Offline Life + Online Life = Life
A few years ago, during the brief time when I thought maybe I shouldn’t work in crafts and creativity and was instead working at a tech startup, I had the pleasure of having coffee with Alexandra Samuel. She’s a powerhouse thinker about social media – not in a slimy soc-med way, but in an intelligent, big-picture, empowering way. She recently spoke at TEDxVictoria about why calling our offline life “real life” diminishes the legitimacy of our online experiences, contributions and relationships. I wish I’d been there to hear her speak, but the beauty of TED and...
Read MoreThe Great Wall of Facebook
Not being on Facebook gives me a new perspective on companies using Facebook for marketing. (And no, my perspective is not that I miss the marketing.) The thing is that marketing doesn’t reach people who are not on Facebook. Now, most social-media users are on Facebook, so if I were a marketer I wouldn’t care about not reaching the few people in my target market who don’t use it. But as a marketer, I might start finding that a slowly increasing number of the people I reach out to directly (bloggers, influencers, etc.), are not on Facebook. After all, isn’t it the...
Read MorePride and Prejudice and Social Media and Big Business
So you heard about that whole kerfuffle last week, when Urban Outfitters was accused of ripping off an indie crafter’s jewelry design? If this is news to you, read the crafter’s post, the tweeter’s post about it all going viral, Regretsy’s follow-up, and Urban Outfitter’s eventual response. In sum, what happened was that a maker of jewelry alleged Urban Outfitters stole her design; the social media craftosphere picked it up and spread the allegation like wildfire; Regretsy pointed out that while the crafter likely didn’t rip anyone else off, her designs...
Read MoreFacebook Shakedown
When I went to sleep on Friday night I had 535 Facebook friends. Today I have 416. I know each of those 416 people. Some are close friends, some old classmates, some relatives, some acquaintances, many are crafters and colleagues. I do not know the 119 people I unceremoniously unfriended yesterday. I may have met a few of them briefly, but most I never met and likely never will. Why had I accepted their friend requests, then? It’s not because I had the goal of having as many Facebook friends as there are members of the United States Congress. Mostly it’s because, though I was very...
Read MoreNorthern Voice 2010: The Great, the Meh and the Ugly
I didn’t much enjoy attending the Northern Voice personal blogging conference last year, but I decided to give it another go this year, for several reasons. First and foremost, in the last fifteen months I’ve met a lot of local bloggers. So I was more comfortable in the community than I was last year, and I knew I wouldn’t be compelled to stand in a corner feeling shy and confused. On top of that, I decided to pitch a talk. My talk was rejected, but I was asked to sit on a panel instead. So I felt like I got a cookie, even though I actually wasn’t too jazzed about the...
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I write here about creativity, business, crafts, publishing and books.
