Over on his Learnstreaming blog, Dennis Callahan writes about the difference between signing up for social media and joining: Having a social media account (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin) doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve joined. It means you’ve signed up. It’s like signing up for the gym. You can say that you belong to the gym but if you don’t get on the equipment and exercise, what benefit is there to your... Read more →

Allyson Kapin, co-founder of the Rad Campaign, and I had the opportunity to record a Social Good podcast with Allison Fine for the Chronicle of Philanthropy about the demise of Delicious and the issues that arise when free tools disappear. In the podcast, Allyson Kapin makes some excellent points about the need to not put all your eggs in one social media basket and makes a plug for open source... Read more →

Jane Hart writes an interesting post on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to nurturing social media in organizations, making the excellent point that bottom up support of existing social media activities will work better than imposing social media use from the top down. What I've been observing in my work with clients, though, is a tendency to use top-down strategies to support bottom-up initiatives, especially in organizations where they're just delving... Read more →

Yesterday was a typical day for me as a knowledge worker--lots of unrelated problems to solve, ranging from troubleshooting an issue with a Wordpress blog I was setting up for a client to gathering information on employment statistics for people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having this kind of wide-ranging work to do. Even the specialists among us have found their job duties broadening in this... Read more →

Much of my work over the past few months has been focused on helping several organizations get up and running with social media. Last week I was doing a debrief with one of my clients on how we'd used Facebook and Twitter to support an event and how the results weren't as successful as they'd hoped. There were multiple reasons for this, unconnected to the the technology, but one issue... Read more →

Several years ago I was going to fly with a friend who'd never been on a plane before. He told me what he hated most about the idea of flying was that he wasn't "in control." This was a person who never let anyone else drive the car because he only trusted himself to make the split-second decision to swerve or brake should trouble strike. In helping him try to... Read more →

The other day, Stephen Downes posted the graphic above--without comment, which it didn't really need because the graphic says it all. And the graphic reminded me of a wonderful recent blog post by Kivi Leroux Miller on creating website content your visitors really want, which suggests that most people who visit your site or blog or whatever come with specific questions and your job is to answer those questions. Usually... Read more →

In a previous post, I shared some lessons learned in planning for the virtual career fair we piloted in the spring with several Pennsylvania counties. Today I'm going to share some lessons we learned during implementation. Make presentations more interactive and visually interesting--While a few of our presenters had some experience in presenting online, most did not. We ran practice sessions ahead of the actual events, but these were primarily... Read more →

< One of the projects I completed earlier this month for a client of mine was an online career fair. It was geared toward middle and high school students, their parents and educators. Our goal was to expose them to career exploration information and some summer job search tips and techniques. The event took place over a three-day period, with a "teaser" webinar the week before the career fair to... Read more →

For the past few months, I've definitely been blogging less, in part because I've been doing training on social media for several clients. I thought it made sense to share some of what I've been working on, so here are some links. They owe much to the WeAreMedia curriculum developed by the ever-wonderful Beth Kanter and the folks at NTEN. Introduction to Social Media--This webinar and wiki resource page gives... Read more →