Keys to Successful Hashtag Usage

Reblogged from Caliber Pulse:

Hashtags became a part of everyday lingo for active Twitter users, but now they are popping up in the strangest places.  You are likely to find them on your television screen while you are watching your favorite shows, on printed pieces arriving in your mailbox, splashed across other social networks (Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram), and prominently displayed on event banners, billboards, websites, etc. 

Read more… 358 more words

Good guidelines!

Online – Work vs. Personal

Last week I posted about one main difference for me, here is the rest of it.

Writing about my actual work gehts nicht. That phrase keeps being in my head. Literally: it doesn’t go. Meaning: it’s not going to happen. Hard to exactly put in in a phrase and have the sentence flow around it correctly, but that exactly captures the situation.

As I’m re-activating these various blogs and accounts and so on, thought I’d share a bit more about why that is.

My work life does not conform to the patterns I see in social media content.

For one thing, multiple aspects that folks normally write about are absent for me.

After taking away all that, what remains is the very core. Some of this content is analogous to other consulting, some is similar to IT process. Some is universal with any work process.

In those ways, I can see within my experiences that which others write about, even though they’re writing within a whole different work setting. And perhaps sometimes I’ll write things meant to be universal, distilled from multiple bits of various experiences I’ve had.

The whole rest of the time though, my online presence is about the goals of my work, which is to support entrepreneurs, creativity, adaptation, communities, and best possible futures.

And the occasional personal-self bit that might be adjacently related to work. Otherwise, my personal content is available nearby as well- but separate from this. Because it really works well for me to keep those two identities distinct, including online. For me they are different selves, with different goals, different challenges, different support systems, different rewards, different cycles, different everything.

And that’s actually the main difference that prompted both these posts – my interest in keeping two of everything – two Google + pages, two twitter accounts: in order to maintain that distinction. It fascinates me that so many merge the two.

The other part for me is about the fourth wall, like of the theater. More on that in another post… Much of work is theater (heck, much of life is), and in my personal online presence, I take away that fourth wall.

So, was thinking that since I’m the exception, thought I’d go ahead and clarify that so people can interact accordingly. I’m looking forward to sorting myself into the kaleidescope of social media more effectively going forward. See you there!

Thanks for visiting, comments always welcome.

Only India

India: You know, that one, single, homogenous, ever-invasive bully-country that strode across the seas and snatched up many many jobs from the nice US economic systems that existed, and strode back across the seas smirking and proud?

That’s much of the image I guess I’d been creating in my head, by the turn of the Century, before being burdened with any actual information whatsoever.

Then, at Legal Aid, they had National Geographic magazines in the lunch room, and one day I read all about the caste system. And felt superior accordingly.

A while later my daughter (she was around 11-12 yrs old at the time) came across ‘Bend in like Beckham,’ and she really wanted us to watch it. I resisted strenuously, having already seen a number of kid-sports movies, and really not feeling like that Indian gimmick was going to work for me.

Finally, exceedingly reluctantly, quite a while after it came out, I gave in. And loved it. Loved the story, the characters, the setting a little bit even, and Loved the Music – especially the Indian music.. I really think looking back that it was the music as much as anything that prompted what happened next.

We found another Gurinder Chadha film, Bride & Prejudice I think, and watched that – loved it as well (the disconnects didn’t bother me at all at that time). And then What’s Cooking. And then another Aishwarya Rai film. And then, tip-toe-ing in.. another suggested one from Amazon. This was before I was on Netflix; and if I still had cable at that point, I hadn’t found any Indian content there (if there was any), hadn’t found iTalkies – was buying one film, then another. Came across a couple I didn’t care for much at all, and just about figured I was done with all that.. then saw Aamir Khan’s Lagaan. And a very long, rich journey was officially launched.

Today my film tastes are forever changed – I’m more used to having subtitles on than off, because even when I do watch American things, sometimes there’s a cultural dialect or it’s independent and the sound is muffled now and then or whatever. I really enjoy the emotion (and music still) of Indian film, the multi-genre aspect historically, the playfulness and other specific choices often made, the rich character focus, and the details such having a line at the end either replicate an earlier line (coming full circle) or completing a pattern etc…

I’ve learned that there are many languages, multiple regions, close to 50 major cities, a tapestry of rural communities, sophistication and intelligence and subtlety and every other similar attribute to infinite extents; right along with and within all the opposites and deficiencies that are most everywhere in various mixtures; many strengths for the rest of us to learn from and much to enjoy and celebrate.

I don’t know if I have any ancestral relationship to India, and probably never will, but my current country (US) certainly has been much richer for it’s existence, with the Civil Rights movement and many other aspects. Also India and one of my countries-of-origin – Ireland – certainly share a great deal historically.

And after all that, as far as India’s effect on financial services, I mainly put that to entities within the US. Changes were inevitable, they didn’t have to be implemented the way they were.

So I’m happy to have started learning about the global neighbor and friend that is India, and am looking forward to including Indian food (which I also love), music, and film as well as democratic struggles and so much more the rest of my life.

Eliminating the Pain with a Lean Business Model (via Applied Entrepreneurship)

Great article! Hope the Big-Box model is eliminated going forward, way too many costs all the way around!

I've long been a student, as well as an occasional mentor, on the subject of innovative business models. As part of my continuing self-education efforts on the subject, I recently picked up a copy of Business Model Generation, written by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. As the promo for the book says, it is "a handbook for visionaries, game changers and challengers. If you're interested in business models, I strongly suggest picking up a c … Read More

via Applied Entrepreneurship

Dialects and dimpsy doddermen (via Sentence first)

Sharing a post from another favorite writer, this one a specialist in language itself. Fascinating!

Time for a recap of what I’ve been writing for Macmillan Dictionary Blog over the last few weeks. The theme for July was small talk, so a couple of my posts are on this subject. In “Small talk is no small matter” I make some general remarks about chit chat and its uses: [S]mall talk serves a useful phatic function. It helps us tune in to other people’s accents and dialects, and to get used to their presence and the ways they express themselves. B … Read More

via Sentence first

How to Maximize Your Success by Aligning Behaviors with Intentions (via Leadership Freak)

Interesting insight in to the importance of considering the relationship between behaviors and intentions! Definitely applicable to consultants and other entrepreneurs as well as those within employment situations.

You won’t get where you want to go until your behaviors consistently express your intentions. If we could see your behaviors without your explanations, what would we think of you and your life-direction? The project: I’m asking a small group of selected leaders to evaluate my behaviors. I want them to let my behaviors explain where I’m going in life and leadership. For example, I might say I’m working on being positive. But, do my behaviors expre … Read More

via Leadership Freak

Top 100 most popular Google+ Users (via Social Local Mobile Marketing)

Looks like an interesting feature for those closely managing their Google + presence!

Via Scoop.it – Google+ Project vs Facebook Top 100 most popular Google+ users   Google+ Statistics currently tracks and generates detailed statistics for 45,426 users and pulls in hundreds of the most popular posts, every second of the day, from Google+.   Add yourself (see sidebar) so we can start tracking your personal Google+ statistics too. You can see how many people added you to their circles, how you grow over time and where you rank in th … Read More

via Social Local Mobile Marketing

Google Analytic Averages (via Byte of the Week)

Great to get more familiar with this data, thanks!

I recently received an email from Google that compiles average traffic stats for web sites that opted to share their stats in the aggregate. It’s interesting to look at them – because it’s nice to know where most sites get their traffic or how much time most people spend on the average web site. So I wanted to share some of the info with you – except that I wanted to add a caution about thinking of this info as average. It’s the average from web … Read More

via Byte of the Week

Google Plus: Content-rich snapshot of today’s information and reactions

from savvy early-adopters, via twitter! (see acknowledgements)

for a Google + invite, see this blog post from Nick LeRoy!

So, just over a week after the launch of this new super-suite of applications, and the response is intense! After seeing so many articles and blogs etc.. I decided to bring together the most useful bits I’ve seen, for the convenience of my readers.

For a quick, intense set of facts on Google +, here’s the Google+ 50 from Chris Brogan.

Google Plus – the new spectacular, all-in-one web-connection machine is kind of similar to Facebook and Twitter, is said to be possibly replacing both as well as Skype, yet is very different. It is intended for both personal and business use, and will soon have company ‘pages’ like Facebook. It provides an opportunity for you to interact with other pages (+1 them), similar to ‘like’ –ing them.

In referring to it, I’m using Google + and Google Plus interchangeably, mainly using Google Plus when it’s before some punctuation symbol that would look weird coming after a + symbol. Some also refer to it simply as ‘Plus’.

This fascinating article from Jay Baer (Convince & Convert) argues that Google + is the perfect fit for how our use of the web is now, because it’s not so much about whole pages as small bits of sharable content – posts and tweets and photos and whatnot. And that – having to do with popularity rankings and search processes, as well, Google + is perfect for both people’s personal use and business presences/interactions.

Besides these positive impressions, there are a few warnings. Or not so much warnings as things to be aware of. In particular, Google + is more like Twitter than Facebook in that the default is for everything to be public. You can restrict content to ‘circles’ of people, but if you don’t go out of your way to do that, it’s public. Similarly, your Google profile itself (that is at the core of Google +) is now required to be public for the minimal info (your name and gender). Other profile info can be private, but that data must be public as of a recent change.

The other thing-to-be-aware-of is in that same vein – privacy, or the lack of it. This article by NakedSecurity highlights all the policies that Google has instituted around privacy, that will especially come in to play with Google Plus (there are 37 all together).

Should you hurry up to get started with it as soon as possible? Well, one thing is, it’s in closed beta still to the general public, so you may not be able to.

Once the next phase comes, if you like being an early-adopter, if you have an active web community you often connect with, then probably yes. Sure, it will be there later on, but there is a lot of excitement about it and it looks like it’s worth the investment!

Be aware though – there are fake Google + invitations circulating at this point that are actually spam, containing only links to a pharmaceutical site!

Anyway, once you do get started, the web urls default for each person are long and cumbersome, so here is how to get a short ‘vanity’ url thanks to mobilelocalsocial.com.

For business owners, Google + shows definite promise of professional functionality, as ReadWriteWeb describes.

For businesses themselves, the site is not yet geared up for that, but according to searchengineland.com, ‘pages’ for businesses are coming very soon.

To get started, here is a video from ExploringSocialMedia taking you through all the steps involved (10 minutes). Also, here is an introduction from Google themselves. And here is a how-to guide written by early users of Google Plus. And here’s a list of tips.

By being an early adopter, you’ll join some pretty auspicious company. Here’s a list of power users put together by Steve Rubel, as of 7 days after launch!

So, lots more out there of course, but hopefully this is useful resource collection! All comments, tips, additional great resources welcome. I’ll review again in a bit then!

And don’t forget, for a Google + invite, see this blog post from Nick LeRoy!

Acknowledgements: These wonderful twitter folks provided the material in this post: @ipHouse, @steveruble, @rjfrasca, @spinsucks, @HaggbergConsult, @timoreilly, @brainpicker, @glenn_ferrell, @GOOGLE_INFOS, @NickLeRoy.

Also here is a site listing: exploringsocialmedia.bloomfire.com, ReadWriteWeb.com, TheNextWeb.com, NakedSecurity, MobileLocalSocial.com, ChrisBrogan.com, PCWorld, convinceandconvert.com, zulucreative.co.uk, NickLeRoy.com, Google.com.

Fun Friday: Gay Pride!

Clarity Solutions celebrates Gay Pride for the wellbeing of our entire community.

We urge all citizens of Minnesota to vote NO on the marriage amendment in 2012, and to help organize the defeat of that amendment until then. The constitution is not about discriminating against groups of people. Our community is most well when all members of our community are well.