“Find your niche and become an expert in that area. Stay on top of the latest trends and be confident that you are among the best at what you do.” — This is advice that I offer to aspiring writing and communications students that I mentor. It’s a new piece of advice for me — one I decided to start using myself about a year ago.
My niche is social media. I chose it for myself and followed my own advice. Every day I learn something new. I scour daily tweets from sites like Mashable. I form opinions on what I read. Most importantly, I apply it to my job.
Over the past six months, I started crafting national media pitches in response to queries from HARO and ProfNet (so much more productive that pitching blind!!!). While pitching others as experts in such areas as education, economics and psychology, I discovered that many queries sought experts in social media.
Following my own advice to students, why shouldn’t this be me! So I pitched myself as a social media expert and was interviewed for the article, “How to Avoid Social Media Messes” published on Information Week‘s blog The Brain Yard on Oct. 31, 2011.
The interview, for me, served not only get my name out there as a social media expert, but it boosted my confidence, renewing my commitment to, indeed, be among the best at what I do. It also gave me confidence to take my own blog, the one you are reading now, more public.
July 19th, 2012 at 7:00 pm
[...] — scratch that — I know how. I even wrote an entire blog post about it last [...]