What I Am Doing Now
I am trying to learn everything about social and new media. I keep a blog about what I am reading and what I am learning in my social media job. I am currently the Social Network Engineer, or SNE, at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming.
My History
In graphic design school I learned to simplify things. I like art, campfires, and computer games. I have a creative and imaginative mind, and I love to instigate action in all it’s forms. This allows me to see and create art and design in unique ways. I was tricked into visiting The Portfolio Center, a graduate school for graphic design. I was so impressed by the work I saw and an inspiring talk from Hank Richardson, the president of the school, that I enrolled the following semester where I became a student of media architecture.
I have been fooling around on computers since I was 10 years old. Plugging phone lines into modems and getting myself in trouble became quite a hobby. I played computer games and became part of online communities of mega-nerds. I taught myself to build my computers and use photoshop to create my own graphics. I built websites and even started making my own climbing videos, just to learn how to use all the latest programs. It was these pictures, websites, and videos that I used as a portfolio to apply to the Portfolio Center.
Interestingly enough I did not end up creating a portfolio at The Portfolio Center. A job came up at the National Outdoor Leadership School that I could not pass up. One portfolio short of a graphic design job, I packed up and moved to Wyoming to work in a basement cleaning gear for wilderness medicine classes.
I absolutely love campfires. The most honest and fun social gatherings have taken place around campfires. You get mesmerized by the glow and warmth of the fire. I love being outside, climbing rocks, exploring canyons and forests, and sleeping under the stars. This is why I moved to Wyoming. A year after cleaning gear a job opened up within NOLS that seemed to be a culmination of everything that I have worked towards and love. It was a creative technical job that dealt with getting people outside. I applied and became the Social Network Engineer for NOLS.
Social Network Engineer
I am the Social Network Engineer for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). I manage the School’s presence on social networks throughout the web. Here is a current list of networks I administer:
Facebook - 10,000 members across different fan pages and groups
Twitter – 1000 followers across 3 accounts
Flickr – 50,000 photos tagged with NOLS, 30 groups separated into geographic regions
YouTube – 100 videos tagged with NOLS, 20 NOLS made videos
Vimeo – 20 NOLS videos now made in HD quality
LinkedIn – Alumni and Employee Groups
Myspace – 1000 friends in NOLS and WMI accounts
The most important part of my job is to nurture these communities by encouraging participation, posting relevant information and media, and staying current with social trends. Finding NOLS media and articles around the web is another large part of my job. Someone posts a great picture from a course, or a local newspaper interviews a NOLS grad, and I am in a position to see these in near real-time, ready to aggregate them out to our blog and/or different networks, both internally and externally. I also make sure stay current with emerging technologies to realize the potential use for NOLS and it’s mission.
Every week I put together an e-newsletter for prospective students, or alumni (alternating each week). I concept, write, and edit each e-newsletter from the perspective of an alumni and employee. Each e-mail contains an introduction and 3-6 stories. I work closely with the Webmaster to keep nols.edu current, editing and creating pages/sections of the site regularly. I Mainly work in HTML using Dreamweaver, but I have had opportunities to create dynamic content using Javascript and JQuery.
Like many jobs at NOLS, I am able to get involved in projects loosely related to my title and I have been involved in brainstorming sessions and projects with Marketing, Publications, Information Systems, NOLS Professional Training, WMI, Video Production, and the Online Store.
Webmaster
I have been making websites since the days of Geocities. Remnants of my early sites live on, unfortunately, in the web’s archives. You just can’t hide from the internet. They can be seen, unabashedly, right here:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.geocities.com/yosemite/8650
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.thepageofzubi.com
With my current website, I am trying to push my career in social media by documenting myself and find my niche. Here you will find my graphic design work, my lifestream, and my blog on social media.
Graphic Design / Media Architecture
I went to school at the Portfolio Center as a Media Architecture student. In the first quarter I went through a graphic design boot camp of sorts; learning color, shape, area-of-focus, and how to work hard. After that I took classes in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, typography, design systems, creative thought, presentation skills, and so on. One class was called “fat man eating spaghetti,” it was a class focused on concepting and created finished products while only using the computer. You will hear frequently in design that the computer is strictly a finishing tool, but that class challenged the notion. I am glad too, since this is the way I create, and I felt justified by the class. I also got to participate in a class with the president of the school, around a big table in the center of the school, which starts at 5:30am and went until 5:30pm sometimes. He would hand his credit card to a student and say, “go pick up some pizzas, we’re not leaving this table.
As a media architecture student, I spent time, on top of the traditional graphic design curriculum, thinking about how to use the technology, the internet, social media, and mobile devices to produce and market content.
Here is some of my design work.
Computer Consultant/Maintenance
I started with an Apple IIgs in 1986 and have been playing with, and working on computers ever since. I currently have a Mac Powerbook G4 17″ laptop, and a custom built PC desktop machine running Windows 7, capable of running the latest video games at high resolution. I don’t really play video games anymore, but I use them as a goal for my builds. Because I was always on computers, I was always asked about computers. I have developed a mindset to be able to explain and teach about hardware, software, and internet applications in easy to digest chunks, and with an obvious passion.