Carter’s Chronicles

So much of societies interactions, outreach, influence and marketing is based on the World Wide Web. The ability to reach across the world instantly and facilitate countless interactions has proved to be one of them most valuable resources of the modern era. This has helped people stay connected to friends, by way of social media, helped employees communicate by means of instant messaging, and business market their brand by expanding their outreach.

Why Is A Web Presence Significant?

A business, or corporations web presence is one of the biggest deciding factors in their ability to expand and market their brand. The ability to expand the amount of mediums able to market a business is valuable because more individuals are able to be reached. Each person that is reached and marketed to, creates a higher chance of producing more business which in turn creates more revenue. Having a web presence could include a variety of platforms including social media, web page advertisements, websites, and more. One of the most beneficial aspects of having a web presence is being able to market services, make people aware of the business, and the ability to change and update information rapidly. In an article titled Why Establishing a Web Presence is Important from the University of South Florida, “Putting all of your information in one place is the easiest way to get the point across about you, your practice, and what you offer. Most internet users begin their search with Google or another search engine. From there, they may delve deeper into your website.” (University of South Florida 2018)

How Can You Influence Your Web Presence?

One of the biggest influential factors of web presence is the frequency of marketing. This is how often people see the brand or the business and how often they are reminded about its services. Seeing a business brand once does little, but if someone has seen the brand several times on various platforms and their friend talks to them about it, then it becomes way more influential. John Ramptom from Forbes magazine states that one of the most common ways people are underutilizing web presence is by “[n]ot utilizing the newest and fastest growing social networks” (Ramptom 2017). Social networks and web platforms are constantly changing and often times old networks usage drops off rapidly.

Maintaining a professional site is also key to gaining web presence. People are ore inclined to check out a new website or social media page if it is enticing and desirable. This means having a professional appearance, and enticing content.

What Impact Can Your Web Presence Have On Your Future?

Marketing used to take place on the radio, then the TV, and now it takes place on the most widely used platform of all: the web. Online market is able to be tailored to those individuals who have interest in the same areas of a prospective business. This tailoring helps increase the liklihood of a person who engages in the web presence to be able to actually bring in revenue. One of the biggest advantages of a web presence on the future of the business is establishing its credibility. As Entrepreneur.com states, “When you can point customers, partners, even potential employees or investors to a Web site, it tells them you are a serious business.” (Entrepreneur 2008)

Googling oneself can be a taunting thought- what personal information is out there for the world to see? Is it possible to remain completely off of the social media digital grid? Regardless of how careful someone is, it seems inevitable that all personal information is completely secure. The results of my decision to Google myself shocked me: I was happily surprised.

Most of the actual accurate results were results of times I had been featured or quoted in the local newspaper with a picture of myself attached. These results included times from high school basketball playoffs. (I am the player on the right in the blue uniform)

One news article featured me receiving an award from the County Fire Chief for reviving a 5 year old boy when I worked as a lifeguard at the local community pool.

(That is me accepting the award from Chief Green)

The most recent article was when I qualified for the U.S College National Championships for cross country skiing during my freshman year of college.

(That picture is during one of the races at the national championships)

Overall, I was generally happy with the results and have a positive takeaway from the search. I was not surprised by the three significant articles and pictures because I remember those instances happening and they are all positive events in my life that I do not mind sharing with the public. I am not active on social media because I do not wish to spread more of my personal information and identity but as I stated, in this age of digital access, it is impossible to stay completely hidden.

• Three things you learned
  • 1. Business email writing skills are important to convey professionalism and courteousness in a work setting. Though this skill is quickly dwindling, its necessity is becoming increasing vital in an culture of informal, electronic communication.
  • 2. Choosing words that convey appropriate meaning and context are important while not overdoing it and sounding pretentious. This was evident in our quiz while closing which phrase best fit the context of the paragraph.
  • 3. A WordPress, or other blog site, can be great for showcasing personal writings which can be beneficial when interviewing for jobs or graduate school. I will also add previous writings of mine on the blog after this semester.
• Two things that were confusing
  • 1. A few of the questions on the Opening and Closing Paragraphs were stumping me but I appreciated that the quiz platform provides the corresponding section in our book for further studying. After reading the corresponding section, I went back through and looked for the closing paragraphs that did not add any new information but rather summarized the main points and wrapped up the section.
  • 2. During the Prestudy Diagnostic quiz, I realized that my technical knowledge of sentence structure is lacking and that I need to work towards improving it, along with my technical grammar knowledge, throughout this semester.
• One ah-ha moment
  • I was struggling during Quiz #5 (Subject-Verb Agreement), which was evident by a low score for the first three-quarters of the quiz. I understood how to make the subject and very agree but some of the more confusing ones were troubling me. However, I eventually began to understand how to write them in agreement by reading through out Little Seagull book; my score dramatically improved after taking a break to study the ones that were harder for me.
• Two topics you hope to cover
  • 1. How to correctly cite a research paper
  • 2. Sentence Structure (which we have already started doing a little bit)
• Three personal learning goals for this semester
  • 1. Increase my skills and knowledge on how to cite a research paper
  • 2. Improve the structure of my papers so the progression of the essay coincides with the progression of my thought process of that topic.
  • 3. Improve my drafting process for writing essays. I need to find a better way to organize, edit and draft before completing my final draft.