Introducing… Nicola Timmins!

Hi folks! I’m Nicola Timmins, Social Media and Research Manager here at Grafton Media. Obviously I’ve been blogging here for a while now but I thought sure, it’s about time I told you a bit about who I am.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…

Just kidding, it was this galaxy.

My digital story starts way back in Singapore in 1995 when I set up my first website over on GeoCities. I wanted to make my own little place on the web where I could tell people about the gigs I’d gone to, the bands I listened to, the TV shows I watched and some of the other websites out there that I found interesting. Geocities was really the first place I’d seen that allowed randomers like to me to set up a site for free and edit it themselves. I taught myself to write the pages in html, in notepad, by looking at the source code of other sites and editing it for my purposes…

…Then in 1998 I moved to Dublin to go to college and my internet access was severely curtailed. In UCD at the time you could only get internet access by joining Netsoc and you didn’t really have the freedom, in the limited number of computer labs, to do what you wanted to do. My, my, how things had changed. So, I had to abandon my little space on the web. Even though I did nothing with it for years, I have to admit I was a little devastated when, more than 10 years later, Yahoo! closed down GeoCities and that small window into the life of 16 year old me disappeared.

Anyway, college happened. I left UCD with a degree in Economics and Politics and started my working life. Or career as they call it. Ryanair beckoned and for 2 and a half years I was that person who changed the prices of the flights every time you went and looked them up. After that I moved into Media Research in TV3, then I joined a start up TV channel, Channel 6, as Sales Operations and Research Manager. Eventually Channel 6 was bought by TV3 and became 3e but by then I had moved into Sales, then Sales Operations and Research, in Carlton Screen Advertising.

It was when I was in Carlton that Facebook started to take off in Ireland. I joined in early 2007 and immediately I was able to connect with the people I’d been in school with back in Singapore. Suddenly I could say “Hello!” and “How’s it going?” to people I hadn’t seen in almost ten years. It was fantastic. I honestly believe that if it hadn’t been for Facebook my ten year high school reunion wouldn’t have happened, it definitely wouldn’t have been as well attended as it was.

While Facebook was like having my place on the internet back, I wanted to be able to say more. That’s when I set up averagefilmreviews.com. I’m a big film fan and Average Film Reviews is a place I can direct people to to find my opinons on films. From there peopel can share them, and their own opinions on them, with the rest of the world. Through the comments on the site and through Facebook and Twitter I can chat to people every where about the things I’m interested in – something that just wasn’t possible back in 1995.

Writing a blog and using social media has broadened what I do. Through the activity on my blog and Facebook page I was approached to regularly contribute to Cinerama on Phantom 105.2 and have also contributed to The Last Word with Matt Cooper. I became a member of the Dublin Film Critics Circle (DFCC) last year and spent an amazing week going to as many films as I could as a judge for the DFCC at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. And people recognise the work you put in, I’ve been a finalist twice at the Irish Blog Awards, once at the Irish Web Awards and I also made it to the finals for Best Overall Blog for the Total Film Movie Blog Awards.

With new sites and services like Pinterest, Instagram, Viddy and SocialCam we’re all now in a position where it’s possible to express ourselves online in whatever way best suits us and, for me, it’s been immeasurably rewarding.

I might as well say it in caps… I LOVE SOCIAL MEDIA.

Now that I’m here at Grafton Media, I get to spend my days working on something I love. Who can ask for more than that in a job?