Guest Blogger: Courtney, 20, Intern.

Like my intern friend Celia, whom I have yet to meet, but share a desk complete with a lovely electronic aquarium, I am a social networker. I too began with LiveJournal and AIM, but promptly discarded those during high school as they were clearly not hip enough for the pending college crowd. I am proud to say that I have not signed on AIM (SN: redheadskier101) since my senior year of high school. Of course, there is that pesky little Facebook chat icon on the bottom of my screen that tempts me so to open it…

My social media use has changed drastically since those dreaded years of “lol” and declarations of adoration of your 8^th grade boyfriend in AIM profiles. I have changed my cute “redheadskier101″ alias to the classy and stylish “courtneylh,” leaving behind the MySpace, LiveJournal and AIM. I am in an updated world today of Facebook, Twitter, Last.Fm, and general blog stalking — just to name a few of the things I do. I use social media to keep up with beloved sports teams, headlines, music news and the oh-so-tasteful Facebook updates that tell me instantly when Friend A and Friend B broke up.

Working in the music industry for the past couple years has taught me a lot on the use of social media and its importance in something other than harmless stalking. In the music business we have LiveNation and Ticketmaster, the industry’s equivalent of Bank of America or Citibank. They are the big guns. They book the biggest shows for the biggest venues and charge the biggest prices. Working for a small booking organization on a college campus where we try to provide affordable entertainment, we were competing with a smaller budget and often smaller bands, while trying to draw the same crowd. We had great success this year, more so than in the recent past, and we accredit a lot of that success to social media use. We had a website, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a MySpace page for bands and friends to track us. We took out ads in newspapers and sent out direct email blasts as well, but you’d be surprised how many people on campus overlook or delete. People are more inclined now to check their Facebook pages than emails.

I’m excited to begin to integrate my marketing experience with music into a more corporate world. Many who work in the music industry are social media savants, and if they don’t have a Twitter, it’s solely because they perceived it quite un-hip (believe me, I held out for a long time). It is interesting to see a business such as a bank, which one would never expect to see on Facebook, to be interacting/engaging with customers on business pages. It turns out that no matter in what industry one works, that social media can make sense for your cause, as the goal is always the same – success (and to find out when Friend A and Friend B get back together, of course).