Last month Mike Volpe of Hubspot wrote a post condemning social media. Though I was offended at first, I now see his point of view. I decided to explore one of his ideas—“hiring an intern to do social media won’t transform your company.” Thinking about this one sentence made me realize that he’s right. A social media intern doesn’t really help your company. In fact, it can actually hurt you. Here’s why:

My advertising class last year had a public relations professional come speak about her industry. Her number one mantra? Write hand written notes after you contact someone. I'm not going to lie, I was very cynical when I first heard this. Probably as cynical as you are right now. I thought to myself, how can writing a handwritten note make any difference? The truth is, it can.

{Ed. Note -The Greenhorn Connect team is growing! We're pleased to announce that Pardees Safizadeh is our new Director of Social Media.  She'll be helping us improve and grow our communication and outreach so we can more effectively interact with and help the Boston entrepreneur community. So please give a warm welcome to @Pardees.  

We are always interested in how we can help young people get integrated in the community, so we asked Pardees to share her story of getting into the community, getting excited and finding Greenhorn Connect!}

Rewind life back two months—it’s June, and I have no interest in joining the start up community. To be fair, I had no idea a start up community existed in Boston. I had no idea there were so many start up companies in Boston, and frankly, I didn’t care. I was interning in Boston and enjoying my life like a normal person. I wasn’t a business major in college and I didn’t intend on starting anything now.

So right now you’re probably thinking why am I (the reader) reading this? Why do I (the reader) care about this random girl and her lack of involvement in the start up community? Why? Because I did get involved.

Last semester, I set out to write my senior thesis for American Studies.  I’d been inspired by a song from the Broadway musical Avenue Q, in which snarky puppets sang about the joys of schadenfreude, or “German for happiness at the misfortune of others.”  Avenue Q’s fuzzy characters honed in on everyday examples of schadenfreude, like “football players getting tackled...CEO’s getting shackled.”  When I heard this song, I came to realize that schadenfreude wasn’t just found in such mundane experiences as seeing someone miss the train, but that it was actually a far more widespread cultural phenomenon and a key component within the realm of social media.