Goodbye, and Thanks

1. In your final post discuss what you accomplished, whether you plan to continue your efforts or start over, and what you learned and maybe wish you had learned.

When I was first told over the summer that I needed to take a content writing class, I immediately thought: “What could I possibly learn from this class that I haven’t already learned in the many years of working as a reporter and editor?” (Plus, I was already blogging.)

Plenty, I would soon discover!

I begin with Twitter. Even though I finally opened a personal account under my real name a few months ago, I rarely tweeted. Admittedly, I didn’t feel comfortable using this platform, because I didn’t fully understand how it worked. I don’t profess to know it all today, but I am feeling far more at ease about tweeting and I am starting to understand Twitter’s potential power in promoting my voice. You can reach certain audiences by using the right hashtags — and get people to follow you, which was the case when I tweeted about the Ironman one day. Someone who competes in these races began to follow me! (If I could make that happen with just one random tweet, think of the followers I could amass by tweeting regularly; and that could translate into more attention being paid to my blog or book, etc.) Twitter teaches (forces!) you to be concise and to choose your words wisely to ensure maximum impact. It is a powerful form of social media, and I plan on using it more in the future. 

Now on to LinkedIn, where I have been fairly active and on which I do have many connections. I realized through this course that I have much work to do on this platform, too. Having to post my resume on my blog and knowing that it would be critiqued forced me to take a closer look at my professional profile. My original summary was far too verbose, as Bob pointed out. I have since rewritten and shortened it, and I plan on making additional changes to my LinkedIn profile as I bring my online persona into better focus.

As my voice becomes clearer and likely shifts, I could eventually create a Facebook fan page or establish a YouTube channel, particularly for my sports injury blog, which I really enjoy writing, though I’d like to make some changes to this site before doing so.   

What I liked best about this class was that it forced me to take a closer look at my overall future, in addition to my online presence. As I said in an earlier blog post, “There are pieces of me scattered all over the Internet.” Being scattered is not necessarily good. I need to connect all the dots and somehow use my connection with my newspaper to garner interest for my other enterprises. (Bob offered some good suggestions for doing this.)

I still love the idea of writing a fitness book — perhaps one on older athletes — and just the other day I sat down with a colleague who is about to begin a book leave. She provided some good suggestions and direction for getting literary agents interested in my ideas. “Start by publishing a feature story about the subject,” she said, “and then prepared to spend a lot of time on the proposal.”

Thanks again, to Bob and Drake and Amie!