Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Picasso once said that Good artists copy, great artists steal…

So I am “stealing” @IkePigott’s video in regards to the new Facebook page changes, because well, he says it better than I could…and he already did the work

I’m thinking it would be good to be Caligula in this situation…

Unfortunately, even after listing 10 great topics that any blogger can use last week, I still didn’t feel motivated today (what? I’m not perfect!). So, I decided to ask for some help from my friends and posted the above status update to facebook and twitter. Thank goodness for great friends, because in just 10 minutes I had the following great ideas! And now, I have some awesome ideas for next week

Ideas from Twitter:

@ParagonMoon: Blog topic: I can get over having done something I shouldn’t have. But to pass by opportunities is deeply regrettable and soul-damaging.

@Hagre: do a how-to of something you’re good at, or go explore someplace new and write about it! Just a couple thoughts!

@Sn0wSurF3r gave me two: How about, “you don’t have to blog just for the sake of blogging?” OR I want 2 read about how people should use lawyers at the beginning of contracts so they don’t need them after things go south

@influxx: take a break and come back fresh tomorrow. Dont force it. It will show.

@healthOC: I want to read about how the market has positively or negatively affected your business and/or others in your field

Ideas from Facebook:

What ideas do you have to add to the mix? What would you like to see me write about?

Or better named: Why I avoided joining Facebook in the beginning.

When I started my social media strategy (blogging, twitter, linkedin, etc) almost a year and a half ago, I avoided adding facebook into the mix. It wasn’t until about 8 months ago that I finally became part of it.

Why?

Because none of my real friends were on twitter or linkedin, and definitely none of them read my blog. It was mine, my business tools, my networking tools, it was my little world. And I liked it that way. I could write about business, connect with like minded individuals and there was no preconceived notions because they knew me already. I didn’t have to worry about it getting to personal – I could control what the business people knew about me. Basically, I avoided adding facebook because I didn’t want my real friends combined with my business connections, nor did I want my real friends to be getting my blog posts or business promotion. I wanted to know that at the end of the day, I could sign off of the “business” and just talk normal life with my friends. Actually, most of my friends didn’t even know I had a blog or what I did for work other than I was in “marketing or something”.

But then a funny thing happened…some of my social media connections became real life friends. I started getting coffee with them and learning about their lives. We had 3 hour lunches talking about everything from business to husbands and family. I attended tweetups and had a lot of fun. I joined a blog crush group, and seriously, those bloggers rock! I’ve recently joined the OCGood group, which should be another great connection to incredible people. I figured out that I really liked these people and wanted to be able to learn more about there personal lives, and of course, almost all of them were on Facebook and wanted to connect.

So I finally gave in and created a Facebook account.

Like I suspected, pretty quickly all my real friends found me and were excited to be able to send me messages/tag photos etc. Which was a slight problem. See, I enjoy going out. I enjoy a glass (or 4) of wine on the weekends. And sometimes, I don’t really want those pictures to be shared. But then I realized something, the more I did share those photos, of me just being me, the stronger that my blog readers and my social media connections became. People want to connect with real people. And because the service that I offer is so individual, people want to know who I am, what I am about and who they will be working with before they contact me.

What I learned was that by connecting my business life and my real life, my friends understand me better and my clients trust me more.

Do you combine business and real life? What have you discovered about it? Or if you don’t…why not?

*Only 15 more days to sign up for the Business Strategy Workshop...don’t miss out!*

In January, I talked about creating a social media strategy that works for me – how often I do certain things and the schedule I try to keep. It covered a lot of the details, but there were some gaps. I didn’t talk about all the sites that I used or what they meant for my strategy. So in May, I covered how I use social media successfully and filled in the blanks. But there are still blanks – not in the idea of my strategy but my execution.

In the May post, I explained that I use:

But today, I realize that what I said and what I do is actually very different.

Reality is, I struggle with social networks.

I do use twitter, facebook and linkedin fairly consistently. Twitter is easy to manage, tweetdeck is always in one the background , I can jump in for a bit, participate and jump out. Facebook is just so connected – there is so much to do and see and read, that I can get sucked in there pretty quick. LinkedIn is important, so I make sure to make time for it, the business atmosphere is something few sites have and I want to capitalize on it. I do tend to have days that I focus on them more, and some days that I forget they even exist. But I do try to stay on top of these 3.

For the last 3, I can’t remember the last time I checked them (stumbleupon, technorati and friendfeed). I think the biggest reason is the connection – I don’t feel as connected to people on those 3, so I don’t use them as much. Stumbleupon and Technorati are very individual – yes you can connect with people, but I use them more for finding interesting articles and blogs. Which I need to start doing again, since those are great for blog fodder when I am having a tough writing day. As for friendfeed, this one I am thinking about dropping. Not removing myself from, but giving myself permission not to use it as anything other than an aggregate for all my tweets and blog posts. I prefer twitter and feel like it is too much the same to do both (although, I would love to hear some arguments for friendfeed…got one?).

But, whether I use the network often or not, the main struggle with social media I have is the lack of completion. There is no final tweet, stumble, wall post or thought. They are continually growing, changing and adding content. While this isn’t a bad thing, I find it to be the most difficult part for me. I love the feeling of completing something. Typing the final word, coding the last line or adding the last color. I especially love the feeling of turning the finished product over to the client and hearing their reaction. Reveling in a job well done.

You can’t do that with social networks. Technically, you can be happy about a tweet that gets retweeted a ton, or a link that gets stumbled like crazy. But, someone else is always going to top it. Even “social celebs” get their content topped. There can always be another tweet added to your thoughts, and the river continues to flow. When it is your own project, that you give to a client, no one is competing to top it. If it is your best work, then you can feel accomplished. Not with social networks – you just participate, you don’t complete them.

Let’s talk…. What struggles do you face with social media?

Social media is a fabulous tool, when it’s used right. But, because of the power and breadth of the social sphere, one mistake can be dangerous. First, lets define what I mean when I say ’social media’. Social Media encompasses blogging, twitter, facebook, linkedin, technorati, digg, etc… basically, any tool that you can use to connect and share with other indivisuals on the web.

Here are a few of the simple mistakes in social media to avoid:

1. Thinking if you delete something, it can’t be found. If you delete a facebook comment, a blog comment, a tweet, anything that is done in the online sphere, it can be found. Make sure that you wouldn’t be embarrassed about what you said if someone else found it.
2. Tweeting about everything that you do. Be yourself, be honest, but don’t tell everyone, everything. It is important to be a real person, but remember your boundaries or people will stop listening (thanks to @littlesunflowers.com)
3. Picking a name and not understanding the culture of the networking platform (from @HappyHourBoston). Your social networks should be easy to connect, but if you use your real name in some and not in others, you are losing out on that connection, not to mention search engine optimization.
4. Talking just for the sake of talking (whether on a blog, facebook, linkedin, etc). Sometimes it is okay to be silent and just read other peoples thoughts. You don’t need to comment on every blog post or write about every thought you have. Silence still is golden on the web sometimes.
5. Digging and Stumbling the same thing every one else has or worse, everything you see. Make sure that whatever you are giving credit deserves the credit. Or, find something that hasn’t been given credit yet and help them to get the credit they deserve. Pro’s like Brogan, Copyblogger and Kawasaki are going to get stumbled and dugg by everyone. Why not find someone who is less known and help promote their work?
6. A blog admin commenting on his own posts repeatedly as different users. he used his own email 4 all = same gravatar = fail (from @tonfue)
7. People not getting to know you, but always sending you messages about their benefits/charities. (@tanyaahedo’s thoughts) This is a big one of facebook, where if you are a member of certain groups, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get spammed. But it shouldn’t be that way! If people join your group, treat them right, don’t spam them daily or they won’t be there for long.
8. Some days? Logging on. (courtesy of @MikeNeumann)

Remember, social media is a tool, one with sharp edges. And although most of us think we could never make these mistakes (oh, no, not me!), they are worth being reminded of.

Social media: It’s completely safe until you use it wrong…

Have you fallen victim to these? Or have another one to mention?

I have been following Ori (@couchsurfingori) for awhile on twitter and then we connected through our blogs. I thought his stories and his travels were unbelievable interesting, and very creative (plus, he is pretty hysterical!). I also thought my readers would love to hear about what he is doing and why. So, a few days ago, I asked if he would guest post about his experiences traveling the country on couches. After we chatted on the phone, he decided to share via video (and has required that I create a video soon too, watch the 12 minutes mark,…argh!). The video is long, but well worth the watch. And not just because he created it for me.

But most importantly – watch this video and think about what it can teach you, or what you can learn from it. For me, it has given me a lot of motivation to keep doing my freelance work, because I love it and want to!

Anyway, here is Ori’s story:

*favorite moments are at .33 seconds (really Ori? A tiger? lol), 6.22 minutes (answering the phone? Well…if it leads to another amazing story, why not!) and lastly, 10.30 minutes (because not everything is hunky-dory, you’ve gotta have the bad too.)

And hopefully next time he is in Southern Cali, he can surf my couch!

Although a bit tongue in cheek, this list (Pointed out to me via Twitter, can be found at nheerdesign, and originally put together by someone on facebook) is the ultimate list of ‘ways to know you are a graphic designer. Although my career is not 100% a graphic designer, I definitely had to shake my head at a few of these. Oh, and I added a little surprise at the end (no fair scrolling to the bottom first!).

• You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at Heathrow Airport
• You watch the Superbowl just for the commercials
• You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away
• You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas
• You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes
• You are completely immune to subliminal advertising
• You look upon a well-designed project with either: sympathy OR extreme jealousy
• Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse
• You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride
• You practically take caffeine intravenously
• You have an appreciation for everything unique
• You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.
• “You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement.”
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like”. (even worse, you don’t actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think ‘I’ll go to bed now’… and you actually go to bed about 2-3am”.
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven’t noticed”
• “…when you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.”
• “… when you wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what they mean. To others its probably a band of sorts..”
• Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.
• You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.
• You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why.
• You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD
• You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.
• You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.
• Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure
• You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.
• You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.
• You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.
• You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.
• The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…”
• You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet.
• Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash
• You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.
• You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin.
• You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”
• Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”
• And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…
• You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.
• cntrl+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.
• You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.
• You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”.
• You know that rivers are more than just water.
• Your best friends are all employees at the local print shop
• The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an artist!)
• Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that.
• Several South American economies suffer noticeably any time you try to give up coffee, or even cut your consumption of it by half.
• You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt.
• when your significant other/ friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them.
• when you know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.
• If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy comic sans and papyrus.
• ….You can understand everything on this list.

Ahh the lovely world of creativity and graphic design.

Now, to make it even worse, here are 5 great graphic design sites you must check out!

1. Amazing seamlesss patterns for the backgrounds of whatever it is that you want to design.
2. Photoshop actions for really cool images (or more professional ones).
3. Photoshop disasters (because we have all had one…)
4. Increbible textures to use on any surface (ohhh, imagination is starting!)
5. Ahh fonts, fonts and more fonts (maybe someday we can get a petition to remove comic sans from existence!)

Did I miss one? how many of the “you know you’re’s” did you agree with? What is your favorite graphics site?

So facebook owns my data. What’s the big deal?I have to say I was a bit surprised by the response to Facebook’s new policy (just search twitter for #tosfb to see what I mean).

In an article by Stan Schroeder, he talks about his opinion on the new policy. Yes, I can understand his frustration as they basically own your data now, and did it without allowing people the opportuntiy to remove their data before the change. But my surprise is that he thought this was strange or out of the ordinary. Really? Have you read the TOS on most of the sites you use? Check your insurance, banks and credit cards. They own you too!

The web is not a place to take lightly where you put things. But, as long as you remember that anything you put on the web can be used by anyone at anytime, you can’t really be surprised. For example, I wrote a post about some favorite artists of my Twitter friends. I am a very honest person, so not only did I put the links to their sites, but I gave them full recognition for their work. The problem? I still took their images! Without asking. And put them on my site. What’s stopping someone with a more malicious intent from doing the same thing? And if they use it in a way that damages the image of an up and coming artist that can’t afford to fight it – what is the artist to do? Nada.

We know how amazing the web is – but it is also a dangerous place. You wouldn’t walk through downtown LA, SF or NY at 1am carrying a wad of hundreds and talking on the phone; we all know what the outcome would be. So why would you be that careless online? Don’t put your hundreds on the web for someone to steal, and don’t put information or photos that could cause damage. As long as you only put on the web what you’re not afraid of someone ‘borrowing’, you won’t have any issues. We’ve seen the aftermath of tweets gone awry already; we really shouldn’t be surprised that we have no web privacy. I’m not saying that Facebook shouldn’t have given us warning (because they should have) but I am saying that it isn’t a surprise.

Agree? Disagree? What do you think of FaceBook’s new policy? Do you think about what you put online before you put it there? Feel free to share your thoughts.

Oh…look at all the pretty colors!

No, I didn’t go crazy with a swirl art, I got a bit of creative motivation from Ari Herzog’s blog post about a new tool on Facebook, created by Thomas Fletcher. It is a facebook friend wheel, and all those colorful lines are a visual simulation of the mutual connections that my friends create. Ari explains the power of the wheel well, saying “before seeing this wheel, I was limited to viewing mutual friendships within the constraint of names and head shots. Now, I can see bands of color and plots of thickness to illustrate the bonds we share.” After looking at his, and checking out his thoughts on it, I had to check it out or myself (hence the pretty colors).

My connections with the most mutual friends were people I know from college (the reddish/yellow section) and the next was connections from twitter (green/blue section). It made sense, as I only graduated 4 years ago, and have maintained strong relationships with my college friends. Twitter contacts being a strong mutual connection also made sense as most of the people I follow, are followers of my followers (if that makes sense…) and I am also very involved with twitter.

I’m not quite as cool as Ari , but my 183 friends (the outside ring) create the 1000 spokes (the inner lines) that can still help me to better understand my connections. Oh, and if you haven’t yet, connect with me on facebook.