Excuse me...you want me to tweet? (jenn olivencia)

“So every day you each need to write a blog twice a day and Twitter about anything and everything and our products. It doesn’t matter if it’s about a delicious turkey sandwich you ate or if you gave 10cents to a panhandler, ALWAYS include to one of our product lines in your blogs. Just make sure that we are blogging/tweeting daily”. That was new responsibility given to my boss and I by the Director of Sales. Sheeeesh….really?! Another thing to add on my never ending list of responsiblities. Grrrrrr…..

At first I was bitter about the whole idea. Why am I blogging for work when I don’t even do it for personal satisfaction? Ugh! I despised the whole idea of (what I considered to be) a mindless marketing “tool.” I mean, I never even tweeted before, let alone felt compelled to disclose my daily life activities with 4000 strangers. Seriously, do they really care whether or not I use mayo on my sugar free bread? Or that I got into an argument in the checkout line at Kings because the woman in front of me demanded that the cashier honored her 9 expired coupons? Well, lo and behold after time, my tweet-infused-blogs seemed to be getting quite an audience! For some reason people seemed to really enjoy reading about my weekend memoirs of NYC roof-top party hopping, my love for building human pyramids in Central Park and having our reserved table in the Hamptons given to Russell Simmons and his entourage. Hey, maybe blogging wasn’t so bad after all - I was getting followers little by little. And it also doesn’t hurt to know that many of our distributors enjoyed my Twitter tweets and blogs so much that they placed orders on our products based on the “ideas” I somehow inspired them with. Plus my blogging endeavors start to build more traffic to our website, which increased every month by 45-60%. Awesome!  :takes a bow:

So what is the lesson I learned from forced blogging? Answer: brand awareness. I repeat: brand awareness. Even if I was “selling” my weekend escapades, I was really selling the brand of my company. Thus, learning the importance of blogging. Which leads me to say…

It totally makes sense for our class to have a blog because how will we learn or be introduced to the foundations of social media if we aren’t using social media? Reading isn’t enough. Putting our learning into constant action is the key to understanding the benefits of this medium called “social media”. I would like to learn more ways on how to take advantage of using this channel for brand awareness; in addition to getting to know a variety of other great marketing-idea-filled web sites.

A friend of mine, Ravi Yande, is an award-winning journalist. I’m going to follow his blog http://theravireport.wordpress.com/ with gusto because he writes with such vivacity and I feel I will get great sense of how to write with such intriguing style.

Jenn Olivencia