Lizkdc Dislocation

Me and the Buttons: a Bevvy of Social Accounts, and Anxiety

You know that metaphor about challenging times, where you talk about having to rebuild a plane while you are still flying it?

It's interesting how much social media feels like that, all the time. Right now I am having one of those moments where I feel like I am unscrewing the tail while rejiggering the wheels and talking to someone on the ground and, now, the metaphor is dying out.

Vintage Postage Stamp Social Media Buttons courtest of Dawghouse Design via Tutorial9.net

But suffice it to say, I'm just in the middle of a fairish-ly big life change—a new job—and it's making me stop and think about the accounts and channels and networks represented by the plethora of buttons on my toolbars, and just how to use them. And evento  try to retrace how they got there, over the last few years of my life.

I started this blog on Typepad in January, 2007, after just having moved back to Boston from Washington, DC.  As I went through that previous massive life change (city, job, friends, family), it was a way to reach out to a few people close to me but far away.  It was also a way to create a practice around writing and reflecting,  and a means to push myself to share a little of that work, against the grain of my tendency to put on a game face with much of the world.  Even if  the audience was only a few people. Even if it the audience was occasionally, only a theoretical one.

At times, I wove this space into my professional life, with occasional posts about the craft of web content, or, like so many others, used it to register a meta-comment on social media itself. But mostly I wrote about my life outside of work.  Though, at the same time, I generally found myself to shying away from using it as a form of reportage.  I've written about a hike, a film, a moment in political discourse or a glimpse of a neighborhood scene. But not, generally, about what I did at work this week, an argument in my family, worries about the economy or my bank account. Although, those realities must often have leaked through in what I did write, and especially in the many long gaps between posts.

Social Media: Recession-Fighting Machines?

Late winter grass blades, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Will social media help us from the worst economic downturn of our time?

One of the key destructive effects of a market collapse is that things of value aren't being connected to, and exchanged by, people who would value them. The contents of social media are people, their skills, creativity, insights, and communities, and the most powerful thing that media can do is help those valuable brains, hands, and hours not go to waste.

Post as Wishing Well

IMG_2077.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Path of light, Fort Point Channel (ICA with DBomb walk)

This is a post of wishing myself good luck in a conversation I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

Good luck, self! Throws in penny.

In an interesting moment of referentiality, the witty and helpful Chris Brogan,a Twitter contact of mine (I connected with him at a social media event and via his blog), happened to tweet mysteriously: "Are you sexy in person?"  (uh, not to me personally but to all 9000 of his followers)  which led to this great post.

It's about the ever-comes-in-handy confidence and value in one self, actually, rather than literally the sexy. But yay for a subject line that everyone will click on!

Connecting with the Actual Interviewer, Not the One You Imagine

IMG_1734.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Late Sunday, wild azalea blossoms

Today I had a happy experience during a call with the HR professional at a company I am very interested in, wherein it went well enough that she kind of stopped me mid-spiel and said she'd already decided to include my resume with those she will present to the hiring manager. I almost said "wait, there's more" before my brain caught up with my mouth and I said, "Great! Thanks!" and shut up.

I wonder if it had anything to do with a new tactic I made up this morning before the call.

I spent ten minutes just brainstorming not about the job,  but about the recruiter as a person, writing lists of possible issues from her perspective.

I asked myself: if I were she, what would I want from me?

Tweet Your Way to a Job (Social Media Breakfast 7)

Social Media Breakfast  7 Boston

The top sign that a professional event was worth it to the audience occurs when each participant gets home.  If you find yourself sorting through your notes, checking out new sites, updating your feeds, and adding people to your contacts, you know you've found a good one.

The golden snitch is our old friend, relevance.  I could walk into a Meetup of astrophysicists, gain an accurate sense of how cool and impressive the folks are, and understand almost none of their discussion.  I could walk into a meeting of Flash developers, understands some of what they are saying, be impressed by the esoteric parts of the conversation that are 10 game levels above my grasp, file a few useful tidbits away for the next time I work with Flash developers, but that would be the end of that.

The Social Media Breakfast, organized by the excellent Bryan Person, provided that great sense of an exact match: the speakers were all dealing with the questions that I'm *already* thinking about.  There was a lot of "new" (names, insights, links, etc.) but it was new information that fit into and extended the set of things I work on or am curious about right now.  In a trifecta, the talks were valuable, the hanging out with people was valuable, and later that day I was busily making a list of people, ideas, and links to follow up on. Bing bing bing (sound of imaginary pinball machine).

So much so that not only am I indulging in my old skool long-form blogging about SMB (ironic, given the Twitter-worship going on that morning) but will divide it into two posts on stuff from the speakers, and stuff from my table-mates.

Speaker Value from the Breakfast

Stever Robbins, "Get It Done Guy"
I am a junkie for Lifehacker, GTD,  and The Spirit of Getting Organized, a Backpack subscriber and 37Signals fan.  I consider the self-management of time and individual action the number one skill that my traditional liberal arts schools not only did not teach, but had no words to express. So this site went into my Netvibes.

Stever began what turned out to be a morning-long love fest with Twitter, a techno-crush in which all the speakers are still in the throes. Stever has a gift for aphorisms: one was that in social media "frequency trumps duration."

Done

We launched. DesignMyRoom.com is live.

Of Garments, Grit, and Gawking

DSC02428.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Cosmic squirrel in Robert's loft workspace .

My business trip to New York this week was such a gas.

I got to watch the script I wrote (a web video tour for the SNW)  being produced in a recording studio by our celebrity designer, who is hilarious.

Robert, our host designer, continues to surprise me.  There he is, on TV and hobnobbing with the celebrities and all, semi-famous, about a foot taller than me and all skinny fashionista in his size 2 jeans and glittery jewelry and trademark sunglasses . . . and he picks up my little red suitcase as we trot rapidly from studio to his offices and carries it down the street.

In the cab, as my boss pitches one idea and he leans another way, he gives me the big, intelligent brown eyes: "don't YOU agree?"  "Why yes, I think that's a *fabulous*"....HEY.  Stop charming me.  One, I'm not sure I have enough  pull yet in this new company for this to even work for you.  Two, no fair.

But you know what?   If I MUST be manipulated, skillful warmth and charm are definitely a nice way to get the job done! There wasn't enough of that in DC.

Of Pretty Things, Peace of Mind, and Price Tags

DSC02603.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Japanese pavilion, bonsai house, National Arboretum, Washington DC

This week, as I plunged further into the world of home design and the markets that exist around it, I got excited and juiced at some points, and anxious, kind of sad, at others.  It had to do with an eternal problem for human people: the nexus between beauty and money.

Happy Last Slacker Day

DSC02356.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

My tiny garden: geraniums, marigolds, and impatiens.  The training wheels of flower growing.

Kathleen sent this eloquent and hilarious wish.

Happy Last Slacker Day!!

Tomorrow you rejoin us poor slobs who trudge and mumble our way through the murky knee-deep waters of American business.  Lucky you!  No longer must you suffer those wasted hours of independent thought and unbridled creativity.

Jobseeker's Tiny Tips on Tools

I am starting a whole new job tomorrow and I have a *leetle* bit of that stomach feeling you get at the top of a steep, unknown ski slope.

Since this is my first change of companies in a while, I am very much not an expert in job change.  In fact, my anxieties (about interviewing, about being without the certain status of a job for a while, about messing with my comfortable circle friends and routine in DC)  partly motivated the actions of my whole last year.  I was on a challenge to face the changes I feared.

But I found myself IMing and emailing with several folks from the old team in the last week about their potential searches, so I thought I'd write up a few experiences here, as some data that other might find helpful.

The Want Ads

Most useful online sites:

• Monster
• If your local paper has its own online listings, they may get some that don't appear elsewhere, so you probably want to sign up on their site.
• My local paper and many others are partnered with Monster, so  you get two for the price of one
• Idealist.org: an excellent source of jobs in the non-profit, association, and foundation world.
• Craig's List: believe it or not, an excellent resource with many items that do not seem to appear in the more official listings.  I think it's partly small companies and partly large companies with horrible HR where people need to do an end run by just going right to the public.

Really want to geek out? I set up the toolbar on my browser so I had a minimenu of the jobquest sites and could run through them right in a row very quickly.  I set up search agents on Monster and Idealist to email me once a week.