Blog – Page 2 – Social Confetti Co

Our Best (Digital) Self

Are you the same person online as you are offline? Or do you only tend to show the highlight reel of your life?

You wouldn’t be the only one guilty of wanting to curate the most flattering image of themselves online. You best believe that if a friend tagged me in a picture that made me look bad I would be untagging myself quick smart.

Social Media is a powerful tool for communicating with many different audiences; how we approach each platform depends on who you are communicating with. What I mean by that is, typically you would adopt a more professional approach on a platform such as Linked In as opposed to the more casual version of you that you present to friends and family on your private Facebook account (assuming that you have one of course).

We often hear ‘just be 100% yourself’ or ‘be authentic’ when it comes to advice for social media. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could hand on heart say that I am 100% myself online. I certainly don’t share pics of my crazy hair, no make-up self before I’ve even had my morning coffee…nobody needs to see that.

A good Snapchat filter is my friend, could it be a lack of confidence or it could be that I just don’t want an unflattering image of myself kicking about the interwebs. I am all for a good selfie, if you are feeling yourself you should document that.

I just wish that people wouldn’t compare their normal everyday lives with the highlight reel of someone else’s. We are all unique and finding your people online can be highly rewarding. There is a sense of community once you find your niche, people with similar interests etc.

The internet and social media is what you make of it, if you go looking in dark places and get sucked in to the drama it’s not going to be a good time. I personally try and spread a little kindness, the world needs more of that.

How we portray ourselves online is ultimately a part of us. William James, American philosopher and psychologist, suggested that our digital identity is somewhat split, with our various online personas leaving breadcrumbs of our core self.

I don’t see social media as the enemy or that it is destroying us but I did find the YouTube clip below interesting and worthy of sharing. I’d be curious to know your thoughts on it…?

Do you agree with the quote by Elon below, are people trying to make their lives look more interesting than they are?

‘People look like they have a much better life than they really do’
Elon Musk

Photo by Alexandre Chambon on Unsplash
#blessed

Who wouldn’t want to share an image like the one above, if you were sunning it up in Greece you would want to capture that moment and look back on those precious memories for years to come.

I do my best to be myself as much as I can be online, without overstepping…people don’t necessarily need to know every nitty gritty detail. But also bare in mind that once you share that photo, comment, tweet, it is out there for all to see. Try and think of the future and make sure you don’t do something that may come back to haunt you (teenagers take note: your future employer will Google you!).

Ultimately it is up to you how you appear online, you control the narrative of your own life (both online and off). If you want to share only the good, there’s no shame in that. Let’s all do our bit to be the good though too.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite sayings: ‘spread kindness like confetti’. Yes, let’s!

Navigating Creative Commons

This week we started discussing creative commons in our unit and the proper way to credit images.

Creative Commons – cc stickers by Kristina Alexanderson (CC BY 2.0)

I wasn’t totally oblivious to copyright to begin with but I definitely didn’t fully understand how to credit correctly. I feel like we’ve all been guilty of sharing an image from Google or Pinterest without giving credit where credit is due.

Artists/Creatives work hard to create those artworks in the first place, the least we could do is give them the recognition that they deserve (plus it’s the law, so there’s that).

Using images through sites that allow you to share and credit photos gives you the ability to really up-level your content. Especially if you are not naturally blessed with the talent to create them yourself.

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

Sharing my love of coffee using this awesome image.

I try and use my own images for the most part but it’s not always possible to create something to illustrate your point that enhances your blog post.

Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash

This photo represents my love of both stationery and rainbow coloured everything…

That’s where creative commons comes in to play; a few resourceful sites for finding great images are Flickr, Unsplash or even the Creative Commons website itself.

It’s also a great way for people to recreate their own version of copyrighted material, such as movies and television shows, and put their own creative spin on it. Case in point…

So make sure you share the attribution love, don’t leave me hanging with no likes. I hope this helped in some small way and encourages you to credit images going forward.

If you want to learn more about the different types of creative commons licenses you can check that out here.

As a general rule you would credit the name of the photo, publisher and creative license and link back to the original sources for those 3 things. You can see in my image captions above my examples. Unsplash is slightly different in that they don’t insist upon credit but it is always best practice to give it.

Thanks for coming to my (brief) Ted Talk, have a fabulous day.

Happy International Women’s Day

I just wanted to give a shout out to all the incredible women out there. There are so many amazing women that I admire and look up to. We should celebrate the women in our lives everyday and let them know we appreciate them. I appreciate that you are here right now reading this, whether you are a woman or not.

Tomorrow is my first class at uni, wish me luck.

The Beginning of Something Great

Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Keshena.

Coffee lover, mother and wife, stationery addict, obsessed with all things cute. Some favourites are iridescent, rainbow, glitter and pink. That should give you a good idea of my tastes, ha…

I have always had an interest in all things social media and content creation but this year I have finally decided to do something about it.

I have decided to make it my career and in order to do that I needed to hone my skills and get a qualification under my belt to help me start off on the best foot.

So for the first time in my life I am going to university to learn all things digital media, I thought it would be cool to document my journey along the way. Hopefully I can share some insights as I learn and also use this as a way to share cool and creative content.

I hope you’ll join me on what will no doubt be quite the adventure. I will try my best to not bore you and with any luck maybe even inspire you to create something yourself.