and I decided we would try it out. Five hours later, we had profiles created and went crazy adding anyone and everyone we knew. When I first signed up it was still called “thefacebook.com,” you could not upload photos (aside from your profile pic) and it was for a select few colleges and universities only.

Now facebook “facebook.com” has more than 110 million users and is the fourth most trafficked Web site in the world. Throughout college, phrases like “tag me,” “add me,” and “post these” became a part of my normal vocabulary. Logging into facebook became as routine as brushing my teeth. Forget the buddy profile, this offered photos, video, links, messages, groups, and the newly defining relationship status. My favorite facebook reference is this eHarmony parody.

Facebook is still one of my most frequented sites as I find it to be a great way to stay connected and be entertained. But now that I have transitioned to life as a young PR professional, my social media involvement has exploded. It started by reading blogs. I would find blogs about PR and social media, many of which linked to other blogs and so forth. Going to each site individually to look for recent updates became daunting, and then along came RSS. (I currently use Google Reader and netvibes because I love folders and tabs for categorizing!) Next I signed up for twitter. Again, at first I thought it was pretty useless. I quickly discovered it’s like AIM plus blogs plus industry news plus networking (and then some) on steroids. I also created a Linkedin (aka facebook for professionals) profile and frequent bookmark sharing Web sites like del.icio.us and digg.

There are countless other sites I sign in to, but they share a similar purpose – to connect people, ideas, and resources in online communities with the ideology of transparency, open communication and user-generated content. The PR world is witnessing a seismic shift in the way it reaches audiences. I still believe in traditional tactics but am excited by the possibilities yet to come.

How did you first become involved in social media? What is your favorite tool to use now?