Article

Elkin Niño
Elkin Niño 26 May 2016

Social Media Save Lives

The story of a handicapped Community Manager

Almost 4 years ago I suffered a motorcycle accident which put me in a wheelchair for good (or bad, I suppose). After overcoming traumas and pain, I thought about publishing an ad: “I trade superbike for a new wheelchair”, no matter how hard it hurt to swap 2 wheels for 4. But after all, “riding” in 4 wheels is not that bad. What it is really bad, and sad at the same time, is that in this country, for many companies –if not all- handicapped people seem not to be able to perform any job, despite their CV’s, experience and knowledge prove them wrong. They make a person to go from being handicapped to feel useless. That happened to me.

Feeling useless and unable to come back to work in the sector I used to work, or any other sector, I felt my life was non sense. Knowing that being paralyzed from the waist down, didn’t take away any of my creativity, intelligence, hands and arms motion, nor the ability to perform the jobs I used to perform, and knowing that none of these was perceived by the companies, I was depressed. My best friend, the angel she is, persuaded me to work in her agency as a Community Manager, a job which I thought it was piece of cake and lame, according to what I knew from Social Media: hollow comments, egocentric pictures and selfies in front of a mirror from girls pretending to be ducks.

I started working with very low expectations. But I crashed against a freight train instead. I started talking about SEO y SEM from the get-go, about organic impressions, tweets, comments and likes. I started to understand how important it is to share and re-tweet, the importance of and audience and the responsibility of creating and publishing relevant content for them. I understood the need to analyze every social media profile and that Google is not just a search engine. Now, Engagement and conversions, words unknown to me before, became my main goal. I learnt about Growth Hacking and how important are social media for a company’s growth, and the world’s development.

The voices in my head turned into new ideas, expressed now through a keyboard and a mouse which in Corel Draw, Illustrator and Photoshop -my new allies- allow me to take over the world and build an image, recognition, for me and my company. My wheelchair is my office chair and despair is now a spreadsheet where I develop a social media strategy, a life strategy. My followers, my Friends. LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook y Twitter are now my platform to succeed. Estrategias Inc. my jet pack.

Humans are social beings and we need society to live and survive. Technology allows us to connect with others and social media feeds relationships which give everybody a reason to be. 

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