Category: Social media

It’s time, it’s time, it’s time, it’s time!!

It’s my favorite time of the quarter! The time when I get to see my students’ hard work come to fruition! The time when I sit back in awe at how creative and brilliant our future as a whole really is! The time when I get so excited because my students have once again gone beyond the necessary and gone to the extreme! It’s dress rehearsals for group projects!

This quarter, my social media class divided into six groups to partner with six start-up companies. And when I say start-up, I mean one-person operations. One is a photography business, one is a prayer journal (that I have mentioned before), one is an online boutique, etc. These are businesses that would benefit greatly from social media management skills. My students will, in one week, propose a social media campaign that will show them what platforms they need to use, what audience demographic they should target, and give them examples of posts for each platform.

Tomorrow – tomorrow – I get to critique their dress rehearsals for these pitches. Dress rehearsals are vital to get all the bugs out of the system before the clients see the finished, flawless project. Not only will they see any technical difficulties they may have with the presentation, but they will receive feedback on their presentation as well as with their hard-copy pitch. These are all intelligent students with fantastic editing skills – but nothing is perfect. I am a pretty dadgum good copy editor myself, and when I was close to graduating with my undergraduate degree, I asked several editors to look over my resume. They tweaked a few items but overall praised it. I took it to a technical writing firm, and before I sat down for the interview, one of the interviewers said, “Hey, you have a proofreading error on your resume. Did you know that?” None of my proofreaders saw that.

Obviously, I did not get the job.

But I digress – the point of that little rabbit trail was to explain that even group work editing needs assistance.

They had a team workshop last week, and as I flitted around from group to group, I was so impressed with their ideas. They’re working with such a variety of creative businesses with a wide range of social media capabilities. One businesswoman is quite adept at social media, and her posts are already amazing. Her group is working to help her take her business to the next level, using her knowledge to boost her sales even higher. Then we have businesses whose heads are not sure how to use social media or what to do to increase brand awareness on any platform – and those students are working on a game plan that gives specifics of what to do, where to do it, and when to do it. And – wait, there’s more! We have business leaders who don’t have time – they have a family or another job or this profession is a side gig – at any rate, my students are working on a plan that will help them grow their social media engagement with a time management plan. It’s great – it’s so great, y’all. This week is exciting, and I am already so proud of all of their work.

And, yes – this is me this week.

It’s time, it’s time, it’s time, it’s time!

I, like most of the country, spent last week – and really, this week – wrapped up in the Kavanaugh hearings. It was a topic of my communication classes, and I could not stop watching.

My heart hurts for the people who are suffering – those who are on the national scene and those who are watching this and reliving their own painful experiences.

I should have stayed off of social media – really. I absolutely should have never gone to Facebook, never gone to Twitter – but I did anyway. And I saw it – the one post that I can’t get out of my head, can’t stop thinking about. It was from a female and said something on the basis of, “I don’t see what the big deal is. I’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times, and I never made a big deal out of it.”

Whoa.

Did you just feel the breath rush out of your body like you’d been hit? Because I did, even typing it nearly a week later. And that wasn’t the only one I saw similar to that, either. I told my husband it reminded me so much of a scene from “Sharp Objects” (semi-spoiler alert coming) where the Amy Adams’ character sees a man from her past who sexually assaulted her. He is apologetic, and she shrugs him off like it was no big deal.

But it was. It is.

Sexual assault, at any age, at any point in your life, is a really big deal. Whether it went all the way to rape or not and whether it happened when you were in high school, college, or whenever — it is a really big deal.

Let me say it louder for the people in the back: IT IS A REALLY BIG DEAL.

Never let anyone tell you differently.

I am thankful to live in the time of the #metoo movement. I am thankful to live in a time when people are beginning to realize that consent – at any time, date, or place – is mandatory. I am thankful that I am raising my daughters in a time when the boys around them will see what happens when “boys will be boys” and cross a line. I am thankful I have a husband who understands that my body did not become his property when we said “I do,” and that he daily seeks to earn the privilege of intimacy (an approach of daily consent), believing I have the right to say “yes” or “no” joyfully.

I hear the arguments against this all the time, people saying that girls need to dress in a certain way or not go to frat parties or, “Well, I guess boys will have to get a form sign and notarized for just saying hello to a girl.” For the last part – what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong about people thinking just a little before speaking? I know I need to think before I speak on a daily basis. Why shouldn’t we all take a page out of that politeness book?

People are discussing this, and that is a good thing. People are asking questions, and that is a good thing. And while it is sadly such a prevalent problem in society, one thing needs to be stated very clearly:

Sexual assault – yeah. It is a big deal.