My name is Meagan Fertig, and although I am a chronic blog checker, this is the first time posting. I received my bachelor’s degree in music with a concentration in music business from the University of Memphis in 2006.  I am currently the administrative associate in the Recruitment and Orientation office at the University of Memphis, and this will be my first semester as a part time graduate student in the Communications Department. While I was a music business student, I was very interested in how bands could connect with fans using social media, and worked with online promotions for label bands during my internship at a local recording studio.  At that time, before Facebook had music and video capabilities, most music promotion with social media was done using MySpace. While MySpace did have music hosting and calendar capabilities that were useful for bands, the connectibility and exposure to new fans was extremely limited in a time before Facebook’s “sharing” and news feed existed.

Now that I am working full time for the university, I am interested in further using social media to reach out to prospective student populations. For the last few months I have been helping to expand the use of social media for the Office of Admissions as well as Recruitment and Orientation by increasing our usage of Twitter and Facebook. This past summer we used Twitter in the program for our new student orientation and tracked the interaction using custom channels on Tweet Deck. We created a hash tag for orientation and included a Twitter contest for our parents and guests who attended orientation with their incoming student. Recently, I’ve also participated in a virtual college fair using CollegeWeekLive.com to live chat with students around the country who are interested in the University of Memphis, using  both Facebook and Twitter to promote the live chat feature.

I’ve enjoyed seeing the way social media has changed in the last few years to connect businesses and organizations directly to individuals. I hope to learn more about the nature of communication that takes place within social media, along with the privacy issues that are a by-product in this class. In addition, I hope to explore the sub-set of etiquette that has developed around social media behavior. As a full time employee, I’m excited that I will be able to understand and implement what I will learn in this class into my current position, and I think it’s the perfect class to start my graduate work.

On a personal note, I’m a huge music fan and a lifetime Memphian. My husband is nice enough to put up with my Netflix and Pinterest habits, and I’ve learned to live through his annual fantasy football season. I haven’t had a bad day yet that a plate of BBQ nachos from Central couldn’t fix.