Hello to all and welcome to my very first blog!  My name is Gabrielle Mosher and I am a senior at the University of Southern Mississippi this year.   I am a double major in the areas of Marketing and Fashion Merchandising.  I am 21 years old and am from the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  I am crazy cat lady, a fashion fanatic, and a proud member of Phi Mu sorority.  Even though it took me three different changes to finally decide what major I would choose, I couldn’t be happier with my final decision.  By having both of these degrees, I have a broader list of occupations to choose from within the marketing field in case my fashion dreams for some reason do not work out.  

While enrolled in this Integrating Merchandising Channels class, I hope to learn a better understanding of the proper methods of social media that should be used in order to successfully advertise for a business or organization.  Since social media is such a large part of our society today, it really has the opportunity to make or break an organization.

As far as my personal and professional goals go, I am still deciding on exactly what I would like to accomplish in the future.  As of right now, I am focusing on trying to open my own boutique eventually.  Because this can be a very difficult task to achieve, I am doing my best to educate myself on all of the helpful tips that I have been learning from all of my fashion teachers.  I hope that all of these classes combined will turn me into an experienced and prepared boutique owner.  Of all of my characteristics, I do have a few strengths and a few weaknesses.  Some of my most important strengths that I have are compassion, creativity, and dedication.  I am compassionate about my goals and am willing to do anything in order to achieve them, I love coming up with creative ideas and scenarios, and I am very dedicated to things that I am eager to accomplish.  Some weaknesses of mine include stress, being able to hold focus, and intimidation.  If I am involved in a lot of things going on at once within any task, it is very easy for me to become stressed.   If something does not seem interesting to me, it is very hard for me to hold focus on the task while trying to complete it.  Intimidation comes into play whenever I have to compete against somebody else in order to gain a title or job.  It is hard because I know that there are many other people competing for the same position, and that makes me very nervous. 

I absolutely love social media.  Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are all of my favorites.  They are fun because you can instantly share statuses and pictures with all of your friends, keeping up with their posts at the same time.  It makes it a convenient way to document your life via internet.  Social media has made it very easy for our society to share things with one another, and I love being able to keep up with everyone and everything on all of my social accounts.  Throughout this class and blogging experience, I would like to gain knowledge on the proper ways to use social media for my advantage.  If I could achieve this, then I would be able to become a great advertiser to the public in my future of being a boutique owner.  With small businesses like that, it is crucial to advertise and get your name out there for others to become familiar with.  By learning to ways of proper social media usage, this could easily be possible in my future career.