FriendBurst Blog

Social Media Day: How Social Media Changed My Life

June 25, 2011 · CreativePoetryCorral

The following is an article I wrote for Social Media Day ~ http://ireport.cnn.com/topics/624477

Interesting how you ended your call for articles with “Be Creative and Have Fun”, because that is our Motto on the “Creative Poetry Corral”. I am the founder of this fun and creative writing site. Back in 2007 I stumbled across a poetry site blog on MySpace and wrote my very first poem. I had joined MySpace because two of my son’s who are in the military told me I should, so I could connect with them when they were deployed. I had become an empty nester LOL 

For the first six months or so I had all but 7 friends, one of which was Tom. Then I discovered the blogs……. Long story short I fell into running my own poetry challenges and the Creative Poetry Corral wound up being one of the most popular poetry social sites on MySpace and typically ranked it the top 10 all blogs feature there. Our daily poetry challenge blogs had wonderful participation averaging 400-600 comments daily. The activity became too much for me alone to handle and over time I recruited 14 hosts to help me develop and manage the poetry challenges! I call these hosts the CPC Crew.

When MySpace moved to their 3.0 the blog capability was severally downgraded and many of the writers left in droves. So the CPC Crew and I began searching for a new home. We found friendburst.com and have been there since 1 May 2011. It feels like home because it offers the same blog capability the we grew accustomed to on MySpace. Our attendance there is better than the last days on MySpace and we so look forward to growing our writer base on friendburst.

Social media has changed my life by allowing me to work and write with a bunch of very creative people, from the novice to the well accomplished writer. Being retired military myself, I also get to fulfill my desire to manage and work with an excellent crew of volunteers. Most of the Crew and poets have been with me for nearly four years now! 

 

 I know this is a lot to take in but here is our “About Me”

The “Creative Poetry Corral” began on MySpace in May of 2007. It started off as a poetry collaboration site and was named “Cheryl’s Pals Creative Collab Corral”. How it happened: Lady Cheryl, our founder, created this UNIQUE poetry collaboration process initially for her friends and it just took off like crazy!!! This Collab development concept is a three blog a week offering that takes poets through a process designed for maximum social poetic interaction!!! The resulting poetry is called “Cheryl’s Pals Collabs”.

Eventually and gradually, Lady Cheryl added more venues to the Corral beginning with “A Simple Sunday Challenge”, a poetic challenge that featured a MySpace artists and their art for poetic inspiration!!! Then came “Wonderful Wednesday with Cheryl’s Pals”, a venue designed to give CPC friends an opportunity to create and host a poetic challenge of their own; “Cheryl’s Pals Meet & Greet”, offered the first Wed of the month ~ a venue originally created to introduce new “Cheryl’s Pals Collab Writers” to the other members of the poetry site *smiling*; “Pick-Apart-Poetry” , a poetic challenge game that featured a MySpace poets poetry selection for other poets to pick-apart 25 words and arrange into a new poetic expression of their own.

As time moved on, all of these venues began to be too much for Cheryl to manage alone and a few of her poetic friends stepped up to the plate to take over planning and creating the additional venues for her. We dub these awesome friends the “CPC Crew”. After that three new venues came along: “Magic Monday”, created to explore the magic in our lives; “Thematic Attic Thursday”, designed to spark the muse’s imagination on things past, present, future; and finally the”Fabulously Fun Friggin Friday Fling” a fun and entertaining venue that touches on a relevant event or current interest and examines being creative with form poetry ~ yep some of them forms are made up by the crew and our friends *smiling*

So now we have all come over to friendburst to continue offering what we believe is both a creative and social place for people to have a great experience at. None of the venues have changed, most of the crew remains intact, and we are happy to have found a new home that offers the capability to have the social interaction on the blogs that we enjoyed the first three years we were on MySpace. THANK YOU FRIENDBURST!!!

Lady Cheryl and the CPC Crew

WE OFFER:

DAILY CHALLENGES PRESENTED BY A TALENTED CREW OF HOSTS

OPPORTUNITIES FOR GUEST HOSTS AND POET FEATURES WHERE OUR HOSTS WORK WITH VOLUNTEER POETS TO PRESENT THE VOLUNTEER POETS POETIC CHALLENGE IDEA

A FUN AND WELCOMING SOCIAL EXPERIENCE!!!

Note: We do not encourage sexually explicit (raw) or strongly provocative disgusting or vulgar poetic expression and reserve the right to remove (without notice) any postings to our challenges that are not within the realm of decency.

Other

10 Comments

Commenting on blog posts is coming back soon. You can read the comments here; to talk with a member now, leave a comment on their profile or send them a message.