Cheating on Sleep with Work

One of the most important things that I picked up yesterday during the Off Broadway tour at Barkley from Joe Cox was that if you’re serious about working in Social Media, you need to have a social media presence of your own.

Easier said than done.

Why is that you ask? Social Media isn’t that hard, right? You just have to pop in every once-in-a-while and say ‘hello’. It’s fun! You’d be half right, if you guessed that. Social Media is fun. Hell, it’s a lot of fun. But it’s also a lot of work. It requires and hell of a lot of balance. And for someone who already has both of her balance plates full, it can be sort of difficult. Really difficult, actually.

As mentioned, I’m taking 18 credit hours, I’m working at the university about 20 hours a week, and I’m working on LoneStarCon 3. I’ve got a little bit going on right now. And that doesn’t leave me a whole lot of time to spend exploring the internet for things to post about. Or, time for learning about awesome things (Like Vine).

If you want a job in Social Media, it’s not enough to just randomly post when you have a spare few seconds. You have to cultive a presence. Post things of relevance. Things that reflect you. It’s hard to do that when you barely have a few minutes here and there to check your email. It can be done. And I’m using every resource I can find to try.

But what do I do when one of my jobs is cultivating someone else’s Twitter and Facebook pages? It’s even harder, in my opinion, to cultivate a presence for someone or something else. It take more time and effort. You have to research the client. Get to know it’s audience. Learn to talk like the group would. You have to become that person instead of promoting the person you already are.

It’s a tough situation. I want to have something like that on my resume, but I also want to have a personal presence on the platform. (Yay for alliteration!)

My solution for now is to not sleep. We’ll see how that goes.

2 responses to “Cheating on Sleep with Work”

  1. I don’t know about not sleeping… ok false. I know all about not sleeping. But, what I mean is that it will only help you in the short run. Getting a good night’s sleep (ie about 8 hours) means the difference between a productive day and an unproductive one to me. If I have to spend too much time thinking about how to focus and when my next caffiene fix is, I lose the creativity it takes to stay focused at all.

    Also, Barkley is a great company from what I hear and have some classmates that are working for them. And I love talking about social media, because it fascinates me, even when it is just me having to make yet ANOTHER timeline image for a client.

  2. Sleep scorned is a real bitch. You’ll finally collapse into bed, and sleep will be all “I don’t think so, Missy! You want me now, you hussy? Stare at the ceiling for a few hours and think about what you did, why don’t you!” Worse, sleep will decide to take you back in the middle of a test, or work, or whenever it’s least convenient. Be careful.

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