The Best of the Red: Dust Bunny Edition

While doing some recent housekeeping in the back end of this site I uncovered some posts in my archives that many (read: most) of you missed, and I thought they were worthy of having the dust bunnies brushed off them.

I realize that the majority of you are newer readers and/or haven’t known me as long, so here are a few of that damn redhead you’ve likely never read:

• What my small town dentist can teach us about social media
• The internet is one big expo – what is your booth like?
• The high school notebook – social media casualty?
• How I accidentally started #ThankYouThursday
• Social media lessons from water skiing (and vice versa)
• Social media is like plastic baggies
• Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter are NOT the Holy Trinity

You can’t see it yet but I’ll be doing some restructuring of the direction of this blog in the near future. Everybody’s blog evolves over time, and this one is no exception. For details, visit my new “About” page.

Enjoy and thanks for reading. Stay tuned.

Be careful whom you “unfriend”

Something happened earlier that made me almost feel bad for somebody. Almost.

By now we know that “unfriend” was the official word of 2009. (I’m going to just set my Grammar Goddess cringing aside and go with it for this post.)

I’m in the process of (re)developing a brand for a client of mine, and while I know a lot of people in various disciplines of web design, graphic design, or any other kind of design in between, I had a certain former colleague in mind whom I knew would be able to conceptualize the perfect new logo for said client. I had worked with her in the past, had been impressed with her work, and she had expressed interest in working with me after the start of the new year.

I kept that in mind, and decided to take her up on it. I went to Facebook and tried to search for her in my friends, but to no avail. I remembered that she recently got married and her last name was different, so I searched again. No dice. So I searched one of our real-life mutual friends’ friends, and sure enough, she was in there.

Former colleague had unfriended me. To my knowledge I did nothing to offend her, and I’m left a little confuzzled.

No matter, I’ve got myriad contacts that would gladly take this referral, as it has the potential to be pretty lucrative and would be a great addition to any portfolio. But I can’t help but wonder why the heck this former colleague “unfriended” me. No, we don’t see each other every day, and no, we were never BFFs by any measure, but she was the perfect person for this assignment, and now … well, as my dad likes to say, “You snooze, you lose.”

The lesson to be learned from this?

Be careful whom you unfriend — it could cost you!

Image by robotclaw.

Real Men of Genius: Social Media edition

(Real men of genius!)

Tonight, I salute YOU, Mr. “I-Sync-My-Twitter-and-Facebook-Accounts”!

(Mr. I-Sync-My-Twitter-and-Facebook-Status!)

Yes, you sir, are oblivious that your Facebook friends really don’t care about your every move & your Twitter followers are a) mostly the same people, and b) annoyed as hell.

(Absolutely, completely oblivious!)

It’s imperative that you tell EVERYONE POSSIBLE about that ham sandwich you had for lunch, or that you are happy it’s football season, because you are just. that. important.

(I’m big on the internet! I’m big in Japan! Germany loves me!)

So go on and open a Ping.fm account, Mr. Twitter-Facebook-Syncer, because YOU are a REAL MAN OF GENIUS.

(Inspired by the Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” radio commercials, you can hear all of them here.)

WANTED: Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed interns to rock international PR/SM space.

Since I took this new job at the chamber, it’s no secret that I’m exhausted all the time. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do everything I want and need to do. And it sucks.

Aside from working full-time in Detroit, I also have a couple of my own clients. I knew it was going to be tough to juggle my own business and work for The Man, but I had no idea it was going to be this tough.

I love my clients too much to give them up, and it’s killing me that I haven’t been able to do as much as I normally would have for them had I not been driving 120+ miles a day every day and sleeping 4 hours a night.

So I’m looking for a little help in the form of a college intern or two. I’m currently structuring how the internship(s) will work, but know that this will be a for-college-credit internship, but possibly paid in the future, depending on performance.

Here are the criteria:

• must be a PR or related major
• preferably in Metro Detroit or Lansing area, but I will consider a remote intern
• internship will be minimum of one semester
• interested candidates please email me your résumé and links to your social profiles

I’ll give details about the actual clients and duties of the internship to candidates when they apply. It should be noted that both projects said intern(s) will be assisting me with are unlike anything they’d normally have a chance to work on, so this is a very unique and exciting opportunity.

So if you are interested, or know somebody who may be, please contact me by either leaving a comment, emailing me, or calling 248.667.8229.

Thanks!

The stuff I can’t go without reading every day.

The other day I did something long overdue — I pruned through my RSS feeds and hit “mark all as read.” To you this may not seem like a big deal but to me it felt so liberating — like the geek girl’s equivalent of burning her bra. For weeks I knew I was falling behind on reading all my RSS subscriptions; it got to the point that I was actually afraid of opening up my RSS reader of choice because I knew it would asplode.

Now I’m starting over at Square One with my RSS feeds, but it’s not like I haven’t kept up with things. I always keep up with my email, and there are some subscriptions (mainly newsletters) that I read every day. I post a lot of interesting things to my Facebook, and people I see often in real life tell me that they love the links I post and ask how I find them all.

So I’m going to share with you my daily reads — what pops into my inbox every day that I usually take time to at least skim over to see if there’s anything interesting and worth sharing. My life is about to get a helluva lot busier in coming weeks so I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with them all, so if you’re that big of a fan of the information I share, here’s your chance to find most of my sources in one place.

In no particular order:

The New York Times - I’ve been getting their headlines in my inbox for years. In fact, for so long I can’t remember how long exactly. I’m a big fan of The Times.

Advertising Age - In particular, I get their headlines in AdAge MediaWorks, Creativity, Digital, and TalentWorks

Copyblogger – OK so it’s a blog & I subscribe to it via RSS, but it’s one that I absolutely don’t ever want to miss so I receive it via email as well. It’s all about copywriting, content marketing, social media, and full of awesome interesting tips and information. Oh, and it’s a lot of fun.

Lateral Action - also a blog and from the creator of Copyblogger, it’s just as fun and interesting. Per its about page, it “provides tips and techniques that help you focus on doing remarkable things, rather than getting trivial things done or never moving beyond ‘creative thinking.’”

Marketingprofs - I’m not an official paying member (yet) but I’m a big fan nonetheless. I highly recommend their Get to the Point! newsletters. I subscribe to a lot of them, maybe all, I don’t remember. They’re short, sweet little nuggets of marketing goodness that stay true to their name and well, get to the point. A couple of my favorites are Small Business, Marketing Inspiration, and Daily Fix, but I love them all.

Fast Company - words can’t express how much I love Fast Company. I receive their Best of Fast Company newsletter, as well as their Tech Weekly, Leadership Weekly,and their Ethonomics newsletters.

Social Media Today - it’s a weekly newsletter but I highly recommend visiting SocialMediaToday.com for a nice daily roundup of all the most interesting blog posts in the social media world. When I find myself neglecting my RSS feeds, this is where I go to get a nutshell overview of what’s being said in the sphere. If there’s something you’d like to see (or not see) on SMT, tell my friend Ari.

Ragan’s Daily Headlines - news, features, etc. for professional communicators worldwide. I don’t read this one as often as I read the others, but the themes are similar to the other stuff I read.

Help A Reporter Out [HARO] – a brilliant idea from Peter Shankman. The gist – it’s a 3x daily digest of queries from journalists from all over, looking for sources for all kinds of topics. It’s nice and organized into sections of topics/themes, and I don’t always have time to scroll through all of them but whenever I do, I usually find some reporter somewhere that’s looking for somebody I know, so I pass the info on to them to contact said reporter. For example, not long ago, a writer was looking for a feng shui expert for a story, and I whaddya know, I just happen to know a woman who is a feng shui expert, so I passed the reporter’s query on to her. This kind of thing gives you good karma and an insight into the trends that reporters are currently writing about. Also, it continues to remind me that I know some extremely interesting people.

So there you are. This is the stuff I at least skim every day, and where I find most of my news. Do you have any daily reads that you just can’t go without? I’m curious to know if other people are as spongy as I am when it comes to this stuff.

Bunny picture by tm_lv.

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