Welcome to the Social Media Age

Anyone that knows us would tell you that we are not the most tech savvy group out there. While some of us at VEM are light years ahead of others, we as a whole, are still in the dark ages compared to the rest of society. I think this is mostly due to the fact that we are past our prime in terms of the tech world, the youngest of us being in our early thirties. However, we are slowly, with some encouragement, beginning to embrace the new era in which people go about their daily lives. For those of you that know Jeff, it may be hard to believe but he's finally agreed to ditch his flip phone for a Smartphone, so watch out! Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Foursquare, QR codes…. the list goes on and on, but we are trying to figure our way through this maze of ever-changing platforms. Part of our effort to become more in tune with the Social Media Age is the development of a blog. Somehow, I've become nominated to write this thing (although some will tell you I wanted to do it to feed my ego). The goal of the blog is to give people, whether it be friends, family, participants or no one, a look behind the scenes at what goes on at VEM. For example, I will touch on subjects such as how we go about producing our events, what goes into the production, decisions that are made and funny anecdotal stories about things that happen during the production of our events. We hope those of you that choose to follow us find the look behind the scenes interesting or maybe even entertaining.


The Social Media age is making us rethink the way we go about doing our business. We've been on Facebook for a while, but not actively, mostly due to my lack of updates. Honestly, it's one of the last things I'm thinking about when we start to get busy. With not only a VEM Facebook page, but now a Twitter feed (which I had created mostly to keep up to speed on the latest sports news), and Facebook and Twitter feeds for each of our events, we need to do more and we need to be better. Not only must we to do this for promotion of the events and recruiting participants, but it provides a great way for our current participants to connect with us and the events. This will be a learning curve for all of us. None of us grew up with this, so it's not second nature and with its ever-changing and new platforms, it's quite a change from the traditional avenues all of us have become accustomed to.

With all of this being said, we now have a HootSuite account, to make our social media lives easier. Michelle has been reading up on the latest news at Mashable.Com and has sat in on many webinars regarding Twitter, Facebook, and Social Media marketing. We've drug Jeff along trying to figure out how we incorporate this into what we do. Its all a huge learning experience or experiment depending on how you look at it. I guess you can say we are looking forward to developing this side of VEM. I'm sure by the time we have a grasp on it, there will be something completely new for us to learn.

Thanks for reading....come back next time for more from the VEM Chronicles