This spring will mark the 10th anniversary of my online social media and blogging activities. It has been marked with ups and downs, but I still do these things because I get tremendous value from my online participation.

I must have been excited to be at SXSW in 2008, because I signed up for Twitter in the wee hours of the morning.

Of all the social media I have experimented with using, I would say that Twitter has consistently proven to be the most valuable to me professionally because of its openness. When someone is on Twitter, unless they have a private/locked account, to me it indicates a certain willingness to correspond with others on Twitter. To me, that represents endless possibilities because there is so much to learn and so many people to learn from.

This semester I am leading a group of K-State students in an online journey as well. We will be studying social media together in a distance learning class. I have a number of ideas I want to share as a result of my own online experiences as well as those of others who have succeeded and failed in the world of social media.

In preparation for the course, I’ve done a fair bit of reflecting on where I have been and where I am currently with respect to using social media and online tools. One thing I noticed right away is that I wrote a lot more back then than I have recently.

I may never get back to the level of where I was when blogging and tweeting was new and exciting. However, I did set a goal for myself to write 52 blog posts in 52 weeks in 2018. That’s at least one per week. Given that I have numerous blog post drafts that I began but never published over the past few months, I think one thing I need to focus on is just finishing what I’ve started. Clicking ‘publish’ would help.

Another goal I have for 2018 is to understand two social media platforms that I haven’t given a lot of attention to yet: LinkedIn and SnapChat. I have been on LinkedIn for some time, but really haven’t realized a huge value in using it yet. However, my recent visits to the platform tell me the environment is quite a bit different than when I first signed up for it. It feels more like a community of professionals, rather than simply a place to post your resume.

I want to learn more about SnapChat mostly because that is where young people hang out. Of course, I understand that is precisely why young people have forsaken Facebook for SnapChat in the first place, because they want to hang with people their own age. However, I am interested in learning more about what the young find so appealing in the platform. I’ve had a few quality exchanges on it, but I’m not very consistent about checking it. I’d like to up my game on that platform.