Making a Name for Yourself: The Reason Behind the Title

                In the world of social media, it is beyond easy to get lost in the shuffle. How do we differentiate from the crowd when the crowd is so gigantic? For every social marketer, there are millions of other social marketers. For every prospect client, there are millions of competitors battling for the same ones – and the list goes on. My point is, when it comes down to the bottom line, we are all a bunch of handles in a whirlwind of content and profile pages struggling to make our names unique. Hoping that it is well known, simple to remember, and not easily overlooked. It’s really important to not only make a name for yourself, but to make a memorable one at that. Some of you may wonder why my blog title is “Social Media Mini,” so I decided to write a fun post to explain my name.

My real name, as you know, is Elizabeth Pasquito.  I love it, but for social media it is not a great fit. It has too many syllables, and fifty percent of people who pronounce my last name do so incorrectly. But this is beside the point. Upon taking my internship, my new boss and I joked endlessly about the similarity of our names. We are both Elizabeth’s, both with the last initial “P.” Aside from that we are very similar people, with to-do lists for days and a constant need to be attentive to our tasks at hand, although there is usually ten different projects at a time. (We would work in our sleep if we could!)  Whenever someone called for Elizabeth, we would both respond. Almost immediately we realized that I needed a nickname so things would be less confusing at the office.

We toyed around with a couple things –Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Part 2, Little Elizabeth..but nothing stuck, and everything was too long. Finally, the president of my department began to call me Mini. After one department meeting, the name stuck! I began signing my emails with Mini, and responding any time someone called to me across the office.  I even created a newsletter which was distributed to my department called, “The Mini Scoop.”

It provides you with a sense of security when you have a nickname. It sets you apart from the crowd, and makes you feel a little bit more special than when someone calls out your actual name. I really felt like part of the team. I'm not saying it is crucial for you to come up with an alias, but it certainly gives you a sense of confidence when writing. After all, how many Elizabeth's are there in the world? But how many of them call themselves Mini, or Social Media Mini as it is now? Probably just me, and that's exactly how I like it to be. It may not be crucial to have a nickname, but it is crucial to stand out in a crowd, and that is one way to do it.

So, in case you were wondering where the title came from, that’s basically it! I am a mini version of my boss – name, work ethic, and all. So here I am: Mini. I like to think that if I find success with my blog, and social marketing insight, that one day I will be known in the marketing world as Social Media Mini. What better way to remember that swell feeling than writing a blog about how it all began?