Oct 10, 2009 | blog
Sometimes I get tired of telling the same story, but very often, that’s exactly what it takes to induce change. That change is the very root of social media and its associated tools, networks, and concepts. Since everyone learns at a different pace, and in different ways, it becomes necessary to relate the concepts of something new, multiple times.
Take the many layers of an organization for example. You have the executive level, the management level, and the worker level. There are several variations on these, some unique to different industries and professions, but bare with me for a moment.
Each of these levels requires the same information to be related in different, unique ways. Sometimes it could be adding or removing detail, in other cases it might be exchanging case studies to make the point more relevant to the person listening or reading. In any case, being able to read your audience and recognizing how the recipient needs to digest the information is part of the puzzle of a good communications professional.
This is but one of many skills the social media professional needs to have in their toolkit, and goes back to being a multi-disciplinarian, what our grandparents used to call “a jack of all tradesâ€.
Photo Credit: Mykl Roventine
Mar 20, 2009 | happiness
Reaching out and learning new things from people I didn’t know I needed to learn from.
Mar 1, 2009 | blog
Spending a week with a different operating system on my laptop is like learning a new religion. It’s intensely interesting, insightful, a true learning experience! Ultimately it teaches one what they took for granted about the things they already knew and cherished.
So I spent a refreshing week on the linux side of the operating system fence last week. In the end, I had to come back to Windows. It wasn’t the operating system, it wasn’t the software, it wasn’t the stability, nor was it any of the big things that people run into when trying to run any flavor of linux.
Instead, it was the little things – very little things. Like not having the play/pause, and volume buttons on my laptop not work with the media player. Or the media player not playing WMA files by default without a trip to the command line to make it work – yeah it matters, I have 15GB of tunes in WMA that I’m not re-encoding.
I ran into a number of things that simply needed a little tweak or manual intervention. Any one of them nothing at all a real problem. All the really important things just simply worked. For example, I didn’t have to find one single driver for my laptop hardware for Ubuntu 8.10 – it all worked out of the box. My favorite Firefox plug-ins, and therefore my main work environment, were all set up in the same amount of time that it takes on Windows – and worked just as expected. Email was set up in Evolution quickly and, again, just worked.
No, it was all the little things that added up made me decide I still needed to be running Windows. I’m less a “techy†person than I have been in the past, and while it’s fun to try new things, and experiment, I need a system that I don’t have to think about or fight with. I need something that simply works on every level at any point, and for me, Windows is that system.
So I’ll test Windows 7 a bit and then go back to Windows Vista until Win7 is released later this year.
Feb 27, 2009 | blog
Since Twitter is the current social media darling, I thought I’d record a few thoughts I’ve had about one of my favorite online tools. I’ve had the privilege of using Twitter for two years, and each and every person I’ve followed or had follow me along the way has taught me something new. So here we go.
Twitter is…
- a place for friends
- a news outlet
- a place to share your greatest failures & your most stunning achievements
- an attention getter
- a publishing platform
- a customer service tool
- a researcher’s dream
- vulgar
- the ace up your sleeve
- brilliant
- a new entertainment channel
- a social network
- a micro-blogging platform
- a marketing tool
- your community
- overwhelming
- 24x7x365 (always on)
- a level playing field for your ideas
- a sounding board for your thoughts
- a comment reel for your new book
- your starting place for your online excursions
- the place for your organization to learn about it’s customers
- a multicasting instant messenger
- a game changer
- a PR tool
- a messaging infrastructure
- a simple way to share & trade information
- can be inane
- is faster to publish to than anything else
- is where you go to learn
- your online “water coolerâ€
- a conduit into the lives of others
- a conduit into the idea stream of smart people
I’ve got a lot more input on what Twitter is than I could fit in this post, so I’ll work on fitting that into another format of some type. What is Twitter to you? I mean, what has Twitter brought to your life that you can’t believe you lived without before you discovered it?
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rickmahn
