Thursday, May 1, 2014

Oh the Places We Will Go...

Last week I met with one of my favorite professors from college just to catch up.  He asked me what I was doing these days and was shocked when I told him that I landed a job in digital marketing.  He asked, "how did you get into that?"  I started thinking about it, and I think my journey toward digital marketing was a long time coming.  I've been an avid social media user since 2005ish when I signed up for a Myspace account and have spent every day since connected to social media.  Maybe it all started in 2006 when I, as a senior in high school, signed up for a Facebook account because I was so excited to college I had to connect with other incoming freshmen.  Or perhaps, even more likely, it may have really started my last year of college when I studied abroad in 2009, that is the year I started blogging.

I didn't have a blog like I have today; instead, I had a Photoblog.  So you've never heard of Photoblog?  I'm not surprised.  Let me preface all of this by highlighting the fact that social media has changed drastically in the past decade.

Photoblog was (and is) a very basic form of social media; it is a blogging website that would allow the blogger to upload photos to their blog giving the world instant access to the blogger's experiences.  Blogs like this were revolutionary for the time, not to mention a huge deal for me when I was traveling. Sometimes I would post a picture with a quick description of something I had experienced, while other times I would post a picture and explain it in great detail, a full on blog.  I would then post the link to Facebook and my friends and family would be able to follow me on my adventures.  This might seem commonplace today with platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr... People take pictures and share it with their friends and family on different sides of the world all the time these days but back then it was significantly more uncommon.  Let's not forget, in 2009 Twitter only had 18 million users (3.8% of adult Internet users), while it now has about 750 million!  Instagram hadn't even come out yet, and wouldn't be released until October, 2010.  So, though I may not have been reinventing the wheel, I was certainly doing something that was a little ahead of its time and I was excited to be able to share my adventures.  I continued to post on this Photoblog when I lived in Puerto Rico the next summer.  From there I landed a coaching job at Point Park University, followed by a job in the School of Business managing a few social media accounts.  My love for social media grew each day and expanded into other forms of digital marketing.  A year later, I got a promotion and my role became digital marketing for the School of Business, I've been ever since. Looking back, I'm a little sad to see that the Photoblog site I used so much never really took off.  Still, it is exciting that there are now so many other great ways to share pictures, posts, etc. from different corners of the world.

Reminiscing on my old Photoblog, I found a bunch of pictures that I'd like to share. I've posted them HERE on Flickr.  Enjoy!