Spotlight: Social Media Maven Amy Vernon

MagMaker / September 22, 2014

My name is Amy Vernon and my medium is words.

My love of sharing information is driven by my life-long relationship with words and grammar. I view my job in life as helping people understand—whether it’s understanding a concept, understanding a story, understanding another person, understanding technology. It’s taken me a long time, ironically, to be able to express that properly, but my connection with words and their meaning began as long ago as I can remember.

I spent 20 years as a daily newspaper journalist, helping our readers understand the world around them. Now, I try to do the same with my friends and community on social media. I’ve spent the last five-plus years working with companies large and small to properly communicate with their communities, online and off. I’m looking for my next big challenge right now, while working in a variety of areas, with a startup, with a museum, and with myself on a personal passion project. You can learn more about me at amyvernon.net.

I use Flipboard to curate information on a variety of topics close to my heart: I have a variety of magazines dedicated to feminism: two of my first mags were on women leaders and women in tech, and I contribute to a magazine created by Flipboard Club’s fearless leader, Aida Boucheron, that sprang from the #YesAllWomen hashtag.

I also use Flipboard to curate a magazine dedicated to my beautiful Siberian Husky girl, and it’s a great way to give friends and family an easy way to look through all her photos. I’m pretty sure Lumi is more popular than I am, so she needs a dedicated resource. I also love using Flipboard for its very original purpose: to help view my social feeds in a visual way. I catch so much more that’s going on with friends by viewing my Facebook and Twitter feeds through the app.

Flipboard’s also great for content discovery. I can subscribe to magazines by others who spend the time to curate the best content on a given subject. I’ve leaned on several existing Flipboard magazines for things to flip into my #WomenLead magazine. User Nazneen Rahman’s “Inspiring Women” magazine is fabulous, and it led me to her other magazines, which are really terrific. I subscribe to several science magazines so I can get my geek on, including Rahman’s “Modern Medicine” and Slate’s “The Bad Astronomer.”

My biggest influences are Albert Einstein, e.e. cummings, and Sally Ride. Einstein because of his resilience—just because you don’t start off the best at something doesn’t mean you can’t become the best. Cummings because he showed me how to build whole structures with words. Ride because she showed me how to trailblaze with grace and charm. I don’t know that I’d ever live up to even one of the three, but I could do worse than to try.

See how women like Amy are changing the face of tech: