Social Media Club | Columbia If you get it, share it

Chip Oglesby is an Online Producer for The State Media Company. As a producer, he helps maintain thestate.com and helps maintain the various social media functions of TSMC including it’s presence on facebook, myspace and twitter. Chip is also a web designer and an award winning photojournalist. Chip also serves on the Steering Committee of Social Media Club Columbia.

Inspired by the series from *Danny Brown, here’s Chip and “Five Questions about Social Media.”

How do you define social media?

The basis of social media is about users creating content that encourages communication and interaction with people across a global electronic platform. I think that we are still in the infancy of what we will later know as true “social media.”

Which social media tools or applications do you use, and why these in particular?

Primarily, I use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Youtube and Mogolus.

At first, I started using Twitter to answer the question “What am I doing” My first tweets included “Walking, sleeping, eating” what every beginner would say when they first started using Twitter. However, after a while, I began to discover that journalism bloggers were also using Twitter to have discussions about the future of journalism and after engaging in conversation with them, my use of Twitter skyrocketed.

Currently, I’m using Twitter to focus more on connecting with people in the Columbia area and with people whose “tweets” I find interesting. I’m not really interested in having 1,200 followers or following that many, because I want my conversations to be intimate and engaging.

Facebook as been a great extension of my social life with my college friends and some of my high school friends. I use it less for personal networking, and more as a tool to keep up to date with people who I care about, but may not talk to every single day. It’s a great way to see what people are up to these days.

LinkedIn is mainly used for my “professional” resume. They’ve made a lot of changes over the past year and I have yet to fully take advantage of it, other than having a place to index my name and work experience.

I mainly use WordPress as a custom Content Management System when building websites. It’s really helpful to have a wordpress.com username/password when commenting on other WP hosted sites. It’s hard to match the power of and support that the WordPress community has to offer. It’s open source, and it’s free!

With increasingly busy schedules, Where do you find time for social media?

Social media is just something that has become part of my everyday routine. I use to just check my email, but more often now, I find myself checking my email, then twitter, then my RSS feed.

Having a device like the iPhone has also increased my social media usage ten fold. It’s really simple to update my status on facebook, or engage in conversation on twitter while waiting on copies to print or receiving a fax.

These sites are just platforms and it’s so easy to use them without actually having to go there. I can use twitter by running twitterfox without even visiting twitter.com

What advice would you give to local businesses wishing to effectively embrace social media?

First, start with transparency. If you don’t know an answer, let them know, but tell them that you’ll point them in the right direction. If you’re on twitter and just tweeting your services, I won’t follow you, and neither will anyone else my age.

Social media is about openness. It’s also about giving your business a name and a voice. It’s true, what you say will reflect your company, so if you can’t stand behind whatever you put out there, don’t do it!

Where do you see the future of social media?

I don’t think that anyone can really predict what the future of social media will be, but I promise you it will be exciting and like nothing we’ve ever seen. Personally, I think that the future will be based around the idea of using Geolocation as a tool to connect with people. I think that you’ll see social media sites such as Ning become more prevalent online.

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