Blog
Thoughts and things I care to shareGetting Back to Where We Came From
It wasn’t so long ago, not quite a decade yet, when I first discovered what a blog was. The idea of sharing ideas and publishing them to the world was new to me. That was what journalists did, and story tellers. Not some computer guy from Minnesota.
Yet I was wrong. I read blogs from all sorts of folks, from all walks of life. The blogs with topics furthest from my own experiences were the most interesting, of course. Through the months and years, the people I knew grew from a couple dozen to hundreds, then a few years later, thousands.
The impact personally, was tremendous, allowing me to start publishing my own ideas on how to approach a problem. Allowing me to present my ideas, which I shared with hundreds of others, on communications and social communication in business. I found my voice in creating my own personal brand, and launching forth a new, second, career in sharing these ideas.
Eventually, these things lead us all back to where we came. I started branching out from Information Technology, and find myself bringing new ideas back to IT in the last couple years. The last four years I’ve worked on multiple solutions with three different fortune 500 companies. All in different ways. All for different reasons.
Today, I find myself looking back on the experiences from the past decade. Not only the technical ones that have dominated my career, but also the social, marketing, and communications ones that I’ve had the pleasure of learning from. I find myself doing what I said back in 2008, bringing social media oriented ideas back to my core skills and incorporating the important and relevant bits.
I think this is the key to social media as we move forward. Instead of the next network, or the next viral video to learn how far – how fast something can travel, it is how much more that we’ve communicated. It’s how we’ve articulated our ideas. It’s how much we’ve listened and learned.
Photo credit: mx2-foto
Top Gear U.S.–Looking forward to the new season
Random Tidbits – Catching Up
So it seems that I’m constantly talking about blogging rather than actually doing it. A lot has been done since my last post where I talked briefly about changing hosting providers (here’s my InMotion Hosting review) and getting that work done. Along with this site, I had three others to move over. That’s been done for a while, and I’m pretty pleased with the service so far.
The challenging thing is making time to get back to writing, sharing thoughts and ideas through this blog. That, of course, is where I’ve let work and life pull me in multiple directions. As usual, one of the first things that’s affected when too many tasks and projects demand more time are activities that don’t seem to support those task and projects. So it is with my blog from time to time.
It’s been a busy couple of months, and I’m finally catching up on a number of life challenges that randomly occur, especially with the economic changes that have been in play. So while I am saying I’m returning to blogging, I am certainly going to be working my way back into it. Easing my way really, building new habits into the days and weeks ahead instead of setting a hard schedule that would inevitably not follow.
Also, I plan to include a bit more personal experiences and items of interest rather than just talking about social media in business. That is still my core focus, but I believe there’s more in that by getting back to some of the original reasons I started blogging… as an outlet and ongoing record of creative ideas and points of view.
All in all, it’s been a long time since I’ve sat down and really thought about blogging again, and I hope to reconnect with those that wish to do so. Some say life is about challenges, but I prefer to look at it as a series of adventures. Each one building on the experience of the last.
So, on to the next adventure.
Photo credit: Hugh MacLeod – gapingvoid
Work in progress!!!
I always wanted to post that!
Seriously though, I’m in the middle of switching hosting providers and obviously I hadn’t finished by 1pm last night… so check back tomorrow and see how things turn out!
-Rick
Unlock creativity by taking direction
Working on something with actionable tasks, and tangible outcomes can be highly rewarding for the creative mind. The trick is to realize the need to back away from a roadblock and do something that helps you get past it. Turning to a task that someone else has given you, or that you’ve taken up responsibility for can sometimes be the ticket you’re looking for.
So go ahead, do something else for a day, a week, a month or more. Let the experience help generate new ideas, and rekindle that creative soul lurking inside.
January 2011 SMBMSP ListenUp Podcast
Just in case you’re interested, the January SMBMSP ListenUp Podcast is available! Mykl Roventine and I talked with Pamela Muldoon about the challenges and opportunities of social media to the publishing industry. Pamela was also the moderator at the January SMBMSP event on the same topic.
Head over to www.smbmsp.org/podcasts to subscribe to the SMBMSP ListenUp via iTunes or RSS!
The Winding Road
Ever have a plan? One you are sure is the one you’re destined to follow? Did it work out the way you thought?
Yeah, same here. Though its becoming less surprising as the years pass I think. The great part of following your gut and your heart in life’s great adventure is that you’re guaranteed an exciting one.
Its been awhile since I’ve talked here about the exciting challenges I’ve run into, and this year has been filled with a number of new ones. Events, people, and situations that make you think hard about what you’ve chosen to do. They give you another perspective that you may not have had when you started.
I speak, of course, about the challenges and choice of freelance consulting. Taking the world by the tail and making the most of your skills and knowledge in a new and exciting way. The great things about plans is that they always tend to deviate… to zig when you plotted a zag, or that the situation you thought would take place doesn’t seem to develop.
For many who attempt it, this is simply known as the Plan B effect. Of course, “The Plan” didn’t require a Plan B… so we never develop one. They tend to develop themselves, and that’s where the real excitement comes from.
In my case, I’m talking about SMBMSP, and there is so much to tell, so much to share on that front that I’m going to cover some of that over the coming months. What I hope to do is share a bit of the back story, some of the perspectives from my viewpoint on how we’ve got to where we are today, and what’s happening next. I guess I should call it “Plan SMBMSP”.
Its interesting to see where the long and winding road will take you.
Bringing Small Town Back
Small towns. I grew up in one, and wish many more folks had that opportunity to really get to know the people in your community. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality in our neighborhoods today, where the urban landscape seems to run unendingly into the horizon.
It was in small towns that communities were, more often than not, strong and supportive. In these small communities, people looked out for each other and most of the time made it easy for people to succeed. You relied on your neighbor because of the challenges and demands that were common to everyone.
For many of us, this kind of community didn’t exist. Or some of us started in those small communities and moved to much, much larger ones. The differences are profound and complex. Large communities tend to seem about numbers rather than people, and coming from an environment where you know everyone to one where you’re lost in the crowd can be overwhelming.
However, we’ve found another way to create unique, small communities that have tremendous value through the Internet. These innumerable, special-interest communities are not unlike small towns. They’re made up of many different individuals with wide-ranging perspectives and experiences, and they are the better for it.
I very much like to compare online communities to those small towns I speak so favorably about. Mainly because they reward the members as they participate and interact with each other. They open up new worlds of opportunity and knowledge that seem daunting at the outset, making friendships and acquaintances easier for many people lost in larger physical communities.
I see a number of small communities I belong to today, each one unique, offering something the others do not. These communities help define and direct who I am and what I do much like the small town I grew up in helped shape my world view and direction in life.
I truly hope you have great experiences with your small communities and help others to discover theirs.
Photo credit: Kodama (home)
Interview with Bryan Person at SMBMSP 29
Every time we wrap up a Social Media Breakfast – Minneapolis/St. Paul, we learn new things. Fortunately, this time we had the pleasure of sharing the morning with founder of Social Media Breakfast Boston (the original), Bryan Person! Here’s a quick interview we had.
Interview With Justin Ware
Yesterday must have been one of those days that I could keep the Flip cam in the pocket. There were too many good reasons to use it, one of which was the opportunity to talk with Justin Ware.
Justin is a local Minneapolis video production professional who not only embraces the ideals and tools of social media, but looks for creative ways to tell his client’s story. We met over coffee to talk about the opportunities, challenges, and rewards of working as independent professionals in the social space.
You can find Justin on line at:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/WarehousMedia
😢
“We are not enemies but friends.”
Live your life.
Completely.
Without fear.
Live it with Love, compassion, empathy, tolerance and joy.
Treat every person with the kindness, respect and dignity they deserve by the very virtue of being a human being.
Out riding this rainy, wet spring. Got 1,000 miles on the clock with more to come this season. #IMRG #IndianMotorcycle
Watching early seasons of #GoldRush. Fun seeing @GoldrushRick in season 3! Hope his new season is off to a good start!
Oh yes I did! https://www.instagram.com/p/BsRDO9ogSO0/?utm_source=ig_twitter_share&igshid=1kha5yzhjq3ot
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