Boomers' Blog

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 [...]

Recently HubSpot Blog published an article by Pamela Vaughn entitled “New Study by LinkedIn Shows How User Mindset Affects Social Media Marketing.” The article summarizes research done by the social media website LinkedIn. This research contrasts the mindsets people have when they are using social media sites for professional purposes vs. personal purposes. It got into why people use different social media networks and what they expect from them, along with the emotions they feel when participating on them. Here is a link to this article for you to read more: http://ow.ly/dZL8q What especially intrigued me was that toward the [...]

Who are your social media buddies? By that, I mean folks who you met through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media sites and who then became more than just a cyberspace connection. They became a friend. These folks may help you figure out the nuances of that particular social media site. Maybe they can be counted on to share your posts on Facebook or retweet them on Twitter. Perhaps they are the ones who took you aside privately and pointed out how you might have handled a situation differently on that site. For some reason, when I think of [...]

Today I met with a young woman just couple years out of college to brainstorm how she could use LinkedIn to help find her next job. Wanting to move away from the nonprofit sector where she has worked since college, she is struggling with how to “brand” herself in her headline on LinkedIn, a professional social media site.  She doesn’t want to limit herself by how she frames her headline, as she is applying for a wide variety of jobs. I encouraged her to include her major areas of expertise in her headline, for after all, she could use 120 [...]

One of the great benefits of expanding my connections on Twitter is that I have more folks offering me helpful tips in the way of articles and blogs via their Twitter posts. To me, these posts are gems that come into my life because I am active on Twitter. Sometimes I search proactively on Twitter using a keyword or two. Other times a post in my Twitter feed jumps out at me and captures my fancy. Just this week Javier Arronis @javierarronis tweeted about a article in Pro Blogger with a number of useful pointers about becoming more professional and successful as [...]