Social Media: My Intro to Social Media for Business

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Red Shoes PR is happy to welcome the latest addition to the team, Rachel Wollersheim. Rachel graduated from St. Norbert College in May of 2009 with a degree in English and a minor in media communications. In her role with Red Shoes PR, Rachel will support the client services team through media relations, social media and public relations planning and execution. 

Over the past seven weeks, I have been immersed into the exciting world of social media. While I have had a Facebook account for four years, and joined Twitter and LinkedIn months ago, the way I think about these sites is rapidly changing.

Upon graduating in May, I immediately jumped into my intern position at Red Shoes PR in Appleton, WI. While I have previous PR experience, I have never been in an agency setting, especially an agency that focuses heavily on social media.

As a college student, I used social media as purely a social tool—a way to keep friends from home and family updated on my life, a place to share photos from various events and a way to plan and share my social calendar with friends at school.

So, throughout my time at Red Shoes PR, I am quickly learning and catching on to ways social media can be used beyond a personal social tool, as part of a public relations strategy communications channel for companies and individuals.

One of the many changes I have made to the way I use social media is in who I interact with. During college, I used social media as another way to communicate with people I already knew and already talked to or interacted with on a daily basis. Now, I am beginning to use social media to reach out to people I have only briefly met, or people I have never met at all. I am finding thought leaders in my field to follow, interacting with clients and talking with other recent graduates looking to get into the PR field.

Along with expanding who I communicate with, I am redefining the way I present myself through social media. I no longer present myself as simply a college student interacting with friends. Instead, I aim to show a balance of my personal interests and day-to-day happenings alongside what is going on at Red Shoes PR.

While this new outlook on social media is a bit overwhelming, especially for someone with a quieter personality like mine, it is also an exciting time to enter the PR field. For us recent grads, with a little training and guidance, our vast knowledge of using Facebook and other sites as social tools can be transitioned into making us thought leaders in the social media world.