Let's Prepare for Tomorrow

I have been doing what everyone has been doing over the last few weeks, spending a lot of time absorbing the news. Some of it has been shocking and some have been downright inspiring.

We have everyone from General Motors to local breweries refitting operations in order to produce the things we need. MIT (and isn't it always MIT), has developed a cheap ventilator design in response to our current need. People with sewing skills are whipping up face masks for our healthcare providers.

I've asked myself "why now?". I mean I know why now,but why not before. Why didn't we have a design for a $100 ventilator before?

I believe that people are good. I believe that people are innovative. But we don't know what we don't know.

There needs to be a repository for ideas. A place where people can say, hey this thing is pretty important, or we could really use something that does this. This place could be accessed by groups like new MIT students, or scout troops, or Bob and Alice in their garage looking for something to do.

I would be willing to put in the sweat equity - but I don't know where to begin. Any ideas?

Tweets, Updates, and Memes, oh my

I have curated content for newsletters for many years now, and I am seeing a trend. There is a lack of content being generated. This is not a ‘get off my lawn’ rant. This is a full-on ‘you should float down this stream of consciousness with me’ idea. 

Earlier today I was playing a game, the topic was ‘things you read’, I think ‘newspaper’ - the newspaper was not an option. We don’t really read newspapers anymore. Everything is fed to us via updates and updates to updates. Later on, I am researching items to curate for a client, when all I find on my topics are press releases. I don’t dislike press releases, they serve a purpose. But for the life of me, I could not find good original content.

 We are microblogging (tweets) instead of writing articles. We have preferred Instagram to Facebook. Can’t think of content - throw a quote on a graphic, post it and call it good (I am so guilty of this one) How may ‘articles’ have you read that is nothing more than the round-up of a tweet thread or Facebook comments? Way too many ‘writers’ are posting pictures of a tweet, describing the content of the tweet and calling it content.

 Where are the new and original ideas? Where are the thoughts and quality analysis with actual research to back it up? Are we too afraid of offending someone that we no longer create something interesting and thought-provoking? (oh screw that and get off my lawn)

 I’ve seen a lot about simplifying our lives a lot recently, not a new idea (Thoreau anyone?). But I think we are going to see a backlash to all of the drips and drabs of information and have had thrown at us in the last 5 years or so. We are going to see a trend towards Marie Kondo-ing that crap and grabbing what brings us joy and sinking our teeth into it.

 This is not a generational thing. Not a Mellinials have no attention span thing. We will all binge-watch a good TV series. Super successful YouTuber Shane Dawson has stopped making frequent 15-minute videos and replaced them with long-form hour-long interview videos which he releases every few months and they get millions of views.

 It’s time to slow down, embrace your organic, artisanal thoughts and ideas and present them to the world as quality content.

I've Become a Woman of a Certain Age

Holding my new born grandson three years ago should have been a clue, but I was too delighted to think about it.

Buying an assortment of reading glasses might have been an indication, but why fight the opportunity to purchase new accessories!

Laying on the table in my Doctor's Office, and she asks her assistant "What normally causes abdominal pain in a woman of her age?"... Her age?!?! What the hell? Give me anitibiotics and stop running tests on me! .. it was starting to dawn on me.

Then one day the perfect storm...new lightbulbs installed, a mirror and my glasses on..I saw it...when did that happen to my skin? what is that? Holy Hell...wrinkles!

Like a lightening bolt, it hit me...I had become a woman of a certain age!

This is not what I thought my life would be like when this happened...it is an awful lot like my 20's.

• I'm single. Well divorced...can someone explain to me why the difference on all the official forms one needs to fill out? Maybe it indicates a level of wisdom that tells you that man you meet at the bar on a Thursday night, probably doesn't have a decent job to get to on Friday morning so walk on by. 

• I am scouring the cosmetics counters, though now serums, acids and moisturizers have replaced glosses and blue eyeliner (shout out to the 80's). 

• Bras have a whole new purpose but are still vitally important. 

• My roommate is 22!...but she is my daughter and way more judgy about who visits than previous roommates. 

• I have a daily perscription, but it is Lexipro and not Ortho-Novum. 

• I dance around my kitchen to Aerosmith...now old men are singing the songs and I have to find the music on the classics station. 

All of this aside, I am probably lucky. I have been a fan of old movies since my teen years. I  have always loved the women of the golden age of  Hollywood, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Katherine Hepburn. By the time I knew of them, they were no longer ignenues but glamourous fabulous women of a certain age with a quick wit and a sharp tongue. These were the women I wanted to be.  I can now walk in their footsteps made by low heeled comfy shoes, make young men blush and ignore the rules.

Now is the time. I can be unapologetically fabulous. I no longer need to put up with bullshit and if something doesn't make me happy I can change it. It's OK because I have become A Woman of A Certain Age!

Did You Know? Stories That Should Be Told

There are fascinating things on the internet! Stories that, if I were an author or film maker I would completely research, devour and bring to the masses. Alas, I am neither of these things, I am just a fan of the obscure, and I will share with you.

Sister Juliette was a sharp shooting nun who left the order to join the French Resistence during World War Two. I looked all over and could not find a book about this woman.  This has got to be a great story. Why did she become a nun? Was her decision to leave hard? Did her faith interfere or enhance her drive to kill Nazis?

If anyone knows of a biography about her please leave the title in the comments below.



I am a huge fan of the golden age of Hollywood. I love black and white movies. One of my favorite actresses is Hedy Lamarr. Not only was Ms. Lamarr beautiful she was courageous and smart too. She escaped her controlling Austrian husband, who was selling arms to Germany by drugging her maid at a party and jumping a train!

As if shocking European audiences with her provocative role in the film Ecstasy and a mad cap escape were not enough, she was also the co-inventor of a technology that is still used today by cell phones and GPS. She understood frequency, sound and light waves, and how these things move...I'm still trying to figure out how the asprin knows where you hurt.

We should stop complaining about the lack of girls studying science and technology and tell this story...

Pet Peeve: Lessons Learned, 5 Blog Post Ideas and the Government Shutdown

Coming up with new blog posts ideas can be hard. The "experts' will tell you that titles with numbers (lists) and tying your business into a top news story will help drive traffic. With the end of the government shutdown I am bracing myself for a slew of blog posts with titles like What CEOs can learn from the Government Shutdown and Top 5 effects of the Shutdown on Your Business.

ARGH! At this point, these kinds of posts show a lack of creativity. If I read a post I want to know what you really learned...

Instead of going on a rant, let me make some suggestions:

·        What Politicians can learn from watching Scandal

·        Tips for Congress from Seasoned Circus Freaks

·        My Top 10 Road Rage Hand Gestures to use in Washington

·        Real Housewives Budgeting Lessons for Congressmen

·        The Care and Feeding of Your Constituents

Value your Customer Service with Social Media

As part of my unemployment induced insomnia I have found myself listening to podcasts in an attempt calm myself to sleep at night. In the inaugural episode of Scott Stratten and Allison Kramer’s Unpodcast they make a point that I have been seeing in action in my job search. The under-valuing of customer service in the business world.

Though I am not only looking at social media jobs, I see that most companies treat the use of social as only a marketing tool to be used by interns. I am not arguing the validity of this mind set, but social has a few more uses than SEO. The social contribution of SEO is in content, organic search and the ability to add new content to your website. It works in conjunction with Ad Words, keywords, meta-tags and other back end magic.

The real value of social comes when you consider its use from the viewpoint of your customers. You remember customers, the people who provide you with their hard earned cash so that your business can survive. How do customers view your social media platforms?

Your customers see your social media platform as an extension of your sales counter, your phone line, your info@email account. Yes you are posting content so that you are seen as a thought leader and to drive engagement, but are you responding? Businesses want to be the rock stars of their industry, but only rock stars can stand on a stage and perform to earn a following. If a customer was standing in your store asking about your widgets and your staff ignored them you would fire your staff, yet many times you see customers asking questions on social platforms only to be ignored or answered after a long wait.

You cannot fix your Yelp reviews by continuing to mistreat and mistrust your customers.

You cannot hand out a brochure and expect a customer to hand back a credit card.

YOU MUST ENGAGE!

Train your social staff in your key messaging and product knowledge.

Train your sales and customer service staff in the monitoring and use of your platforms.

Implement monitoring and social engagement as part of your everyday sales process.

Analyzing the Analytics

As much as I enjoy writing and researching sharable content for my social media platforms, I also like to take time to look at the analytics to this blog. Mostly I find it amusing that Russia, Germany, Ukraine and France round out the top five countries of my readers after the US. This morning I was taken aback by the top referral sites for the past week…porn sites.

Now, I guess it would have been a brilliant move for me to post links on these sites to build SEO…maybe if I had researched the search behavior of those who visit such sites – but alas I have not done such a thing. Though I guess I should have known given that my top post of all time is the one I wrote about employee engagement titled Are Your Employees practicing the World’s Oldest Profession? Or maybe tiara wearing is more tantalizing than I ever knew.

Digging further into the numbers, I see that I need to re-activate my Tumblr account. This is something I never should have deactivated since people I respect liked the page and decided to use the same template I chose. I let it go because it was just one more platform, and it didn’t always pull from my other sites. I hope they have improved this feature.

Networked Blogs has always been a good traffic driver, for me I attribute it to the Facebook integration and the resulting support of family and friends.

Scoop.it is an old favorite, that I am going to try for a while to see what the results are – I have been using it for a while. It’s great for curating and searching content, the site also makes it your posts visually appealing. They have added Newsletter creation to their features. You can export your content to MailChimp, email directly to yourself or download the file.  This is an example of what the freebie generated newsletter can look like.

What are your favorite referral sites?