Building Community through Engagement

I was born and raised on the campus of a boarding school in Connecticut. I also attended that school from grades 6-12. It’s probably not a huge surprise to find out that I now work at a boarding school in Connecticut (though not the same one.) This experience gives me a special understanding of the […]

Creating Brand Community

This week I’m focusing on brands that go beyond having a social media presence to those who truly create a community online. The two brands that I’ll focus on in this article are GoPro and Grove Collaborative. Both brands are utilizing social media to build a community around their products. GoPro GoPro, which makes the […]

Selling a dream: A social media audit of Den Outdoors

Den is a fairly new small home architecture company that sells plans, kits, and pre-fab houses. Their aesthetic is a beautiful mix between simple farmhouse or Scandinavian design and modern architecture. The company features a manifesto which states “Den began because we know that building a cabin changes who you are, having a cabin changes […]

Gatekeeping doesn’t need to be a dirty word

I left Facebook in January of 2016. I had burned out on the constant drama surrounding the election and decided that I was tired of hearing even the opinions that I agreed with. It took some time to stop automatically typing facebook.com into the search bar when I opened my browser, but eventually I retrained […]

Reclaiming My Time

In August of 2016 I came to a crossroads in my social media use. We were in the last few months of what is likely the most contentious presidential election in American history, families were dividing along party lines, it seemed like everyone in the entire world was mad and wanted to tell everyone else […]

Digital Puritanism Keeps Us Locked in Limbo

You are not Facebook’s customer. You’re its currency. Facebook, and every other social media platform which makes its money off of advertising dollars, is engineered to trick you into spending the most time possible on its services. Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than […]