While many students enjoy the creative freedom afforded by the social media project, others find the breadth of options intimidating. With that in mind, I’ve compiled examples of the most successful project submissions, and I’ll be sharing them here over the first few weeks of the semester. These should act as a useful complement to the in-class presentations by former students.
First up is Alicia Viarruel’s The Fringes. Alicia, who had long aspired to work in the fashion industry, set out to comment on clothing design on a fashion-themed blog. I was (and remain) amazed at the level of work Alicia put into her project. She posted frequently and consistently, and she created several well-maintained companion pages for her main blog.
Her image-heavy main blog, laden as it is with snazzily-dressed models, has no choice but to stand out visually.
Alicia created a Facebook page to keep more connected with the community and drive more readers to the main blog. Her Tumblr page featured less text commentary and focused on easily-digestible reposted images (I suspect she would have used Pinterest for that instead if it had been as well-known in 2011). Finally, she tweeted original comments and links to her blog on Twitter.
Note her effort to foster both independence and interdependence among her pages. Each stands on its own to some degree, but they all feed back in some way to her main blog. As one of the first, and still one of the best, projects I’ve seen emerge from this class, Alicia’s The Fringes is as good an example as any of what I expect from you this semester.
Media Studies Blog 
If we were to use the most common platforms ie. Facebook, twitter, youtube and wordpress, do you think that would suffice to tie in the content and keep the community interested? My concern is if I spread my content across too many platforms it might prove to be a challenge to manage.
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Good question, and it’s something we’ll discuss more in class. The short answer, however, is that you don’t necessarily have to spread your content across multiple platforms. Your main content should reside on one platform, and you should use the other platforms to attract and capture audiences and draw them to your main area. So you can post your main content to your blog or YouTube channel, and use Twitter and Facebook to engage with people there and get them to go to your main stuff.
You can also offer different and/or smaller versions of your main content at other platforms. So you can post two or three pictures to your Tumblr and include a link to see your full galleries at Flickr. Or post material that appeals to (what you deem to be) your Tumblr and Instagram audience while offering different material elsewhere.
As for which platforms to use…again, that all has to do with what sort of project you intend to do.
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I am both inspired and apprehensive at the same time. Inspired because I am so impressed at the quality displayed, and apprehensive because the level of work expected is not as simple as I thought, I am not savvy as most of the class but I am willing to learn, this should be an interesting journey
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