feeling lost and old

Hello everyone. My name is Colleen. I am taking this course for work purposes. We are an old fashioned business and have a hard time embracing social media use for business purposes. We are aware of the trends and want to stay current. So, here I am. We hope to learn how to properly use social media to market and promote business and generate a more positive online reputation. Being a small family business with older employees, we feel the growing pains of being current and navigating modern technology. I can’t wait to continue and learn. I am eager to collaborate with my classmates in this course. Feel free to ask me any questions, business or personal. Looking forward to this! 🙂

My background includes a Law Clerk diploma from Algonquin. I graduated in 2001. Since then, I worked in a couple of law firms, but my strong personality was not a good fit. For the past 11 years I have enjoyed a crucial role at Sky High Roofing where I am responsible for supporting the owner, office manager and sales staff.

What interests me about this course? Honestly not much. I don’t like social media. My own personal Facebook has minimal friends and posts. I do like memes.

From taking this course, I hope to get more familiar with how to use Facebook and Twitter for business use. I would never want to work in this field full time and just want to get more familiar with current trends.

To me, social media means just that. SOCIAL being the operative word. To me, the word social means interacting on a personal level, not a business level. Interacting on a business level is PROFESSIONAL interacting. For many years we have avoided an online presence but with the changes in society, and generation of customers, we find ourselves at the “if you can’t beat them, join them” point in our marketing plans.

I have never read one blog in my life. I wouldn’t know where to start looking or even what to look for.

My nephew was a very popular You Tube vlogger. His channel was popular and his videos got many views. Along with this, came cyber bullying. As a result, he took his life at the age of 13. This is part of the reason I am so jaded with social media. I find it to be dark, negative and outright cruel. I don’t think it’s right that one person can take down another like that online with no consequences.

This moves over to business. Business suffer from unfair reviews and trolls that have no other purpose but to harm. I really want to learn how to combat the trolls and astro-turfing reviews. One of the major things I hope to learn is why people are so fast to bash online, but rarely offer compliments. I would predict almost 100% of our happy customers who say they will post a nice review or comment on Facebook don’t follow through. On the flip side, even the smallest of bad experiences are posted without any chance of making the customer happy first. To our dismay, Google, Facebook, Twitter offer no support to the business. The attitude is “they can say what they want”. To me, this is very dangerous.

I invite everyone to my nephew’s vlogs. I hope it counts as a blog for the purposes of this assignment. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2ifaMEULa3CLUQqQkKofow

Khalif’s vlogs inspire me because they are honest, raw and funny. Khalif inspired many people with his vlogs. I think his vlogs are great but I may be bias.

In closing, forgive me in advance for my skeptical and old fashioned approach. I feel confident that after taking this course, I will feel better about social media.