Ever wonder who the face is behind the college’s social media posts? As of this semester, it’s Eugene Ahn, Cabrini’s new social media coordinator.
He has been involved in social media before, but in a completely different way than he is now–one that didn’t revolve around tweeting about the college’s next big events or posting about Cabrini happenings.
Social media was always a necessity to Ahn as a venue to promote his music career. That’s right, for the past five years Ahn has been in the music space as a nerdcore hip-hop artist. Among Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Ahn has managed to collect an impressive following of close to 24,000 people. In order to promote tours and albums, as well as get the word out about his music, Ahn would turn to social media. “I don’t have any traditional experience in it, I never took a class or worked for a company, so a lot of my background is really non-traditional.”
Now it’s become a job and there’s no denying that his experience in music played a big role in learning the ins and outs. Ahn manages all of the main social media accounts of the college, while many departments on campus still run their own accounts. Something that Ahn really focuses on is creating a community of sharing and cross promotion across the entire campus.
One of his main goals is really just getting used to the traditional office environment again since much of the past five years has been centered around traveling or just working on music at home. “I was nervous about fitting into a community like an office culture but it’s been great and my only goal is to just do a good job and then we’ll see where that goes,” Ahn said. “I’m still new, coming back to working in a normal nine-to-five setting so I’ll set grander goals when I’ve been here longer. But I just want to do a good job.”
Joining an office once again was not the only major change that Ahn had to make. He also had to figure out how to switch from the voice of promoting his music to the voice of a college. Posting on his own social media channels, he is really free to say whatever but the perspective has now changed from a single voice to the voice of a community. “[I’m] figuring out how to put my personality and my personal spin on it but also still having it be the way that everybody sees Cabrini because it’s not just how I see it, it’s how the whole community sees it.”
As for his favorite social networking site? It’s a toss up between Twitter and Yik Yak. Ahn has met many people through Twitter, many of whom are friends of his to this day. “There’s just a community of people who were talking, you meet people, you start emailing and you start to travel around and meet them.”
Yik Yak, however, has become a real contender for top spot. “Yik Yak has slowly become my favorite just because I’m fascinated by what people post on there,” Ahn said. “I observe the ones around here and it’s very strange stuff but I don’t post things on there, I just look at it because it’s all anonymous but it’s fascinating to me in a morbidly curious way.”
Looking to the future, Ahn hopes to remain in high education. Having previously worked for other universities, such as Rutgers, doing student life and event work, he hopes to become involved in that too. “I really like higher education and social media is a very valuable part of it, Ahn said. “Even now being a part of the marketing and communications department, it’s not like I do social media nine straight hours a day. You just kind of end up doing any and everything involved in higher ed, so all that kind of stuff interests me and hopefully I’ll be able to do more of that stuff as time goes on.”