Dive into the archives.
- Weekend Reading: The 419 Design, Freelancing, Social Media & SEO Links I Tweeted This Week (8/21-8/27)
Back again by popular demand. Well, okay. Only 3 or 4 people expressed a desire to see this series continue, but who am I to deprive them? And yes, I counted. 419 links in all my favorite interests – web and graphic design, freelancing, social media, SEO and more! Hopefully there are some tasty little tidbits of info here just for you.
- Social Media, SEO, Design, Brand, Influence: What’s Most Important?
It was about 9:30 on Tuesday morning when I got a call on my cell from my eldest daughter. The voice on the other end was trembling, and I could tell even before she said two words that something was wrong.
“Dad, I just got in a pretty bad accident.”
- How To Fail At Using Twitter To Drum Up Business
Several times over the past few months I have received some ridiculous communications via Twitter from freelancers or small businesses who obviously are new to Twitter and have clearly decided to jump on the social media marketing bandwagon in an attempt to utilize the tool to find new clients. The reason I say these exchanges are ridiculous is because they have been asking me – a web designer – if I would like to hire them to do web design! Not asking if they can assist me or if I need an outsourcing contact, but flat out asking me to hire them to design a website!
Thanks to yet another misguided attempt at engaging me as a client for web design recently, I have written this post to help identify some critical steps that should not be overlooked if you are trying to use social media to drum up business. My hope is that it will provide some much-needed guidance for those that are new or considering diving in, while simultaneously aiming to rid current social media enthusiasts of the annoying, hard-sell marketing spam that is making its way onto our platforms.
- Should Social Media Relationship Rules Be Different Than Real Life?
My answer is no. But then, that’s just me. I truly believe you are free to answer differently, and even better, we can co-exist with our differences of opinion and practices. The world is full of people with distinctly differing opinions, belief systems, methodologies and more, and while this can sometimes cause tension, anger and even war, the human race is still here. I see that as proof that we don’t have to all believe and live our lives in exactly the same way in order for society to continue moving forward, online or off. In fact, I believe that society benefits from our differences, as long as we allow and even embrace each other’s freedom to be an individual.
There. I said it. You know where I stand and hopefully have an idea how you personally would answer the question in the title of this post. Now why am I asking it?
- Pro Bono and Free Services: Is It Possible To Give Too Much?
Last Thursday I was taking part in a weekly discussion among designers called DCTH (Design Community Twitter Hours) and this question came up: When do you draw the line between pro-bono & just helping for free? A very interesting discussion followed and it got me thinking about my own experience with offering my design services pro bono or for free. In this post I want to share some of those experiences with you and how they have influenced my business approach as well as the impact this has had when I began applying it to my social media interaction.
- Surprise!!! Social Media (and Life) Is NOT A Competition
Spend a few minutes browsing through recent headlines about social media and you will most likely be left with the impression that all of the networks are in a fierce competition with each other. Facebook is the king, with more paticipants than any other. Twitter recently boasted that its users are posting an average of 50 million updates a day. Google Buzz burst onto the scene and the pundits immediately pitted it against the others in comparisons and contrasts. The list goes on and on, with countless also-rans and quickly-developed newcomers waiting in the wings, all hoping to compete for your membership and usage.
Zoom in and take a closer look within the individual social networks and you will witness users clamoring for significant increases in followers and friends, regularly checking numbers and trying a myriad of techniques to grow their counts to what those who are paying attention might call ‘respectable’. Tools that rate, rank and grade feed the frenzy and give us all the ability to measure our success in order to insure that we are doing things ‘correctly’.
A few weeks back I got involved in a conversation on Twitter in which another user (identity to remain anonymous) was tweeting complaints to TwitterGrader (a tool that ranks users based on an algorithm that goes beyond simple numbers). This person was upset because they have almost twice as many followers and updates as I do, yet TwitterGrader listed me in the top 5 in my city while leaving him somewhere further down the list. I told him it really didn’t matter and that this whole thing is not a competition, to which he responded vehemently, “EVERYTHING is a competition! LIFE is a competition!”
Really? Is that the world we live in?
- Google Buzz (Kill) Has Driven Me To Social Media Self-Examination
What I need is to continue to get better at giving and sharing and interacting with others who have similar interests, interesting viewpoints and intelligent discussion. Not another social media tool.
- A Social Media (and Life) Lesson I Learned From My 12-Year-Old
Today is my son’s 12th birthday.
It seems like only yesterday that he was without a doubt the cutest toddler on earth, and as the youngest in the family it is definitely with much melancholy that we approach the incoming teen years with him, never to steer through the early childhood years again. From day one he has been his Mom’s “baby”, the youngest and only son and more-than-willing recipient of all the benefits that are a part of that special mother-son bond. So it is probably most difficult of all for my wife to watch him grow into a young man. Still, we are proud of who he is becoming, and it is part of this that I want to share with you in a simple but profound lesson I have learned from him.
- Don’t Let Your Bad Attitude Or Ethics Ruin It For The Rest Of Us!
The other night my wife and I went to our eldest daughter’s high school basketball game to cheer her on. We took our regular spot up at the top of the bleachers so we could lean back against the wall rather than slouching on the hard wood for the entire game. As we settled in, we noticed a few parents from the other team had the same idea and were setting up camp about 15 feet away. We commenced with the standard smile and nod acknowledgements and then turned our attention to the beginning of the contest. What transpired over the next hour inspired a range of emotions, from anger to frustration to disappointment. And I’m not talking about what happened on the court.
- Are “Lists” The New Twitter Status Measurement?
Let me start this off by saying that I have not made use of Twitter’s new “List” feature because I don’t use the Twitter web interface nearly as much as I use Tweetdeck (here’s a great article explaining Lists). At first glance it seems that the new feature is very similar to Tweetdeck’s “Group” feature that enables me to create groupings of specific people who I wish to organize their tweets and perhaps watch them a little more closely than others or for particular reasons. After doing a little research there is one apparent difference: lists are public. My groups in Tweetdeck are not.
I believe this is not just a good expansion of the social networking capabilities of Twitter, but it is also very strategic. I would be willing to bet that the geniuses behind Twitter, while creating a very useful addition to their already powerful and revolutionary tool, have also taken into consideration one of the driving forces behind its popularity: the competitive human nature that pushes for social media status and measurable success.
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