Facebook

Porsche Kristina

24 January 2012

ORCO 4000

Facebook

            I remember the day clearly – I had been waiting for my MTSU acceptance letter and roommate assignments to come in the mail for weeks, and I couldn’t contain my excitement when it finally got there. I ripped open the envelope and immediately after reading my roommates name, I went to look her up on MySpace. When I couldn’t easily find her profile, I started to get worried. “Surely any normal person my age would have a MySpace, right?,” I began to wonder to myself.  So I did the next best thing besides stalking her online, I called her. One of her questions to me was if I had a Facebook profile, because she couldn’t seem to find me online. Come to find out she was just as worried as I was at the apparent lack of social media skills of her future roommate.  I’m not sure if Facebook was originally limited to certain regions, or perhaps it caught on differently throughout the country based on culture, but I had never heard of this website (and I was friends with a LOT of college students)! Thankfully she explained it to me and told me that anybody who’s anybody is on there, and I needed to immediately sign up with my newly-assigned MTSU email address. You can guess what I spent my next week doing.

            Since then, I’ve seen Facebook change and grow throughout the years and adapt to the progressing social media trends. I remember when you couldn’t post a status, when your only photo was your profile picture, and when you could start joining groups. It quickly became a staple in my life, and more honestly, an addiction. My roommate was right; it was THE way of communicating with people. Especially since I’m from out of state and my fiancé was back home in CO, it made it much easier to keep in touch with everyone and stay connected. Since joining Facebook in 2005, it has gone through a variety of makeovers, and my needs and reasons to use it changed as well. Once they opened it to everyone, it became a way to connect with my family. As an activitist and a student leader, I was very interested in the Facebook Groups and constantly created groups, invited friends, and joined as many groups as I could. As an event planner, I created and RSVP’d to an unbelievable amount of Facebook Events. And now as a professional I use my Facebook to keep tabs on all of my friends, but mostly to connect with people in my industry and keep up with any important news.

            I am a big fan of keeping personal and business accounts completely separate, but I also recognize the fact that it is almost impossible to divide them entirely. Because of this, I think it is highly important to maintain a professional Facebook page and make sure that I’d be willing to show anyone in the world what’s on my page without worrying that it might be inappropriate.

            I’ve recently had a neat opportunity to help The Nashville Wedding Planners Group as we create our entire online persona from scratch. There are challenges that come along with managing a Facebook Page for a a business/organization because every move made from that page represents the group as a whole, and not just me. It has been interesting, however, to see the impact that social media plays on group formation as we’ve had lots of our members and vendors find out about us from our Facebook page.