The catalyst for the creation of this blog is my enrollment in a Social Media Marketing class at St. Edward’s University. As part of the creation of this blog, each of Professor Ramirez’s students have been asked to do an analysis of the current footprint that we each have on the internet. The primary measure of this is typing your name into Google (as we have all done at one time or another) and another search engine and seeing what comes up. So here it goes…

Looking at the first page of results, it becomes clear that I am far from the most important and/or famous Michael Greis in the world. Which I’m not at all bitter about, as the life of a Business Intelligence Developer at GM is much more exciting than the life of an Olympian…Luckily, I am not completely overshadowed by this Olympian due to my Linkedin page.

The second search engine I used was Bing, which I had more of a footprint on. As a side note, this probably means that Google has a better search algorithm than Bing, as most people who search Michael Greis are probably looking for the famous one. On the Bing results page, I came up first through Facebook. If I clicked on the LinkedIn link present on the first page I was the first Michael Greis to pop-up in the Linkedin results. This seems to be good news, as Facebook and Linkedin are the primary places where I currently maintain an online presence.

These results don’t give any indication as to who I am, which I suppose would be a positive if I didn’t want to establish an online presence. If I were to interpret my current online footprint, I would label it as “every other college graduate”. I have a Facebook profile because I have always had one, and the stats back up the statement that the vast majority if people my age and with a college education have a Facebook. I have a Linkedin because at one point or another I was told that I wouldn’t get a job without a Linkedin profile, as apparently almost half  of college graduates were also told.

This then raises the question, what are my goals with this blog? After all, what’s a blog posting rate of less than 10 million a day indicate other than a dying medium? Well, my first goal is to create something that is hopefully enjoyable to read, and a place where I can post things that I find interesting for future reference and sharing with others. The next goal is to increase traffic to this blog and hopefully create the opportunity to converse with others who have similar interests to mine. My final goal is to establish an online presence where I can present myself somewhere between the stuffiness of Linkedin and the no-holds-barred cage match that is the user community of Facebook.

By the end of April I hope to have:

• 3 followers
• 100 visits
• 30 unique visitors
• 20 blog posts

Let the games begin!