I’m the brand new social media department lead doing what all the other brand new department leads are trying to do over summer: learn the ropes and not mess up too badly. In my case, that means I’m working hard to keep our blog on schedule and running smoothly, to be active on our social media accounts, and to be available to my fellow students to help and answer any questions that come my way. The twist? I’m doing all of this remotely from 650 miles away in California.

I’ve managed thanks to the help from my great partner over in editing, Nicholas Shea, and the instructions passed down to me from my wonderful predecessor Alan Holley.

Here’s pretty much what I do:

• Log in to Trello daily and keep an eye on who still needs to turn in their blog posts and which completed posts have been edited and are ready for scheduling.
• Send emails. Lots and lots of emails. At the beginning of the term, I sent out an email with detailed instructions about blogging and explained the due dates and procedures. I then emailed out reminders to those who hadn’t turned in their blog posts. I have a fine line to balance between “annoying enough to make them do their work” and “not so annoying that they start thinking about withholding their blog posts to piss me off.”
• Once blog posts have been turned in and edited, I need to schedule them. I make sure that their photos are optimized and that their tags are doing what they’re supposed to do—if the post doesn’t look right on your computer screen, it’s because I didn’t do my job. I often need to rewrite the hook so that it fits within Twitter’s character limit, meaning that I need to mince words while maintaining the integrity of the author’s original hook.
• I monitor Ooligan’s social media calendar and make sure any upcoming posts have been edited. Sometimes, what with me being new and the tendency for a couple of blog posts to be swapped around, it will happen that a blog post will be overlooked and skipped over. It ducked and hid when it was its turn to be edited. When this happens, I shoot Nick an email (See? Another email.) letting him know what’s happened in time for the post to be edited and scheduled before it’s due.

In the future, there will be more that I have to grapple with and learn (Bulk uploads? Ooligan’s Instagram?), but I’m confident that I’ll be able to handle it, in no small part because of the great people who I’ll be working with. One of the most exciting aspects of the social media department lead position is the opportunity to get my hands dirty alongside Jordana, who is our marketing department lead, working with the newly unveiled Social Media Strategy Document—a collaboration of marketing and social media devised by last year’s department leads. I can’t wait to jump into this next year and give Ooligan Press everything I’ve got.