In doing this series highlighting some of my social media heroes, its hard to decide what helps someone reach true hero status. But its clear to me, that one of my colleagues, Kathleen Manning aka @Kath_Manning has to be on the list.

Its really pretty funny to think about that first day so long ago. It was three years ago this week actually — February 2, 2009. I was working from home and on a conference call with the other members of our team (most of whom were in a room in St. Louis). Kathleen hadn’t been with the company long but had hit the ground running with social media. The company’s blog got started thanks to the work she did with a small team of folks and we were on Twitter. As she told our team about what she was doing, she said she was interested to know what our area of public affairs could accomplish in the medium and Nick & I volunteered. In fact, I signed up while we were still on the call. LOL!

Signing up came easy. I even found it fairly easy to decide on my handle I wanted to talk to farmers & farm media so cotton was really my greatest connection, and I’ve been called jp off and on for a long time. I found a photo fairly quickly and sent one or two tweets.

For some reason, that motivation wasn’t quite enough. And I think that’s part of why so many people set up a Twitter account and over time forget about it. But that wasn’t happening to me. 

When I didn’t get something, I was able to just send an instant message or an email to Kathleen. She talked and walked me through so many of the basics (several probably took her multiple times to get me to absorb it). And when she told me that I should download tweetdeck rather than using the website, things just spiraled! I was using hashtagging, finding new tweeps I had to follow NOW and more!

Helping me define and find my Twitter mojo is certainly a reason to recognize someone as a social media hero! Who’s been one of your social media heroes in this same way?

Other Social Media Heroes:

• Danyelle Little @TheCubicleChick is One of My Social Media Heroes! — It has been a little while since I did a post in my social media hero series, but this weekend I was clearly reminded of one I needed to write up. That’s because Danyelle Little and her Show Me the Blog conference has rocked my world again. Yeah, I know I wrote about the conference […] Continue Reading
• Ryan Goodman, Ranchhand & Social Media Hero – Over the past few months, I’ve done several posts about some of my social media heroes. I have a lot more to go. But recently I sat down to write a post for the AgChat Foundation’s website and realized I was writing a lot of the things I should put together explaining why Ryan Goodman, […] Continue Reading
• A Social Media Hero With a HUGE Heart & Great Hugs @JeffPulver of #140Conf – I’ve written about Jeff Pulver before — he’s an integral part of my post about the faces of #140Conf Small Town and Monday’s #140confDM.  And while I talk a bit about Jeff in those posts… you don’t really get the feel for the guy cause all of that was within context of the conference and lots […] Continue Reading
• Creating the #BlogChat Community Leads to Hero Status for @MackCollier, Darlin’ – Writing that headline was fun. Blogging and social media have to be fun for me, cause this blog is a personal passion. I have no interest in “monetizing” my blog (I hope all the scammy folks who send weird messages will read that). I have a great job where I get to do communications.This blog […] Continue Reading
• The Farmer Who Broke My Twitter Sound Barrier @FarmerHaley – I’ve talked about how I came to be on Twitter before but what happened after I got on…. not sure I could have anticipated that. Within a few months of being on Twitter, the tweeting agricultural community was clearly as a great source of information for me. I can still remember when I broke the […] Continue Reading
• Social Media Hero, Farmer & Blogging Coach Judi Graff aka @farmnwifeA lot of the people who are involved in agriculture and who write blogs will probably recognize the social media hero I want to highlight this week. It’s Judi Graff aka @FARMnWIFE. There are a lot of reasons she is a social media hero to various people, but I get to make the list so […] Continue Reading
• Who Are My Social Media Heroes? Hero #1 is @ArveyColumbus – Recently, my friend Cheri Albritton (Twitter’s @ArveyColumbus) wrote a blog post asking if you are a social media hero in the making. She was nice enough to point to me in her post. That was awesome to see pop up in my email! I decided to do at least a short series of posts highlighting […] Continue Reading