Hello. My name is Liz // 07.30.09

Social media has indeed become the mainstream of people interacting with other people and forming of communities. With all different types of social media floating around the Internet, including but not limited to blogs, forums, and tweets, it’s difficult to stay out of the growing groundswell.

First, let me bring light to what the “Groundswell” definition of Groundswell is. Li and Bernoff, the co-author’s of the book, state, “Groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” Basically, it’s word-of-mouth on the web, and I wanted to find out where it would take me.

A little over a month ago, I decided to start my own social experiment with hopes to better understand social media’s influence on marketing and advertising. I bought a few books on social media and started a blog. Since there are an infinite number of topics to blog about, I decided to write about what I was learning with regards to the development standpoint of building a blog website.

Initially, I got a few url hits, mostly from whom I made my blog aware to, and my blogsite url went from not being found on Google to the top five listing when searching for “Liz Matthews”. At first glance I thought, that’s pretty cool. But upon closer examination, setting up a blog and writing to an audience who doesn’t even read my blog is incredibly unfulfilling, not to mention my search query in Google was practically the URL verbatim. Not so impressive.

So how do I solve this social discrepancy?

What I have learned from this experience so far, which is synonymous with what I read in the “Groundswell,” is that social media is a social fad, and can fade just as quickly as can gain recognition. Therefore, in effort to gain a bigger audience, I am changing topical direction and going to start blogging more openly about what I experience and learn as a 25 year-old female prospective graduate student, and not confine my postings to what I think is more professionally appropriate. This isn’t a complete change of direction to how I started out, but it’s certainly a shift from what I originally started blogging about. Thoughts?