Social Media Expertise

Image Credit: Zazzle

Being a journalist requires you to connect with your readers, but what happens when your readers are in the middle of America and you’re sitting in the Time Inc. Building on the Avenue of the Americas in the middle of New York City?

Well, you start Tweeting.

My love affair with Social Media began in 2008, when I started working for This Old House magazine.

Actually, scratch that, it began in 2005, in a College Psychics class at Saint Joseph Hill Academy.

You see, I often found high school classes to be boring; I wanted to be challenged, and science wasn’t doing it for me. You can’t debate science and in 2005, I wanted to debate everything. It was Halloween, which back then meant all the possibilities in the world as we had the next day off, and my friends were chatting about an invitation to this new site, a way to connect with friends online — better than MySpace.

This magical site — Facebook — was supposed to help you stay in touch with friends who went to College and also keep in touch as we prepared to head off to Universities around the country ourselves. And, oh yea, it could also help you remember that cute boy from the Farrell dance.

I joined Facebook in 2005 with a photo from someone’s 17th birthday party and big, big dreams, dreams I hadn’t even fully realized yet.

The next time I realized the full value of Facebook and Web applications – like Skype – was in 2008 when I studied abroad in Rome, Italy.

Living in Italy was wonderful, but it meant I was away from my friends and family for six whole months. It didn’t matter though — they lived that wonderful period with me, online.

That was also the year I got very involved with my College newspaper — I submitted an opinion piece on Study Abroad that actually got picked up by one of the Study Abroad programs — all because we had published it on the Web.

I was hooked. I joined each and every site you could think of — I even reactivated my MySpace.

Once I got to This Old House, despite the fact that I was “just an intern,” I was an expert at this. I knew this; I breathed this. Social Media was, and continues to be, an area where my expertise is not tied to my age, it is tied to the very fabric of my core.

Okay, dramatic, but you get the picture.

I signed up for Twitter on Dec. 17, 2008 and haven’t looked back.

Creating a brand for myself, The Giornalista, has been one of the most educational, fun and exciting experiences of my career. Creating a social media hashtag — The Twitteristas of @UniversityChic — was another great experience.

Twitter is one of my favorite reporting tools, but I am also skilled in using Facebook, Facebook Pages, newsletters and countless other tools to connect with my readers and others out there in cyber space.

I think everyone should be educated on how to use Social Media and have created (and presented) several different presentations on this for business professionals, non-profits and college graduates.

Would you like to learn more about Social Media? Contact me (victoriareitano at gmail dot com) to discuss pricing and consulting options.