Utilising Social Media

This week's session was focusing on Social Medias.

It is pretty obvious how incredibly important networking is, especially for those that wish to work in the design industry (Regardless of what area), while we perhaps take it for granted, it has given us the opportunity to expose ourselves, to share our works with others, to reach out to professionals in the industry, and so much more. 

Back before social media became what it is today, one would have to strategically figure out ways to get themselves exposed, it couldn't be shared worldwide and you really did have to carefully plan out how you wanted to get noticed. Still, it is not to say that things are perfect now with social medias around, despite all of the free perks they provide us with...

It sounds like a pain to create professional accounts and separate them from your personal ones (Especially when it comes to your art blogs), but I can understand why there is a need to do so. Whether you choose to be a freelancer or decide to open up a little company of your own one day, it is always good to have a professional face to those that you might one day have to work with. 

There are quite a few exceptions where incredibly sought after artists are able to simply mix both personal and professional works together in one blog, but we all obviously can't be as lucky as them. Either way, it is always good to find ways to solidify your professional presence, with portfolio sites being a good starting point.

How professional does one have to be on Twitter however? I have seen practitioners that remain quite formal, sticking to one area when it comes to their tweets and retweets (Such as work progress, upcoming projects, sharing the works of others, etc.), and I have seen others that are a little more relaxed in the content they write and retweet... mixing in what was mentioned earlier with more casual posts (Eg, "On the way home, just ran into a bush."). Does this depend on how high your status is in the industry? Or does it just depend on the individual themselves and the types of followers they attract?

Consistency should be taken into account when one commences on creating a number of professional accounts for themselves (That should later on be relinked and connected to one another for easier access for both the creator and the visitors themselves, making all these social medias work with one another) between it all, like a logo and or your username.

RSS is known as Rich Site Summary and is often called Real Simple Syndication, it uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information such as blog entries, news, headlines, audios, videos, etc. An RSS document (Known as "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarised text, and metadata, like the publishing date and the author's name.

Anything new will get updated into your RSS feed, it is an efficient way to help you pull together a daily mailing list, instead of you have to go through the trouble of checking each site one by one (Which could be a problem for those that don't have time to sit down and look through everything for hours).

Vine is a short form video sharing service, the service allows users to record and edit five to six second long looping video clips, and revine. A revine is where users can share other people's posts with followers. Some vines are revined automatically based on what is popular. The videos can then be published through Vine's social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. And so while this service has been used mainly for entertainment purposes, one could make use of its popularity system in someway and create a preview of sorts for their works (As I believe I heard one of my classmates say).

Twitter's feature for creating custom lists is quite underutilised. These lists helps you organise your Twitter feed so that you can see tweets coming from people with specific interests and expertise that you might for any reason categorise into a group. As you begin to follow more people, this really helps to pull all of your design interests together, organising the noise .

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service that is mainly used for professional networking. It helps you organise your resume, CV letter and helps create a formal portfolio for you. LinkedIn supports the formation of interest groups, which will definitely prove to be helpful, the majority of the largest groups are employment related, with a very wide range of topics covering professional and career issues. Either way, by following professional groups that link to your interest, you will soon enough be able to create a helpful feed that you can refer to for various new and events.

And so with all of these available, why would it still benefit us if we still wanted to add in a personal portfolio site to that mix? It shows more investment and professionalism. While I have Wix account, I can see that it is not a very effective portfolio site unless I choose to pay for the features available. And so over the next few months, I will probably have to look into other sites like Carbonmade.

The trouble is that I feel that there are so many social medias that seem beneficial to me, but should I really follow them all? Or be more selective? Surely I can't efficiently keep up with all of them? Looks like there are a lot more things to add to my to-do list, I just hope I will remember to write it down...