The end

So as not to leave current and potential readers out of the loop, I've decided to conclude my overall message in this, my last required blog post of the semester.

What I set out intent on writing when this semester started and I was assigned this project was to educate, but mostly to convince readers that social media is not only important, it is also necessary. While I feel that I have mostly succeeded in writing about topics in an effective way, I feel that I have learned much more through being assigned this project than I could ever hope to teach someone else.

I have learned, first of all, that social media is a deeply-seeded interest of mine and not just a passing phase. Nearly every article that I came across were all intensely interesting to me and I read every single one in their entirety. It is exciting to me to find something within public relations that I'm passionate about because up until this point, I had not felt that way about public relations at all. Maintaining this blog throughout this semester has given me hope that there is a chance that, if I find a job that requires me to use social media, I will be extremely satisfied and happy with my career.

What are the strengths of social media?

I've discussed previously in this blog that social media provides many strengths to individuals and companies that use it; however, I have not thoroughly discussed what a lot of these strengths are and what they can mean to those who utilize it.

• Relationships and Conversation

Social media allows customers, potential customers, and even random individuals browsing the internet to get involved in conversations about things that they were not previously able to be a part of. Social media brings companies and their consumers closer than they have ever been able to be. Consumers are now in a kind of personal relationship with whatever companies they choose to involve themselves with. Consumers now have the opportunity to feel closer to these companies and the companies themselves now appear more within reach which allows consumers to feel as though they have more weight within the company.

• Sharing

Companies can now share more about their company in ways that are much easier than they have ever been. Social media allows companies to essentially advertise cost-free to the people that are interested in their company enough to follow what is going on with it on the internet.

• Creativity

Creativity abounds within the usage of social media. Not only is in easier to be creative when using social media, it's also cheaper. The formats used with social media allow a lot of room for creative minds. From creating issue-specific layouts for the social media accounts of the company, to producing videos specifically intended to be shared through a social media file-sharing site, social media is an extremely creative platform through which companies are given an extremely exciting opportunity to shine.

Social media professionals

It is Journalism Week this week at WVU and I was lucky enough to be able to experience two of the speakers that were brought in to share their stories. The first speaker whose lecture I was able to attend was the social media director of the American Red Cross. As I have mentioned frequently throughout the course of this blog, a future career that involves utilizing social media marketing and PR is something I'm extremely interested in. I was very excited to hear her story and to learn something from her.

One of the main things that I took away from listening to her speak for around an hour was that it can sometimes be a very big struggle to get people to believe in the power of social media. She said that when she was hired by the American Red Cross, her initial task was to silence the bloggers. Around the time she was hired in 2006, bloggers were mentioning the American Red Cross around 400 times a day and most mentions were extremely positive. When she found these things out, it became her task to convince her supervisors that it would do no good to try to take down the bloggers, so they should instead work with them. She went on to say that, initially, everyone she approached within the organization was unconvinced about the usefulness and effectiveness of social media. In order to prove that social media could work for the American Red Cross, she wound up purchasing a professional blog with her own money. Eventually, the organization began to fund the blog on their own and they now even feature it on the homepage of their main website.

The one thing that sticks out to me about social media is the need to be persistent. I've previously talked about the need to be persistent with social media when you're attempting to utilize it within a company or and organization, but it's just as important to be persistent when attempting to convince others within your company or your organization to be more open-minded about embracing social media instead of attempting to silence it.