**Disclaimer – this blog post is tardy due to sickness.**

• How do notable individuals use social media?
  • I think that notable induvial use social media to increase their engagement for the sake of promoting their work or their brand (either a business or themselves). Social media use for notable individuals is an imperative tool of the times and is simply apart of the recipe for success in our 21st century. If people want their work to be seen, they must utilize social media through connecting with their intended audience by creating content that is applicable, fresh, captivating, and appropriate, while remaining in their lane.
• What are the benefits of being in the public eye and having a PLN?
  • The benefits of being in the public eye and having a PLN is that you can capitalize on a richer, more diverse selection of connections to learn from. In comparison, someone who is more of a social media hermit, or “ghost user”, has far fewer opportunities to connect with successful individuals because they have not built enough accreditation in their own online image to expect someone of great accomplishment to afford them a relationship.
• Building a community with online tools provided by the employer can be limiting, what are the perceived restrictions and benefits?
  • Some of the restrictions in building a community with online tools provided by an employer are that the tools may not be applicable to your specific technical skillset, and so you are at a disadvantage of needing to increase your proficiency in said tool before you can begin to really reap the benefits of its use. Moreso, there is often less privacy included with being ‘provided’ tools that utilize accounts that are owned by the company. Whereas the benefits could be that all employees are using the same platforms, and so less time is wasted trying to connect with people within your field because everyone you could possibly connect with within your company are all housed in the same online space.
• Delivering information in a connected society requires verifiable resources, how do build a PLN to rely on?
  • Building a reliable PLN is challenging, such that the saying goes “don’t believe everything you read on the internet”. I think that reliability starts at the faucet that produces the information that flows toward you. Thus, we, as online users, should take on the accountability of verifying our received content through filtering who we follow and connect with.
• How do those, who are veteran storytellers, minimize the risk of sharing misinformation?
  • Veteran storytellers minimize the risk of sharing misinformation through investigating and vetting their sources before producing their own content. They uphold a standard of practice that includes fact checking with valid and reliable research.

• Identify the risks and benefits of engaging with a public audience in a media space – What are the risks for a public figure or person in a position of trust (educator, lawyer, and government official)?
  • I think that the risks of engaging with a public audience in a media space as a public figure or person in a position of trust, such as lawyers and government officials, are that anything you produce may be misconstrued and redistributed in a damaging light which could easily harm your career and your image; and that content is often a product of its time, and so although something said is politically correct in our day and age, it does not guarantee that it will stand the test of time, which can again be extremely damaging to one’s career and image. Whereas some benefits may be that those individuals are reaching a vastly fuller audience and are able to connect with people whom they may never of had the opportunity, for example, people living across the globe; as well as engaging with a public audience in a media space affords them the opportunity to push forward their mission statements by arguing for their beliefs in an open, transparent and accessible fashion.

• Include in your blog, how to best address negative replies and reviews which reflect your personal values?
  • I think that the best way to address negative replies and reviews is to firstly, acknowledge them to allow people to be heard and to maintain a sense of openness and transparency; secondly, to thank them for stating their opinion as it encourages free discourse; then thirdly, to state your counter opinion with justification, while most importantly, refraining for using charged language or derogatory profanities.