Internship: Done! Now what?

Hello dear readers!

I have completed my Internship in Library Science, and am pretty proud of the final product. I built the base of a virtual collection of materials about the Treadwell Mines here in the Juneau area, and it now looks pretty excellent. You’re welcome to check it out and give me feedback in the comments below!

http://treadwellsociety.com/home/

Meanwhile, that means I am trying to get back to the rest of everything in my life, because I am now done with my Master’s in Library and Information Science! So I have some things I want to talk about, things I want to explore, so let me lay out some of what’s on my mind!

The Sunday Re-Blog

First and foremost, I kind of started doing this and stopped, but I really kind of like the idea. I am doing most of my main writing over on Comparative Geeks, so that means I have some content that I am really proud of. There are some in particular that I think have to do with blogging, or social media, or writing and storytelling, and those sorts of posts also belong here on this blog. So I am going to return to sharing something I have worked on over there here on this blog, to highlight some of my favorites and thoughts!

I think I will also use this space to highlight the excellent blogging of others, but I’m not sure quite how best to do that. With my own content, I have no problem with cutting and pasting it wholesale here onto the blog – though for stats I suppose I should redirect to Comparative Geeks? But for others’ content… this should definitely be links. But then, just one link? That’s kind of a dull post. So perhaps I will have to collect good posts… and perhaps that will have to be a new, ongoing post, beyond the Sunday Re-Blog?

The Liebster Award

One of the things that has happened over on Comparative Geeks (I have to fight the urge to link to Comparative Geeks every time I mention it…) is that we were nominated for the Liebster Award. Check out a bit more history on this award here. This is a community-building award, because when nominated, you have to then also nominate 11 worthy blogs.

So I want to do a couple of things.

First, I want to explore the idea of blogging awards, because I am finding that there are a number of them that go around, in some ways like a chain letter, but in a good way? We’ll go with that. Like a chain letter in a good way.

Second, I want to highlight the blogs that replied to our nominations, and show off their good work. I don’t know if Comparative Geeks is the space for that, but over here in my writer’s corner, it’s definitely a good place! Finding blogs that had good content going, were keeping going, had maybe been around a while – and had a small number of followers (we went with Word Press followers) – was a difficult task in its own rights. It made us explore the people reading our blog a little harder.

Check out our nomination response here!

Facebook Page and Ads

I have also been learning more about Facebook, by helping administer a page for an annual charity event (I discussed working on a charity event here). I learned a lot about Facebook, using their insights on a page. I also did a lot to try to build a community around this page, by liking the pages that were the businesses related to the event – the sponsors and attendees.

From there, we decided to throw a few dollars at Facebook as advertising, and I learned some things there. Such as, things about their ad approval process, about how specialized you can make your ads – and how creepy this is for privacy – and about what catches people’s attention. Using this, I saw a bit of a future for Facebook, because the question of them being able to make money is a good question. Their advertising is really not that bad, and we got almost 200 likes – from a very specialized group of people who might be interested in paying for the event – for only $60. Lots to talk about here!

Publicize

And finally, one thing I have picked up a bit from our Comparative Geek Facebook Page – which has finally reached 30 likes (go here to go to our page and like it yourself!) is that we may not be getting very good reach. We tend to post our blog posts – 6 a week – once they are done, after work, after relaxing, eating, all that. So they go up later in the evening – Alaska time. So super late. So like, no one is seeing them shared on Facebook at that time, and then by morning, Facebook has moved on to new things.

This made me think, you know, we should set up our posts to publish the next morning. That’s easy enough to do on WordPress – you just schedule it, rather than publishing immediately. However, with the additional advertising we do – mainly on Facebook – that makes it hard. We’d forget, or something, and it would be easier if they could happen at the same time.

Enter Publicize, WordPress’s way of instantly sharing your posts on Social Media. We have known about it for a while, but have hesitated. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s wanting to have control. Maybe it’s the fact we’ve never gotten ahead with a buffer of posts. Whatever it is, we haven’t tried it.

So I want to test it, and so this post is my first test with Publicize! I am sharing on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and Facebook. If you find this post because of that, hit a like on the post! And thanks!