Click through above to information on Thursday evening’s get-together downtown. One of the biggest questions around social media for business is “how can I make money with this?” – and I’m hoping our time together will provide some of those answers.
On top of that, it’s a great way to meet folks from around town who are also working in these same marketing/business/social media/networking fields.
For the past few months I’ve been building a repository of social media articles and thoughts and quotes over on my tumblr blog, “Over Coffee”. I’ve learned lots of new ways to process and think about what I’m doing professionally and what I’m helping others with on a more personal level. But I’ve also been trying to watch for ways to do just a bit more than Tumblr, up to now, has been able to allow.
Enter the second level of “Over Coffee” – I’ve moved the posts from Tumblr to Blogger and I’m happy with the new space there. I was able to redirect my RickCaffeinated.com domain to the new site, so whatever branding and name I’m building can continue on. And we’re sitting on a weekend with some extra downtime so I can play with the site, add some pages from the old site, and get it looking hospitable and friendly for anyone happening by.
This blog will continue to be a journal of what’s going on, life stuff, coffee musings – all the usual. But for the first time since starting, my blogging feels right going in two different but still complementary directions. This site will be more personal with some of the ways my professional growth might affect my growth in various areas. And the other more professionally-directed website will have some writing on how personal life impacts over there as well. It’s still a great deal of back and forth, but I look forward to having “the other side of the coin” on the web.
I’ve started a new online endeavor that I’m hoping will not be too much overkill for those of you who don’t care, and will be a useful place for help and information for those who do.
I set up the Tumblr.com blog to point to a new domain, and my intention is that this new space on the web will be a repository for all the stuff I’ve been willy-nilly tossing around the past few months. Tumblr is free, the webspace was cheap enough from GoDaddy, and we’re all set to… well, to just try something new.
I’ve had inquiries from a handful of folks into social media/marketing kinds of things. So this new site is an attempt to gather those links, quotes and stories into one space while still posting the updates to Facebook and Twitter. Hopefully add value on anyone’s clickthrough by sharing why I think this or that is important in the first place. Online social interaction can be a scary place full of TMI, but it can also be a rewarding experience personally and a beneficial one publicly and professionally as well.
Anyway, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask, comment, suggest or whatever. I hope the new digs will be good for us, and I’ll take all the help I can get.
I saw this in my Twitter stream this afternoon:
I love introducing good people to other good people.
I couldn’t say it better myself, so I wanted to post and give credit for its simplicity and meaningfulness. One of the things I appreciate about people like Sarah, and something I want to cultivate more in myself, is the desire to connect the right people to the right people to get the right things done, to get the right questions asked, to get the right solutions working the right way.
Are you a connector? Someone who likes to introduce good people to other good people? Or better maybe, do people come to you expecting you to know to whom they can connect to meet a need, to help a cause, to scratch an itch?
[ht: other "connectors" connected through this connection - @RadioAlexander, @LindsayAnvik, @calliemiller, @LisaJohnson]
I posted some time ago about “content versus content” – what fills your space compared to how we feel about your space, or something like that. This post is different, yet the more I think about it we’re in the same basic brainstorm, aren’t we?
Some people are great at providing content. Whatever they write, wherever they take a photograph, whenever they speak or share what’s on their heart – these folks have something worthwhile going on and they know how to use it. Maybe you look up to some of them, or maybe you employ some of them. Maybe you are one of them, in which case you can skip down to the comments and tell me what you’re thinking.
But sometimes, there’s nothing but an empty well. Folks without content might still be overly prolific, but what they’re piping out is just filler. They might be using lots of words, might be spouting big high-falutin’ fancy sounding jargon, but in the end you learn nothing, you get nothing, and you’ve lost a part of your life that time will never get back. You know some, or maybe you are one. I’m betting that if you are one you don’t know it – but if that’s the case, you didn’t read this far and you’re adding filler to my comments right now. If you suspect you might be in this category and you’re still reading though, I’ve got one more thing.
As someone who appreciates good content, and who hopefully shares and expresses good content, or at least can show that I’m one who’s trying hard to be the former over the latter – I ask this question: Are you content? And if not – why not? It’s my experience that reveals that those who share good content are by and large more content than those who are merely living out the filler. So if you’re not happy or you’re not content…
Fill up on the good stuff. Fill up on good content. Fill up to overflowing on good writing, great photography, seriously deep movies, fun really joyful films. Stop eating the junk food of life, the filler that makes us think we’re full but really only masks the real hunger inside. And start eating the good stuff.
Those who have decent content are, generally speaking, full of good content themselves because that is what they are filling up with in this life. They are content, generally speaking, because their tastes and drives have brought them to this point. And the flipside downside is equally true: those with “just filler” are living off the crap, and the only overflow they have is of the porcelain variety in the… well, you get the picture.
Twitter has rolled out a new way to post from Twitter. Before, choices were to cut/paste the text or to take a screenshot. Now, with Blackbird-Pie, they “bake” your tweet link and shoot out the embed code:
RT @jamestowncoffee: @brianonthescene: we’ll stay out of feud between grandma & Megan Fox, but we’ll keep making Palmetto Pecan Lattes.
Rick Stilwell
RickCaffeinated
On Thursday, I maintained a relative “radio silence” for the benefit of “a little joke” for April Fools. I’ve done this before.
I realized early on that in order to maintain the illusion, I would need to NOT SHARE ANY of the cool things, good articles, deep thoughts that normally wander through my twitter feed and google reader through the day. I share to let others see and to keep an archive somewhat of new and innovative stuff for me to click back to later, and not doing this through the day would have been a major bummer.
So here are some of the things that have been through my wheelhouse today that would have been shared/facebooked/twittered. It’s been a good day, even if my “april fool” wasn’t all that in the end…
When I left my job of nineteen-plus years last August, I knew what I was getting into – and at the same time I had no clue. I had spent those years in various forms programming for the financial/output side of the insurance industry. More recently, I had been able to do some technical writing in requirement gathering and project planning. I’d traveled to some really cool places – Philadelphia/Lititz, PA; Seattle/Enumclaw, WA; San Juan/Humacao, PR; Staunton, VA; Tampa/Treasure Island, FL; SFO/San Mateo, CA. Over the years, I met with good people also trying to do their jobs the best they could for their own customer bases. I liked that we were doing our best for them to then do their best for their constituents. I liked that I could work meetings into paragraphs, and I enjoyed the back and forth to “get it right” in putting to paper what the client wanted and how we were going to deliver.
Writing first, programming second – some C++ with a mostly text-based script system. We did some good things, and I liked my job. There wasn’t a reason to leave, except that I had had an itch to find something new. Nothing had really panned out, so I had re-settled into my groove and was ready to stay for the long haul. But then there was an opportunity to start something exciting and new… The Love Boat… soon will be making another run…
I stopped Job #1 of my adult life on Friday, and started Job #2 of my adult life on Monday. I was hired to work on social media initiatives, with a touch of graphic design and programming on the side. That was in August. We’ve been planning and working and replanning and reworking things since then, on multiple fronts, multiple platforms, multiple configurations. It was a huge change for my mindset – honestly, the stress level dropped more than anything. I didn’t know how stressed I must have been but today, I have actual fingernails. I don’t chew them off anymore – that’s been a pretty big realization on my part. I’m on a new team that’s once again fun, professional and trying to do good things for customers. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it?
So what happened last week? We opened the world to a new website design – I had one small part, helping with some of the “search” capabilities, while everyone else poured themselves into what was happening. It’s a major step forward, and folks worked with a real determination to do what’s right, make it easy for the customer, and to build something they could be proud of and management would be happy about. Internally the kudos were there – people from around the company loved it. When the rollout came there were some issues that became the week’s priorities and were quickly sifted out. It was good for me as a newcomer to see the team work as a team and celebrate as a team. It’s a good tech shop, with great people and big dreams.
So what happened to me last week? The new web design shows more prominently than before that we are involved in social media. For the first time in our process, we were getting major play on our Facebook page, on Twitter – even gained a YouTube subscriber or two. A few folks commented on their enjoyment of the new site. We gained visitors, we saw web analytics from the social media links, and we interacted with folks “in the wild” about real things that mattered to them. For me, it meant the things we were doing were going to pay off, that ideas we were having and challenges we were working out had come to a point beyond conjecture and were now really happening in our system.
There’s a scene at the end of The Incredibles where the neighbor kid sees the explosion of Syndrome and the family being saved inside Violet’s forcefield. His jaw drops, he stares at Mr. Incredible, and finally exclaims, “THAT WAS TOTALLY WICKED!” – that was me last week. I was so happy one evening, I tried to explain it all to my 12-year-old. I don’t think she was necessarily impressed, but I do hope some of that excitement from doing something you love rubs off on her so she won’t settle for a career path that’s anything less. I enjoy what I do, still putting in home/offsite time to make myself better, to find better ways to do things, to try to look at things differently and stay up with the growth in these areas. The past week or so has reinforced the decision to move on, to make a change, to move out and try new things in new ways.
I highly recommend…
I warn both of you reading that this post has been simmering at some level in my cranium for at least a couple of weeks. It’s not really controversial, nothing new being added to anything, just something that I’ve thought would make a decent writing prompt if I ever decided to be prompted and ever decided to write. And honestly, how’s that for a really vague and meaningless opening sentence? So much for simmering…
I changed career paths last year to begin working in social media. I’m all over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, blogs and magazine sites and RSS readers and iPhone apps and whatever else can be used or done to connect people to each other. Professionally, it’s about connecting people well with each other and with our company. It’s brainstorming and creatively targeting ideas on using these tools in productive and ultimately profitable ways. Personally, it’s making friends, having conversations, enjoying the back-and-forth of folks all over the country and around the globe over usually the most mundane and the most important pieces of life. It’s all that and a bag of chips.
For me, the SOCIAL aspect is something that I often find personally lacking. I’ve gone through things over the last ten years that have taken some of the wind out of my sails – a good thing for the most part, since blowhards need to be de-winded from time to time. But there’s often a lack of confidence that I feel holds me back. To be honest, I feel some of this lessens when connecting via the internet. Maybe the anonymous nature of the thing, the ability to be and say who/what I would want to be or say. Maybe it’s the disconnectedness geographically that makes actual connectedness better or more palatable somehow. Whatever it is, I like it – especially when those online connections spill over into actual space from the virtual world. People are people, whether we have met and shaken hands or only met and exchanged avatar twibbons.
Then there’s the MEDIA part, where I see all kinds of things around MEDIATE, MEDIATION, MIDDLE GROUND. I huge chunk of my journey to this point has involved me being the one in the middle, the one seeking to bring opposing sides together or to bring reconciliation and relationship back into broken circumstances. I see these connections as very real, very meaningful ways for all of us to forgive, to grieve, to confess, to move on – whatever we can do to build each other up, to teach each other and learn from each other, to bring Truth into what’s usually just our opinionated Facts – that’s what I see in that word as well.
So if you see me tweeting too much on Twitter or facebooking too much on Facebook or linking in too much on LinkedIN, just smile and wave, write back if you’re so inclined, and think about me trying to be social, trying to be middling, or just simmering over long full-of-whatever posts about live, the universe and everything.
And if you see me on MySpace, tell me to get away and get a real life.
