Use your ePortfolio to feed 'Free' Social Media

When reading a blog post by Peter Kim, 'Is Social Media free?' I was struck by the comment he made that a former CFO said to him, "this is an online store...why do we need to spend any more money...doesn't it run itself?" Kim then jumped to the present day and quoted a headline - 'Procter & Gamble will eliminate 1,600 jobs and shift more budget into digital media' and the more extreme headline  'P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It's Free To Advertise On Facebook.'

Social media is not free. It never was, and certainly won't be in the future. It gobbles up time, effort and resources. Just reading favourite blogs can become a chore. Looking at public updates of ePortfolio users on FolioSpaces I have noticed a trend to better organised portfolios, and particularly 'snippet repositories'. I use a journal page in FolioSpaces myself, to dump useful URLs from interesting articles I find as I discover blog and journal articles, video or other media.

One of my favourite ePortfolio blog posts was by Donald Clark on E-portfolios – '7 reasons why I don’t want my life in a shoebox'. Now I guess I am a shoebox person. I love pulling out a box occasionally to trawl trough the treasures it contains. The critical element though is you need to be able to keep it under your bed to retrieve whenever you want to. An ePortfolio provides a more orderly approach though, shoe you can have as many shoe boxes as you like, and you can even label them.

So back to 'Is Social Media Free?'. One of the best ways to manage social media (whether for yourself, or your employer) is to have a repository to store snippets that can be called up at any time to be used for any purpose. We originally started FolioSpaces to allow students to take their ePortfolio with them when they graduate. I am still convinced that an ePortfolio that can't follow an individual from school, college, or the workplace is useless. It is a glorified school project. You need to be able to drag out your shoebox, whenever and wherever you want to. It could be for your thesis, employment review, or your latest Facebook entry. An ePortfolio can be the perfect repository for any purpose.