Preston, age 5, writing his first book

I’ve grown up alongside the internet. Living on the Jersey Shore, my family owned and operated a small town surf shop. In 7th grade every morning before school, my house chore would be to get the surf report from the shop, then update the surf shop’s website with how the waves were. The web designer that built the website showed me what parts of the HTML to change (as this was in the mid 90’s and most of it was done by hand) and how to use the FTP to upload it. This chore quickly became an interest of mine, and by 8th grade, a few friends and I had built the homepage for our elementary school. My parents would always say, “You sure can do a lot with that box.”
I would just smile and say, “It’s not a box, it’s a machine.”

In high school and college is where I really developed a love for writing. Reading all the classics and writing lengthy essays on them helped me hone my skill of developing thoughts through writing. All my teachers said I had a lot of “voice” in my writing, and I put it to good use in my creative writing classes. In my freshman year of college, the Myspace craze had started and I decided to hop on board. I’d written regularly on LiveJournal all throughout high school, but I soon realized Myspace was a different animal. As my college years continued, Facebook and YouTube became popular, then Digg, Twitter, Blogger, and the list went on. Some of my classes even required me to create blogs. I jumped at all my chances to play with these shiny new toys of the web, and infuse them with my writing. I never thought using what would come to be known as “social media” combined with a strong background in writing would be a marketable skill, but that all changed when I interned for FURminator Inc.

The summer before my senior year, I arranged an internship with FURminator Inc. The technical title of the internship that one of my professors and I came up with was “blogging and editing,” because I was going there to help introduce some fresh ideas to their online marketing campaign and to do some writing/editing for press releases. I introduced the idea of the Online Initiative: a project to take advantage of underutilized web resources such as social media and blogs for marketing and branding. I prepared and presented a mission statement and marketing plan for the Online Initiative program, and soon launched and provided regular content for company pages on Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube. When the internship was over, the company continued with the projects I started, and I continued to develop my knowledge on social media, now with a new perspective of how my knowledge could be put into application. My senior year of college I built up my personal portfolio and experience with the web 2.0, and hope to continue expanding my experiences in writing and social media.