Something I’ve been playing around with trying to start for awhile is a social media/personal branding club on campus at Lindenwood. When we discussed it the other day in class, there seemed to be quite a few people interested. I went and checked with my friend Sarah (she’s the current VP of student government) and she said that these were the basic things we needed to be a recognized student organization on campus.

Here’s What We Need:

• Bylaws – just something basic that outlines who we are, what we do, and how we do it. Take a look at this basic outline to understand what I’m talking about.
• Officers – We need a minimum of five officers: President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary, LSGA Representative.
• Please note that the LSGA Representative must be available to go to meetings on Wednesdays at 4p.m. in Harmon Hall and fulfill a few other responsibilities.
• Faculty Advisor – We need someone who is on the staff that is willing to hold us accountable to University Policy.
• Members – Including officers, we need 10 people.

Let’s Give This Organization Some Direction:

The first thing we really need to do is get the bylaws written and figure out who we want our executive board members to be. That’s where it gets tricky. We need to get a group together for a few planning meetings and decide what we want the organization to look like. Ideally, this should be the 10 people who are going to help start the organization, people who would like to be in leadership positions and/or have experience with social media/personal branding. So, if you’re interested, fill out the form on my contact page.

He's upset that this class is over too. Source: Funny Photos

Um, didn’t we just start this class? Yeah, I’m pretty sure we did. I can’t believe that we’re already done with PBandJterm. I’ve learned so much and had so much fun. I don’t want it to end. I’ve said it like a million times, but I’ve never had so much fun in school before. I guess the adage “Time flies when you’re having fun” rings true yet again.

This Week In Class We Learned:

•  What SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can do for your online brand. Derek Mabie of Evolve Digital Labs came in and spoke about how to make your brand SEO-friendly and owning your content.
• Mike Zandstra talked about one of my favorite things: WordPress – not the .com version, but the one that you host yourself. It’s pretty much magic. Like dragons and unicorns magic.
• Maddie Marshall and Jessica Leitch came in and talked about their blog City in a Jar. They’ve been blogging for about six months and have already been nominated as one of the best personal blogs in St. Louis by the Riverfront Times.

This guy is partially responsible for WordPress. Source: The World is Raw

Awesome Links of Awesomeness

• WordPress.org is the best resource for anything and everything to do with the self-hosted version of WordPress.
• Check out Matt Mullenweg. He’s one of the creators of the WordPress software. He likes to write here and here. Neither of these blogs are strictly WordPress, but both are really great examples of what you can do with this software.
• I love glee and I’ve had this song stuck in my head for like a week. So now you will too. The Toby Keith version is great too, but I love the end of the glee one.

The Importance of Having Fun

This particular theme keeps cropping up in my life recently. For instance, yesterday when I was on the phone with a client at work, we were chatting, just waiting for an email to send. He started asking about how school was going and I told him I would be graduating in May and go straight to working full time. His response: “What! No break to travel the world and experience what’s out there? That’s not any fun!” I think it was kind of a knock on my head of sorts. Someone was trying to tell me “Jen, you’re 22. You have your whole life ahead of you to work. Enjoy yourself a little.”

I'm going to visit these islands very soon. Source: Sweet Marias

It kind of made me realize why I love this class so much – it made me slow down and smell the roses a bit. I was able to interact with other people, which is a precious commodity for me because of everything I’ve got going on. I got to design projects that I care about and really let my personality show through my designs. Because when you work for someone else you don’t get that luxury. I’m very grateful that my employer took a chance on me and gave me this job, but when you work for a web design company that does sites for other businesses, you can’t really be as creative with it as you want. You have to fit their mold and do things the way they want you to. So, from now on, I’m going to try and post an original design once a week. It might be something as silly as a picture that I’ve waved my magical Photoshop wand over, but if I’m going to preserve my unique creative style, then I need to have some fun.

Let’s Connect

So I mentioned this at the end of class, but I’ve been thinking about starting a social media/ personal branding club here on campus. I’m working on getting the information that we need to become official, but expect a post sometime this weekend with the details. If you have any ideas or would like to help DM me on twitter or fill out my contact form.

A Word of Thanks

To everyone in the PBandJterm class, thank you. It was really great getting to know each and every one of you through your class presentations, blog posts, and the banter that flies around the classroom. Your kind comments and tweets were really encouraging.

As I’m sure you’re now finding out, my final posts aren’t here. You can find them here.

Why is this class going so fast? I don’t want it to end. It’s way too much fun to just last twelve days. I feel like I’ve learned so much, not only about social media and personal branding, but also about myself. I feel like as a class we’ve become very close knit. I’ve never had a class where that happens. It feels more like a group of friends getting together for coffee (at Starbucks, of course!!) than a class where we’re supposed to be working on our personal brands.

This week’s topics included:

• LinkedIn – Setting up a profile for those who didn’t have one and doing some other basic things to get everyone going in the right direction.
• Nick Gilham of A Branded You came and spoke to our class about things you can do to improve you LinkedIn so you get found more in search results.
• Everyone in the class wrote a blog post on what they are passionate about. Mine just so happens to be cooking. You can read it here
• Today we learned the best way to share links on twitter.
• Tomorrow everyone is going to be presenting on the niche blog that we are going to write for our final project for class.

LinkedIn Lessons

This week was most definitely the week of LinkedIn. For those who are not aware of LinkedIn, it’s the largest online network of professionals. You can find people on here in just about every industry. It’s a great way to connect and stay in touch with past and present colleagues, find jobs, and ask questions of other professionals. This week we learned how to set up and polish our profiles to make them really reflect our experience.

This is my LinkedIn profile picture. I know it's a little artsy, but that's what I am an artist.

On Tuesday, Nick Gilham of A Branded You came in and gave a presentation about the importance of a well thought out and organized LinkedIn profile. One thing that I took away from it was the eye-tracking test that was done on a LinkedIn profile. The area that was looked at the most was the profile overview (that’s the box at the top!). In the overview you need to make sure you have as much relevant information as possible, as well as a nice profile picture. Your profile picture should be fairly close up with the majority of the space being taken up by your face. Keep in mind that the picture space is about 150px square. Your picture should look like you, no pictures of you making funny faces or the like.

Super Awesome Links of Awesomeness

• Wanna start your own niche blog? Check out this post from Problogger.
• Chris Reimer talks about How Not to Use Social Media to Promote Your Brand. This post details a series of tweets from Vinos Finos from Raleigh, NC and the not so excellent job they are doing of branding themselves.
• And just for fun, I’ve found a couple of sites I like more than looking up lolcats: Attack of the Cute and Dear Blank, Please Blank.

Write Your Passion

Like everyone else in the class, I had a spot of trouble figuring out what I was passionate enough about to write a blog post on it. I sat in my room for a good hour just listing things that I like doing that I could write at length about. I just kept coming up blank. I had a lot of ideas, but none that really stood out as something that would be really enjoyable to write about. Then it hit me – why not write about cooking?

A few months back, I started a cooking blog called Microwave Magician. It’s currently housed in a wordpress.com blog and it only has one post. I started out with really good intentions of using the freedom I had after homecoming was done to do something productive and then I ended up only posting once. So, in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions (a bit late, I know), I’m going to create a content calendar and commit to it.

Microwave Magician is the working title of my blog for now. The whole concept is to cook complete meals in the microwave. I’m not talking TV dinners, but real food. Like the spaghetti and meat sauce that I posted about this week and the homemade potato soup that I posted when I first started. In the future, when I no longer live in the dorms (read: in May when I’m finally free of college), I’m going to evolve it a little bit, into a lifestyle blog of sorts. I’m gong to try to write about crafts, decorating, cooking, and entertaining ideas that work in any size space on a relatively small budget. My goal is to post twice a week on that blog and then twice a week here about web and graphic design as well as about SEO and social media trends and topics.

How Are You Going to Write Like That?

If you read that sentence and thought, “Holy cows, that’s a lot of writing,” you’re absolutely correct. That is a lot of writing, especially when you consider that I have a tendency to write longer posts. But along with that content calendar I’ve already mapped out how I’m going to do that. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to stop spending so much time on the internet doing things that aren’t productive. To help me stick with my resolutions, I’m going to start writing a list of 3-5 things every night of that I have to get done the next day. When those things are done, I can do whatever I want, whether it be looking at lolcats, or just vegging in front of the TV.

Some Tips On Prezi

Tomorrow’s presentations for class are going to be using Prezi. Not my favorite, with good reason. I’ve got some weird inner ear stuff going on and I get motion sickness from it. It’s fairly mild and goes away quickly. But there’s some things that people commonly do in Prezis that make it worse. I know I’m not the only one that is affected by it, so I thought I would post some tips that we learned last year in my Digital and Interactive presentations class.

• While it is possible and looks cool (unless you get motion sickness easily) please don’t make your presentation spin, zoom, and move side to side all in one motion. Even people who don’t have an inner ear problem get a little woozy with this one. Try and keep all motions going in one direction.
• As with any type of presentation, don’t use complementary colors for the text and background (i.e. blue text on an orange background or vise versa). The text will appear to vibrate which can also cause headaches and eye strain.
• Keep the text to a minimum. No one wants to look at a big block of text.

Here’s a video with comedian Don McMillan about what not to do on your presentation. While it talks specifically about PowerPoint, the stuff he talks about is relevant to the world of Prezi as well.

This post has found a new home at my cooking blog. You can find it here.

He can't believe how fast the week went by either.

Holy cows. The first week of class is over. What a week it has been, too. Where do I even begin? There was so much – twitter exploration, WordPress bloggins, and many, many presentations. That sounds like a lot of work, but it’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had. Ever. It was really awesome to be surrounded by people who don’t think my love of all things Web 2.0 isn’t obsessive. I love the community that we’ve been able to create through twitter and our WordPress blogs. This is the first class that I’ve ever been able to honestly say that I was really excited to attend every day.

This Week in Class I learned…

• Companies look at what I’m saying online and that I really need to be more careful. Because of this realization, my facebook profile is more secure and my tweets are going to be more carefully written from now on.
• Writing a killer synopsis and objective are skills that everyone should have.
• What my facebook friends think of me. That was a really awesome confidence booster.
• T-shirts are a really great way to get your brand out there.
• David Armano is a BADASS.
• Talking about something you’re passionate about makes writing so much easier.

This Week on Twitter

"I'm kind of a big deal. People know me."

Our class started the week with the hashtag #LUPB. It was boring and nobody liked it. Wednesday Professor Falk came to class and suggested #PBandJterm. It was a hit. In fact, the hashtag was being used so much that for a few hours Friday it became the top trending topic in St. Louis. That was probably one of the highlights of my week.

A Brand You Should Know

Tammy and her husband, Logan.

This week one of our class assignments was to research a blogger and share our findings with the class (definitely go check out my slide show on SlideShare, I’m really happy with how it turned out). I chose Tammy Strobel of rowdykittens.com. Strobel is a full-time writer and tiny house enthusiast who lives in Portland, Oregon. Strobel used to live life similarly to how most 30-somethings do – stable job, house full of stuff, two cars, and $30,000 worth of debt. Inspired by others who were living simply, she and her husband started giving away their belongings to charity and then Tammy found the 100 Things Challenge, a movement that, according to its website, strives to “break free from the confining habits of American-style consumerism.” In other words, a movement to quit buying crap that we don’t really need and don’t use all that often that ends up collecting dust in a closet somewhere.

That’s exactly what Tammy and her husband did. They pared down their belongings to just 100 items. Tammy now owns four plates, three pairs of shoes and two pots. They are car-free and debt-free, even with her husband in school for his doctorate degree in physiology. Their current abode is around 150 square feet and sits on a 8 x 16 foot trailer. Because of their lifestyle change, Tammy has time to travel, volunteer, and was able to quit her job. She now works as freelance web designer and writer to cover the couple’s bills. I really admire Strobel for her lifestyle change. We could all learn a little about the real definition of want vs. need from this woman.

Additional Links

• For those of you who didn’t see it when I tweeted it earlier this week, here’s the video of Chris Reimer from the GetDigital seminar I attended in November last year.
• On that note, if you get the opportunity, try and check out a GetDigital seminar. These seminars are jam-packed full of great information on things like engaging your followers, SEO (my personal favorite!), and branding in general. The seminars are brought to you by the folks at Gorilla 76 and Evolve Digital Labs. Both companies also have great blogs.

My Thoughts on Living Simply

Thought I was done talking about this simple lifestyle thing, didn’t ya? Not yet. I mentioned briefly in class how her philosophy could be applied to social media strategy. Strobel has been quoted saying that she now has a few high-quality items and she plans to use them until they wear out. You and I are both well aware that social media accounts don’t wear out, they just kind of float around in the interwebs waiting to be used. But just think about it. How many social media accounts do you have, and how many do you actually use? I know that I’m guilty of it – I’ll sign up for a social media site because everyone else is using it, and use it a lot for a few weeks and then get bored with it and stop using it.

A screenshot from the footer of my site. This isn't even all of the accounts that I have. Needless to say, I'll be doing some spring cleaning in the near future.

My twitter is a fine example. I signed up for twitter in April of 2009. I used it occasionally until this past summer when I became an avid user of the site. I have many other accounts like this, where I use them like crazy for awhile and then let it sit dormant. I know I’m not the only one that is guilty of it, because I will follow someone on twitter and then they don’t say anything for six months. Something that we discussed at that GetDigital seminar that I went to back in November was that you should only have the social media that you need. In other words, don’t have anything relevant to your brand to make a video about? Don’t sign up for a YouTube account. In other words, if you have an account on a social media site, commit to creating quality content. Something suggested at GetDigital (read: drilled into our heads) by Jon Franko was creating a content calendar and committing to it. To see what I mean download an example one here. The content calendar will help keep your content more focused and consistent.

Bottom line? If you’re going to have an account through a social media site, make sure it’s the right fit for you. If you have an account for a month and you’re not committing to using it well, follow Strobel’s example and get rid of it.