Boomers' Blog

What are your thoughts about connecting with folks on more than one social media site? For example, do you find it beneficial for your Twitter connections to also be your LinkedIn connections? In large part, what I decide to do depends on how I met the person in the first place. If our initial cyberspace conversation was warm and inviting, then I am more apt to respond positively to a “let’s do Pinterest too!” suggestion. In the last few weeks I have met two women through Twitter: Marty Diamond of Diamond Website Conversion and Kim Starr of Starry Nights Social Media. [...]

Do you give presentations on social media? I have given them from time to time, yet sometimes struggle with how to approach the presentation. So often there is such a wide range of knowledge, background and experience in the audience, that it can be tough to teach to a common denominator. I want the “newbies” to at least get something out of their time with me. And I want the more experienced folks to benefit as well. How do you approach these kinds of situations? In keeping with the importance of “know your audience,” I always do as much research [...]

Tonight on my drive home from work I learned in a segment on National Public Radio that Newsweek will stop publishing its printed magazine at the end of 2012. It was a sad moment for me. With so many more people getting their news through social media, blogs and other digital sources, print magazines of a general nature like Newsweek simply can’t attract enough readership and advertising to make ends meet. For those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, there are other iconic magazines of our youth whose demise has preceded that of Newsweek – think [...]

When I grew up near a rural farming community in Wisconsin in the 1950s and 1960s, people pretty much knew everyone else’s business. That’s one of the charms and challenges of small town living. And if you didn’t already hear the coming and goings of townsfolk informally, you could read about their social visits, birthday celebrations, graduations and many other activities in our local weekly newspaper, the Manawa Advocate. I go into all this because of the many times that I am on Facebook and have that déjà vu sense of finding out other people’s business whether I planned to [...]

One night in July I started thumbing through the catalog of classes that Colorado Free University (CFU) sends me every month. Here is a great summary of CFU that I found on its website: “Colorado Free University is a lifelong learning center offering a wide array of skill-based and enrichment courses. More of a learning network than a traditional school, CFU draws its teachers from the community and all teachers are independent contractors. Classes are designed for busy adults who want to get useful information or new skills without having to commit a great amount of time.” I had taken [...]

Tonight, I spent three amazingly productive hours with three other people. Four of us, including our facilitator Nazli Nomanbhoy, rolled up our sleeves in the Hands-On Web and Social Media Marketing Lab at Colorado Free University on the east side of Denver.   This lab is one of the required courses for the Social Media Manager Certificate that I am pursuing through CFU, and in many ways, it was the best course so far. What I especially loved about our time together was the way we each got to have a chance to share what our immediate needs were regarding [...]

  One of the many reasons that people flock to the social media site Twitter (OK, so I couldn’t resist the pun) is the opportunity to track with the activities and observations of those they admire. Whether it is Lady Gaga or Deepak Chopra or the Dali Lama, our favorite sports figure or the leading thinkers in our industry, we have a window into their lives and their thoughts. Now the professional social media site LinkedIn has gotten on this band wagon by inviting LinkedIn members to follow people that LinkedIn has identified as influencers. So far, just over 100 [...]