How to Love Social Media

I hated social media for a bit, mainly because of FOMO (click here for a flashback to my issues with anxiety online). As a public relations student, one of the main jobs you get straight out of college in these days is doing social media. I vowed to myself I wasn't going into social media. I already got stressed with my own pages, so why would I want to do it all the time as a job? Then I got an internship in social media, which was the most healing experience between me and social media. It reframed my mind and made me feel a lot less anxiety about being on social media. Here's all the ways working in social media has helped me feel better about my life on social media:

1. You are posting for people other than yourself. This makes spending all day on Facebook healthier because you're on someone else's newsfeed and not stalking out your friends profiles and wondering why their lives seem so much more fulfilling.

2. It tuckers you out. I used to spend all my free time on social media, but since I do it for a living now, I don't really want to waste more time on it after work. I basically check it on my phone and then put it down and refocus on something else that I haven't been doing all day.

3. It helped me mature. I used to follow some whiners. It was a huge sobfest on my timelines, which did nothing but make me want to complain and gave me a negative worldview. Once I made it into the industry professionally, I started connecting with relevant people and my timeline went from a high school locker room to a forum for articulate discussion.

4. Probably the most important part about working in social media for me has been understanding it as a way to no longer feel social anxiety. I get it all now. I understand the practical and pragmatic networking abilities and it stops becoming such a powerful emotional experience. Transitioning from this heavily emotional forum to a logical outlet for communication has helped me respect social media more and feel less possessed by it.

I'm not saying that everyone should work in social media to feel better about it (because then I would be out of a job), but once you stop letting social media dictate how you feel, life becomes a lot less stressful.

Overcoming FOMO

In college one of my favorite articles I read was about FOMO, the fear of missing out. It's basically a feeling you get when you go on social media and see that all your friends are having so much fun and you weren't there. There's all these studies out now that back FOMO up, saying that social media and the Internet is causing kids to feel higher levels of anxiety (click here for an article that backs me up. and another just to up my credibility). Why I liked this article so much- and literally printed it out so I could always have it- was because I could deeply relate to it. I always felt like I was missing out. If I was invited to 2 different events at the same time, I would pick one and then sit on Facebook or Twitter the day after, waiting to see pictures and and status updates about the party I missed out on. I consistently felt like the other option was better no matter how much fun I'd have the night before, I'd always feel like I should have done the other thing.

Making decisions would be stressful, and then I'd have anxiety about it after, knowing that I'd be able to see if the other people had fun. One night I wanted to unwind after a rough week and relax, so I made no plans and decided to stay in. However, it was nowhere near relaxing. I kept checking in on social media and seeing how much fun people were having and I wondered why I ever decided not to go out. So much for relaxing...

Over time I built it up in my head that social media was this huge problem and that I'd never want to work in it because it is an evil empire. After getting a job where my title is literally "Social Media Specialist", I realize how wrong I was about social media.

Social media was never the problem. The problem was all in my head. This is how I needed to think about it: when people go out and take pictures, they hardly ever take sad ones and post them on Facebook. Even more, some of the best nights I've ever had were ones where we didn't take any pictures because we were literally having too much fun to do so.

Consider that people that tweet excessively are probably not doing anything else that would distract them from tweeting, while you're out there having a blast.

And lastly, who the hell cares? Remember that. If I had a great time, why should I be concerned if someone else had more fun? Why can't we all just have fun and not attempt to quantify it and compare it?

Social media is a great way to connect friends and families, consumers and companies, and strangers with similar interests. Just because someone tweets more than you, is tagged in more pictures than you, has a higher Klout score, or is Vine famous does not intrinsically mean that they are living vastly more exciting lived than you. It's just means they waste a lot more time trying to document their lives, while you're out there living it.

Debatably Narcissistic

Today I decided I was going to anti-up on my About page, as currently I have nothing more than an artsy picture of myself with a bio reading, “Im just a girl trying to make it in summer heat of Virginia.” Yes, my bio is only one sentence and features a lack of appropriate punctuation. So I decided to invest myself in writing this witty little ditty about myself so that people will be enthralled with the person behind the blog. Then I started to feel plagued with narcissism. I wanted to throw in my college GPA so everyone takes me seriously. I wanted to throw in all the honors I won and namedrop all the places that published me.

I seriously began to go on and on about how great I am, how funny I am, etc. Then I woke up and realized I sounded like a narcissistic prick.  So I deleted the whole bit and decided that until I get down off my throne of narcissism, my bio shall remain only one sentence.

My short stint with rewriting my bio got me thinking though: Is social media just making people more narcissistic?

I grew up with a pathetically low amount of self-esteem, yet now I find myself thinking that people will want to know my day-to-day lessons as a young adult just breaking into the workforce. Even more, I actually think that people should WANT to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, my blog, and hell, people probably even want to email me. I chuckle at myself when I tweet something funny, and get an exorbitant boost of self-esteem whenever someone clicks that little star of favoritism on one of my tweets.

To answer my own question, maybe social media has made me feel more important, like my thoughts are more relevant, and that people might actually want to hear from me.  But, on the same token, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Here’s me when I used to be a boy.

Just kidding, I didn’t used to be a boy, but I sure did look like one!

So yes, social media makes me feel a little more relevant and connected, but don’t you think after having this bowl cut, I deserve a bit of extra attention?

Domain Names are Changing!

Yesterday I got my first opportunity to blog for the firm I work for about domain names! Domain name options are expanding, so be ready for lots of internet changes coming up. Read my article to learn more about all the changes, as well as the implications the changes will have on domain name strategies: http://goo.gl/y4PZiL

Let me know what you think about ICANN's changes and how you think it will change the internet atmosphere.

Sometimes, there CAN be such a thing as too much enthusiasm

So now that I'm running my own independent beauty consulting business, I decided that I needed to back it up with social media. This was a natural inclination, as social media is my daytime profession. Plus, I had it worked out in my head that the more I sold online, the less legwork I would need to do in real life. So along came my alter ego, Sara at Mary Kay. She has this fancy little fan Facebook page and a Twitter handle to match. I went through and invited my friends to like the page and gave about a 10 second thought as to what to schedule onto it. Then I turned my sights onto my new Twitter persona.

I really saw Twitter as my outlet to new fans for many reasons, such as Twitter's longer history of hash tags, trending topics, and a general attitude that its not creepy to follow strangers. So I went Twitter-crazy. @SaraAtMaryKay went through and followed almost anyone talking about makeup, Mary Kay, skincare, or even just in the geographic vicinity of Richmond. Then she started retweeting like it was going out of style. Just to top it all off, she started mentioning lots of people that she whimsically decided would be interested.

Then Twitter blocked @SaraAtMaryKay.

Down went my non de plum. Thankfully, it only lasted for about an hour, and @SaraAtMaryKay was back in the game.

One may assume that after being blocked for being considered spammy, you would breathe and reign in the crazy Twitter horses. Nay. @SaraAtMaryKay continued to trek on. I had that account go through my real account and follow everyone that I thought would want to follow my makeup persona. I did a bit more retweeting, and just like that I was suspended (which means that you have to sit through several days of Twitter jail while they decide if you are allowed back on the site).

I was livid. How was I going to launch this great new endeavor if Twitter keeps taking me offline? So what if I condensed an entire day of reasonable Twitter engagement into an hour? So what if I spent my lunch hour blowing up the feeds of my followers?

Then it hit me.

Twitter is about people. No one wants to see me throwing myself at them. It was basically Twitter trying to tell me I was being desperate and needed to get my shit together. Basically I was being that drunk girl at a bar that just won't shut up so that everyone else can enjoy a bit of discourse. She just keeps blurting things out and hoping someone latches on to at least something she said, when in reality they're just rolling their eyes.

Sometimes, there can be too much enthusiasm. It's great that I wanted everyone to know I was selling markup, but I needed to direct all that emotion into digestible packages. I wouldn't want people doing that to me, so why was I doing it? Better yet, I work in social media, so how was I so deluded into thinking that this was okay?

My best answer is simply  one word: enthusiasm. It's hard to gauge how much is too when you're excessively excited about something. Not everyone will want to hear about your passions 24/7. That doesn't mean they don't want to hear it, just that they want it in moderation. Keep your readers in mind and just consider: how pissed would you be if someone blew up your feed with all the content you are producing?

From Tom Boy to Tweezers

On the day that I was left alone in office and was tasked with compiling the components of a proposal into a succinct and elegant binder, I quite literally ran to Panera to grab a sandwich for lunch before the big push was going to happen. As I was waiting in line, cursing the skies that I happened to come during the lunch rush, this petite blond girl told me the color of my dress (coral) was very in season (the middle of a Southern Virginia summer), and complimented my skin tone (flushed and sweaty from the jog over to get a sandwich). Then she asked me to enter in for a free makeover, so naturally after the plethora of compliments I had just received, I half-assed an entry and put just my name and number in. A few weeks passed and I got a phone call from the petite blond girl telling me I won. My life at this point was nothing short of a clusterfuck. Most days I couldn't tell you which way way up, so when she asked me to give her a date and time that worked, it was a miracle that I even picked a day of the week that I was free.  So then my friend and I embarked on an adventure that led me to make some very spontaneous decisions.

We rolled up a few minutes late to our free makeover, and were soon welcomed by the petite blond girl, who showered us with compliments, free drinks, and promise of cookies. Then we went into a mecca of makeup, in which she had an entire room full of product and pink, and spent about 2 hours smothering our faces in a myriad of products. By the end of the seminar and $100 later, I had somehow decided that selling makeup was going to be my new part-time job.

When I called my mother to tell her about it, she laughed.

When I called my sister to tell her about it, she laughed.

When I told a few of my close friends about it, they laughed.

Why was this new part-time job so funny? Probably because I had grown up playing sports, started wearing makeup my senior year of high school (let me clarify when I say "wearing makeup" I just mean mascara and eyeliner), and was basically a bro. So what I had never applied an entire face of makeup? And who cares that I can't put eyeshadow on myself without looking like a drag queen.

It was this reason exactly that I wanted to sell makeup (other than needing a bigger budget to maintain a somewhat reasonable lifestyle as a twenty-something respectable, yet fun, young professional). I thought that this opportunity presented itself so that I could learn how to be a lady.  In order to sell makeup, I'll need to learn how to to apply makeup, as well as consult people about what to get for themselves. Surely all this pretty girl stuff will rub off on me.

Even if this is the best it's going to get, at least now I know what the difference between foundation and bronzer is.