Category Archives: social media

Ever changing

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Many of you have heard by now that on Monday I started a new job…at AOL. It’s been a crazy ride to get to this place, but I’m very happy in my new position and I’m excited for all the opportunities that it will bring.

My role at AOL will be an ever changing one. As we all know, the internet does’t like to stay still and we constantly have to adapt to the changing landscape of this world that we live in, but we do it because we love it! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…I love the internet! And AOL is the perfect place for me right now.

Many of you know that I am still in school, so hearing about my new position confused a lot of people. Just to clarify…I’m still in school, full time. I will be working at AOL 30 hours a week as a Social Media Consultant for the Marketing team at AOL media.

Finding a company that recognizes the talent in someone that is still in school and is willing to take a chance on them is hard to find! This position at AOL does one very important thing and that is, it allows me to be myself! I finally feel like I don’t have to hide the fact that I’m still a student or the fact that I have (and have had) a great career!

I don’t think any of this would be possible without the awesomeness that is Matthew Knell! Back in 2009 I wrote about him in my Good People Day post and I can’t think of any better words to sum up how grateful I am to have him as a friend and mentor!

Matt Knell. You were the first person to ever come up to me, already knowing who I was, at a Mashable event back last summer. It was one of the most flattering moments EVER. Since then you have become a great friend and provided me with some great advice over the past year. You have never stopped believing in me and pushing me to be the best person I can be.

I’m so excited to be an AOLer and continue to build communities online.

Good Guide

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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When it comes to “being green” and living a lifestyle that is kind to the earth, I admit that I am still just learning. But I came across a great site that I am finding very helpful. It’s called the GoodGuide.

GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.

With GoodGuide, you can:

  • Find safe, healthy and green products that protect you and your family
  • Search or browse over 70,000 food, toys, personal care, & household products to see what’s really beneath the label
  • Use expert advice and recommendations on products to quickly learn the impacts of what you buy
  • Find better products and make purchasing decisions based on what’s important to you
  • Create a personalized favorites list with the products that are right for you and your family

They even have an iPhone app to help you make better choices when shopping. With this app, simply scan the barcode of the product and immediately see detailed ratings for health, environment and social responsibility for more than 50,000 products and companies. GoodGuide provides this information about personal care, household chemical, toy and food products for free on your iPhone / iPod Touch and is adding thousands of products every month. By making information about consumer products transparent, GoodGuide’s goal is to help people shop smarter and motivate companies to offer even better products.

But what really blew me away is their SMS application! It makes this type of “on the go learning” accessible to anyone with a SMS enabled phone! Simply send a text message to 41411. Every text message must begin with the word “gguide” in the body of the message. Then, add whatever it is you are searching for after “gguide”. You can search by Product Type, Product Name, or UPC code.

Everything’s already a Community

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
1

This post is going to be a variation of the review I wrote on Lunch.com’s SXSW community (client) of a panel called Community Management: Future Skills You’ll Need to Know, and the panelists were @saulcolt @glusman @thorpus @seamuscondron @ambercadabra @sarahprevette. The review I wrote was titled “You already have a community”.

My favorite points from that session were:

  • You can teach anybody social media, but for community management to succeed, it needs to be a senior role.
  • We are in danger of slinging around “community” as this big buzzword, but you ALREADY HAVE COMMUNITY, it’s called your CUSTOMERS!
  • Your community tells you when you have a community
  • If no one is saying your brand sucks on twitter, you’re doing it wrong. You want that opportunity to start that conversation.
  • You can’t tell your community what to do, you can only advise them. You don’t own your community, it’s their community.

Please read my review for more specific notes on that panel. But my big take away from that session was, You already have a community, it doesn’t matter what kind of business you are, or whatever kind of brand you are! This made me realize that even I have a community around my personal brand, and I need to actively manage my community.

I have been thinking about community a lot this last week, and I realized that I often find myself only talking about community as it refers to tech, or tech companies. But EVERYTHING is a community. Both in the physical location sense, and in the sense that you are probably a part of more communities then you realize. I realized that I am a part of the social media community, but I am also a part of the cancer community, the online video community, the vegan community, the health community and the New York City community.

I am interacting with all of these people, across all of these different communities, without even trying! Just my being myself, and that is awesome!

So I wanted everyone to reply in the comments with what communities they feel they interact with every day?

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Things Twitter helped me discover: Smarty Pig

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
2

I’m starting a new post series called “Things Twitter helped me discover” to highlight all of the great sites and other things that I find out about on twitter.

The first is Smarty Pig. Smarty Pig is a savings account with social aspects. This all started when I asked twitter if there was a way for me to save for specific goals and let other people also donate money towards those goals. Sure there were things like ChipIn, but that was only to show progress in collecting money, I wanted to also show my own savings progress. So someone suggested I check out Smarty Pig.

When you create a Smarty Pig account, you are actually opening a real FDIC insured savings account that has a 2.01% APY. Then within that account, you set up specific savings goals. That can be a family vacation, college savings for your children, or maybe just something you want to splurge on.

You set up these savings goals and choose how often you want to contribute to that goal, and how much. This was perfect for me because it allowed me to take out an amount from my check each week to save for rent, and then at the end of the month, I had my rent money without even thinking about it.

Next you can choose if you want to make the goal public or private. Certain goals like my rent, I kept private. But for other things, like my trip to SXSW, I can keep it public so that my friends and family can help me save too.

Once you reach your savings goal you have a few options. You can have the money deposited back into your checking account, Smarty Pig can send you a debt card with your savings, or you can choose to receive up to a 12% cash boost on your savings by placing it on a retail card like Amazon.com, Best Buy, Travelocity or Macy’s. You can even spilt your savings among the three, to find the best option for you.

You can add widgets for your facebook or blog so that all of your friends can help you save. I put one in my blog footer.

A hard post to write…

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
12

But I know I have to write it.

Over the past 4 months I have been living in Philadelphia, and working for Comcast Interactive Media. I worked on a project producing a series of tutorial videos. It was a very different job for me. There was a lot of managing. Managing people, managing expectations, managing outside agencies… it was a very big project. But my contract is ending on Jan. 15th so it’s on to hopefully better things.

So I had to make a decision, stay in Philly and look for another job, or move back to NYC? After talking with my family and close friends I have decided to do something that I didn’t want to do, but I know I have to do. Go back to school.

When I first started blogging there were 2 things that I worked very hard to keep under wraps.

#1 – that I was still in school

#2 – how young I was

I don’t really remember why I decided to do that, but from my point of view at the time, they were both negative things. I had a number of friends my age who were still in school and also in the social media/ blogging podcasting space, but for some reason whenever they were mentioned, they were always “student bloggers” and in my head that sounded like it was something less than everyone else. I didn’t think that they deserved less credit because they were young, or still in school. I also feel like the “student blogger” was being put in a box. It became a specific category that I didn’t want to be a part of. The age thing I always wanted to keep under wraps because I wanted my work to speak for itself.

I have very strong opinions about higher education. I don’t like it, I didn’t think I needed it, and I think the whole system in general is broken. I’ve written a little about education before. Once I had finished 4 years of school, I was done. I didn’t graduate, I just couldn’t take it anymore, I didn’t see the point. But while I still feel this way somewhat, I have decided to go back to school and finish my degree in Media Studies.

I can only hope that this doesn’t set me back career wise.

So…now that I got that off my chest, I’m moving back to NYC and I’m looking for a job. Not an internship people, I might be going back to school, but I don’t think that takes away from my level of experience. Ideally I would like to find some work in community management, social media consulting (I know I hate that term, but there is not other way to put it) Something that doesn’t require me to be in an office all of the time (since I will have classes, etc)

If you hear of anything, please let me know.

I wanted to thank all of my friends and mentors for being so great and supportive to me with this decision.