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Sources:

• In 2006, Chris Brogan’s words were Ask. Do. Share.
• In 2007, his words were seek, frame, build, bridge.
• In 2008, his goals were believe, loops, and farms.
• He wrote “Your 3 Goals for 2009.” His were Equip . Armies . Needles .
• Brogan’s 3 words for 2010 were Ecosystems, Owners, Kings.
• For 2011, his words were Reinvest. Package. Flow.
• As of when I’m writing this, I don’t know what his three words are for 2012.

Ana L. Flores worked in the television industry for over 15 years, as producer and creator of content, specializing in the Latino community. The co-founder of SpanglishBaby, the online community for those of us who are raising bicultural children, she is also at the helm of Latina Bloggers Connect, which connects brands with bloggers. Ana received the 2011 Latism Award for Best Latin@ Social Network Leaders in a tie with Rebecca Aguilar from Wise Latinas Linked. The mami of 4 year-old Camila, she carved time out of her busy life to talk to Mamiverse.

Ana received the 2011 Latism Award for Best Latin@ Social Network Leaders in a tie with Rebecca Aguilar of Wise Latinas Linked. Camila, she carved time out of her busy life to talk to Mamiverse.

Read the entire post for most info on Ana and her successes. Definitely worth watching.. and following.

My sister kept joking about being at JC Penney at 4am for the sale on boots. I know several coworkers who were at assorted Best Buys across the city trying to score on limited quantity items, some with success and some without. But that didn’t apply to me. In reality, there was only one thing I wanted enough to bave the shoping masses… an external hard drive for my laptop. (By the way, my sister did get her boots, and she didn’t even leave home before 9am.)

Last year I bought a 1.5TB portable hard drive for less than $100. I considered that to be a very good deal. I was looking for at least a 2TB drive for approximately $80. I did some research and found that someone had pulled together a list of the best Black Friday deals for hard drives. I took this as by “go by” of places to look. 

As you can imagine, the $99 3TB drives at Best Buy were gone by the time I got there. I really should not have had breakfast before leaving home. That may have cost me vital time. But two doors down, at Office Max, I found a 2TB drive for $75. Score! I bought it and declared my shopping done.

Next came the installation. 

I connected the drive and saw that the computer “read” it, but it wasn’t showing up in my computer. My first thought was that the drive letter was conflicting with something I already had installed (that’s happened to me before, on other computers). Unfortunately, I’m still not comfortable in Windows 7. In XP I could have found the computer management window without problems. On Windows 7 I just was lost. thankfully, I found a discussion thread on a tech board that pointed me in the right direction. (BTW, if you need this info for XP, I also found that on the Microsoft site.)

Once I opened the disk management window, what I saw was the the hard drive was “offline.” Offline? Why? I hovered my mouse over the “?” next to the disk drive and typed in the error message, word for word, into Google. The search results gave me several options, of which I chose the Microsoft board discussion that offered soooo many solutions; halfway down the page was the very pragmatic suggestion that I right -click on “offline” and get the option to place the disk “online.” (I know, so amazingly apparent!) And that worked beautifully.

I moved my files from my laptop libraries to the external hard drive using a sync utility I’ve been using for a few years. Yes, I found SyncToy via a suggestion on a Tech blog. At this point I don’t even remember which one. I just know that it’s one of those small applications I use daily.

But while in the process of creating duplicates of my files, my hard drive kept disconnecting. Very weird. Almost as if it was turning off them on again. Repeatedly. And so I found out that the hard drive has settings that default to turning off when it’s not being used. This forum suggested downloading software from the Seagate website (which is how I found out about the settings). The download wasn’t necessary; the software install comes on the hard drive itself. I just hadn’t installed it or opened it to alter the settings. Once I knew what it was for, and what I needed to look for, I installed it and altered the settings. Problem solved.

The most interesting challenge of moving files to the external hard drive came with moving my iTunes files, and database, without losing the information. I’ve done this before, following the instructions on this page. It’s a very detailed, very dry read, but incredibly effective. I followed the suggestions step by step and it worked flawlessly! I like it when that happens.

As my day ended, it occurred to me that I had a very successful day thanks to the kindness of strangers. I was able to save money, time and a lot of headaches because others had done research and shared it with me, had shared their expertise with others (and archived it online for future use), and had just generally been helpful because they could be. And I was glad I am savvy enough to know not to download unknown software from unknown websites, to look for some recognizable resources, and was able to search in such a way that I could find the information I needed.

Today my only failure on this is that I’ve been unable to figure out why when I delete a file on the external hard drive, it doesn’t go to the recycle bin. It just disappears.

Oh well… I’ll just keep looking.

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As tools proliferate to measure your “online influence,” more companies use them to decide who to work with, employers use them to select who to hire (and fire), and more decisions are made about individuals based on their “scores,” whether we like them or not, we need to find a way to work with these measurement tools to find influencers.

But how do you find the right influencers for your brand or organization? And how do you build yourself as a specific type of influencer to build your career and attract brands or organizations?

We will talk about all of this and more at the upcoming Social Media Breakfast.

SPEAKERS

Jennifer Patrick is a freelancer, a “sorta-kinda-stay-at-home-mom” and family lifestyle blogger. She regularly works with big brands, both as an influencer and a guide through her PR work. She also writes a blog for the Houston Chronicle. Her blog is Still Living the Dream at http://www.stilllivingthedream.com/about-me and on Twitter she is @jpatrickcomm

Julie Pippert specializes in building communities of influencers for brands and nonprofits. She works with Zoetica, sits on the American Cancer Society’s Blogger Advisory Council, and helped launch its Choose You blog. Julie was named one of “The Stir’s” 30 Political Mom Bloggers Who Will Change Your Vote, has consulted with national and local political campaigns, is an editor at TheMotherhood.com, and is a contributor to the blog MOMocrats. You can catch up with her @jpippert on Twitter, on her blog http://theartfulflower.blogspot.com/.

I’m still sick, so I don’t know if I’ll be there this week. But I really want to go, especially since I haven’t gotten over my disappointment with my Klout experiment.

The meeting will be tomorrow, Friday 11/11, at 8:30 am at Canopy. Please RSVP on Facebook.

written on my iphone

Before some of you take me to task for even checking my score, I am going to say that it’s been an experiment. I wanted to understand what impacts scores and what activities increase them. Also, if others are going to judge me and my social media knowledge based on it (and there are those people out there that use the score as a real baromoter) then I want to make sure it’s a good score.

So what I’ve been doing is content curation at it’s most basic. I find good content, or content I think others might find interesting, and I schedule it for sharing on my networks. Some of those are timed retweets, some of them are responses, some of them are followups or repeated information. In other words, things I normally do anyway, but with a schedule and intent.

I was surprised to see so little effort produce results. As of yesterday my score had increased by 4 points in the last 30 days, not astronomical results but consistent and positive. As of yesterday I was just a few decimals of a point away from a score of 60.

Today I’m at 51.
51.

Let me clarify that it’s not that I dropped from 59 to 51 overnight (though that’s what, essentially happened). According to my graph I’ve never been over a 52. At least not in the last 30 days.

What?

The Klout graph shows that I was at 52 a month ago, I slowly declined to 49, spiked to 52 overnight, and have been declining to 51 today.

Wow.

Who explains to me how the graph I saw yesterday disappeared and was replaced by this one? And, if I’d been one of those clueless people out there touting my Klout score as proof that I know what I’m doing in social media, who would have explained it to the potential clients using it to make the decision. (That was sarcasm, by the way.)

One last question to anyone who understands Klout better than I do — why do I have 5 K+ to give today, but had 10 yesterday?

I declare my Klout experiment a failure. If someone is putting in an effort to increase Klout score only to have it wiped out, artbitrarily apparently, and overnight… why would anyone else bother with it?

UPDATE #1 — Klout “improved” their rankings and “A majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop.” I’m still declaring this a failure.

UPDATE #2 — Marshall Kirkpatrick has a good post outlining why Klout scores have value for him and how they help him evaluate new Twitter accounts to follow or use as sources. It’s statements like these that made me decide to run the experiment and try to figure out the method to improve my score. 

UPDATE #3 — Read “Klout is bad for your soul.”

UPDATE #4 — Read “When Sites Drag the Unwitting Across the Web.”

Cordially invite you to a reception
celebrating
Houston Hispanic Heritage

Thursday, October 6, 2011
The Downtown Aquarium
410 Bagby
5:30 – 7:30 P.M.

RSVP by Thursday, September 29, 2011
832-393-0815

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