End of Year Lists

December 21, 2016 by MlleD

Next year my lists will be all hand-lettered.

The Winter Solstice is here and with it Mercury Retrograde. Although the latter comes with a little more woo woo (then again thinking about Stonehenge, perhaps they are equally wooish), they both offer the opportunity for reflection and planning. In what is now an annual tradition, here’s my end of the year business list for 2016.

Annual Digital Business Goals

1. Blog more often and on a consistent basis.

You, me, everyone with a stake in this interwebs game. My personal goal is 27 posts in 2017. I’m getting that number counting 2 posts per month , with an extra three thrown in for good measure/luck as the year ends in a 7:)

I reckon it takes me a week to think up a topic, and begin a rough draft (outline format) and then another week to flesh it all out with pretty pictures. Given my profession, I tend to overdue the images bit – i.e.: they’re definitely not just grabbed from the internet and stuck in there. Even when they are plucked out of the ethernet, they are always altered. In short, can take some time for the image aspect of the post, this post proving the exception to the rule.

Whatever your current blogging schedule / post count is, why don’t you try setting a goal to ramp up output in 2017? Mine is a four-fold ambitious increase, but 20% is good too. There’s a lot of debate about long post vs short posts, that’s a topic for another post (!), but the importance of consistency cannot be overstressed. Google definitely favours new content.

2. Review All Social Media Accounts.

Keep, exterminate or even, gasp, add more? This year I blogged for 153 days in a row as part of a public art project (A fictional blog set in 1938, I don’t count it towards business blogging) where I focused solely on twitter as an outreach platform. Yet, I noticed way more likes on the instagram end of things even though I didn’t post anything there (my account is dormant — it was all other folks sharing). Last Saturday, I took a delightful calligraphy workshop at Fox and Flourish. The owner Christina had a hashtag, but noted she mainly uses instagram. Both of these got me wondering if I should (despite loathing this word) reboot the account.The value of said likes etc is also up for debate, and that too is a topic for another post.

3. Start a Newsletter / Develop A Mailing List

This is the year we too, will offer one of those annoying pop-ups to subscribe to the newsletter full of unicorns and other magical wisdom.

4.Plan to unplug

Every year I attempt to conquer my inbox and get down to the mythical state of “inbox zero” (coined by Merlin Mann). I do, and then a few days later the breeding begins. This year, I will plan to conquer the inbox every quarter at a minimum. Also to unsubscribe from e-mail lists that no longer align with my personal or business goals. Sometimes the newsletters are great, and yet they can represent a pressure to perform, to be, to buy into something….after a while you realize it ain’t gonna happen.

Creativity comes from boredom and doing nothing. It’s been proven. I can’t find the source quote, but intuitively you already know this.

5. Nap more.

Ok, this one’s not digital, at least not yet.

Cheers, and Happy 2017!

To Quit Social Media or To Fade Away?

November 25, 2015 by MzD

I bumped into a friend/colleague the other day on the street and had a great chat about public art and whatnot. Later, I received an email from him, but didn’t get it right away because my email forwarding wasn’t working. When I did finally open it, rather than reply right away, I had seen something on twitter he might appreciate, so I immediately jumped on twitter to mention it to him.

And … crickets.

He wasn’t there.

I couldn’t quite grasp this, thinking he must have changed his profile or something. I have known him as an extremely prolific tweeter. So I emailed and he confirmed that he had left twitter. And, even more dramatic, deleted all his social media profiles. Gasp!

I confess, one of my first thoughts was, “Aaack — but you had so many followers (in the thousands) and “you only followed a few hundred” – your follower/followee ratio* was fantastic! “….

I admired his decisive move to cut the ties to the hive mind and lose the what he called “junk language” to focus on his own work and keep critical thinking free from the sometimes banal or trivial tone of these spaces.

He is not alone in his flight from social media. In the last couple of weeks, 2 other people that I know have also dropped off the airwaves. I also deleted that you-know-who app from my phone, and after a few days of withdrawal noticed I hardly ever go there anymore. And generally get a bit of the doldrums when I do. I wrote about social media fatigue in the spring.

What To Do When You Leave The Shoe

So if you’re considering leaving the hive mind, here are some tips for off-roading:

If you’re using social media for professional purposes, it’s a good idea to keep the profile live. You could tweet something simple “Not currently keeping this account active” and change your bio line to emphasize where to reach you (like your website (which should already be there of course) – or linkedin …)
Announce or have a status report on your departure. Although there’s no need to announce if you’re only taking a short break— like a few days, or hours;). Consider if this is a temporary (like 1-3 months ) absence or a longer term. Your profiles should reflect that.
Unless you’re taking the Kurt Vonnegut approach. Then by all means delete and be done with it.
The return. When you come back, you don’t need to say “blowing the dust off this account”. Just start tweeting, posting etc. No one cares about the dust. Unless they are an archivist. Or you’re famous, in which case you have a handler, and probably aren’t even allowed to tweet by yourself.
The return if you went AWOL by a total delete: If you want to start completely fresh, with new friends, new followers then you might want to consider more carefully how many accounts you keep live, how many people you follow / friend etc. It was the overwhelming noise that drove you away in the first place, no? Why go all hustle and bustle right away?

If you want to disappear completely, well good luck with that. It’s a challenge to wipe away all traces, but I’m sure it can be done.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Social Media Fatigue

March 9, 2015 by MzD

Social Media Overwhelm — (with apologies to the master Mr. Schulz)

Or the incessant nagging of social media and how to resist its petulant demands.

A few days ago, the news spread that Google+ is on its last legs, as the G giant re-structures and puts ‘Google’s Photos and Stream products’ on the front burner. I will not miss the product, as my primary interactions were half-hearted attempts to engage in a space that I couldn’t quite figure out how public it was. FB is clearly for “friends”, Twitter is public (sure you can make it private, but what’s the point?) and G+ was a too many options with confusing circles type of place. I helped set up a number of client’s business pages and that was about the size of it.

And yet even as its passing is widely pronounced there are pundits who are still assured of its G for giant status.

This leads me to let out a big sigh and slump my shoulders.
I’ve developed social media fatigue —keeping up with the tweets— how much to tune in, how much to tune out, this new product, that new app. It’s a jungle out there.

I’ve noticed symptoms of social media fatigue, feeling overwhelmed, anxious or just plain ol’ bored.

When Twitter first came online in 2008, I started to notice all my favourite bloggers using this new platform. It seemed fun , but I held out till 2009;) opening two accounts, one for business one for personal needs.

At first it was always fun. Everyone was so pithy and content so curated I felt like I as at the office water-cooler and the latest greatest conference at the same time. After a while it became a kind of chore. Then, something might happen — this news event, that conference, this conference, and I was hooked in again.

It’s a see saw.

I totally see the value of social media and yet I see its tendency to be a beautiful countryside road overblown with billboards. Yuck.

So what’s a poor girl to do in the face of a behemoth.

Breathe – Dr. Andrew Weil recommends the 4-7-8 relaxing breath exercise. Briefly, (because hey you’re busy:) inhale slowly for 4, hold for 7, and exhale with a whoosh sound for 8.
Focus – How many social media accounts do you really need? Pick one or two accounts to keep active. (unless of course you’re a big company and you have staff handling this for you in which case why are you reading this?) If you must have several accounts, but are truly only active on one, then let your readers where to find you. ie: I have this FB page, but I’m really active on pinterest. Join me there (with link).
Prep – your content – (which is definitely not only about you!) in advance. Articles, fun stuff, etc. And yet remember that timing is relevant. Careful with those pre-tweet strategies when something big is happening in the news and you’re tweeting rainbows and unicorns.
Know – your audience. Which is the same as #2. If you’re speaking to twitter, use #hashtags, @replies, learn the lingo and, again, don’t spew out links to me-me-me every two minutes.
Be Nice – social media makes it so easy to get caught up in the moment in a not such nice way. Bad service at X department store (@BIGbigstore – hey I ……***&&&%%%$$(((!!!) – that’s really noise and isn’t helping you and your brand. (I speak from experience – ahem) Of course if you’ve got a real complaint and have already tried being nice, go ahead and leverage the social media angle. But try to be polite. (I’m Canadian;)

You can find me on twitter @diamedia or @deanneachong. There’s a whole bunch of other accounts that are wasteland and I’ll follow my own advice soon and update them with where to find me. Soon come. Soon come.