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Passion Stirs Innovation

By Kimberly Dinh—On March 25th, I had the opportunity to attend Cameron School of Business’ Celt Coffee Hour with guest Speaker Michael Osborne, a Senior Solutions Architect at SalesForce. In addition to his daytime office job, Osborne became an Instagram sensation after adopting the hobby of woodworking which he has successfully grown and promoted using effective business strategies.

After his introduction, Osborne started off the discussion with a question about our hobbies and if our future career would involve working with what we are passionate about. This definitely struck my interest as I would imagine “every soon to be” graduate would hope that their career would be related to what they are passionate about; however, in reality, that may not always be the case.

Osborne continued to share, based off of his life experience, that while careers and passions may not always end up being related for some, everyone still has the ability to pursue their passions and to build a personal brand in addition to leading a successful career. This is something that Osborne strongly encourages because while a strong career path of achievements brings high satisfaction, there are countless other ways your talents can be used to inspire others and bring a quality of fulfillment to your own life.

SALESFORCE

Osborne shared great insight into his professional experience as an employee at Salesforce where he is constantly working to develop new technologies that aim to improve businesses’ performance. He used the knowledge he learned from his career to leverage the development of his passion as MikeytheMaker on Instagram which lead him to become a sensation in a short time frame. This made him credible when sharing his insight and advice as an individual startup as well.

 SOCIAL MEDIA BACKGROUND

Working in technology Osborne recognizes how social media platforms such as Instagram are free, user-friendly, transformative, and provide a large and broad range of audiences which make it ideal for anyone to utilize, as he did to build his personal brand. Some of  key factors he shared about building an audience are perseverance, consistency, and time. Just like professional success, social media success does not happen overnight, as Osborne shared. He was posting twice a day, every day for six months in order to build a following and interested business partners.

Osborne also recognizes the time and effort that goes into maintaining a presence with the audience that he built. He explained how a fifteen-second video could take hours of work because quality content matters. Engagement with the audience will build your reputation and increase retention of followings. In order to build a successful presence on social media, one must have a positive and persistent mentality to understand that not every post will deliver the same results, and the ones that perform less have something valuable to not so you can improve future posts. Ultimately, Osborne emphasized the importance of figuring out what works for you and your audience. If you are providing quality content that captures the attention of your community, the sky is your limit.

CONCLUSION

During the session, Osborne delivered an innovative and refreshing learning opportunity to us students and gave valuable insight that inspired us to not only be proactive in our careers but also open to exploring our passions. To attend Celt Coffee Hour at the Cameron School of Business and learn from industry experts please visit the following website at https://stthom.libsurveys.com/CSBNetworking.

Kim Dinh
UST -Cameron School of Business – BBA Candidate

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