…what Sandra says about technology, communications, friends and other things…

Storify board re Houston Social Media Breakfast (#smbHOU) for Friday, February 1, 2013 featuring CC Chapman.

Storify board re Houston Social Media Breakfast (#smbHOU) for Friday, January 11, 2013 in partnership with LATISM (Latinos in Social Media) Houston Chapter. The topic was “Reaching the US Latino Community through Social Media.”

I used to live in the world of advertising. Wait, maybe that’s not entirely true… I used to visit the world of advertising for long periods of time. I was always a native of Public Relations. What that means is that I managed advertising campaigns, hired art directors and photographers, and made the media buys based on long-term plans. And I paid attention to industry trends.

Yes, I trained for that. I studied advertising in college, though I never had an internship. It was an “extra” while I was earning my degree in Public Relations.

One of the downsides to working in advertising is that I lost the ability to enjoy advertising as entertainment. I found myself trying to decipher the audience and other information that influenced the ad. That’s something I never quite overcame.

The new Target ads for their groceries baffle me a little. Unconventional and completely different than any ads on television for a traditional grocery store or a superstore that also sells groceries. One or two mention price, but that’s not the selling point. Or at least it doesn’t seem like the selling point.

Though I think they’re very pretty. The visual branding is in line with Target’s usual stunning graphics, even if the white is a step away from the usual red. And it makes groceries look cool, one item at a time.

In case you haven’t seen them, here’s one to enjoy.

What do you think?

2013: Reduce. Balance. Invest.

Every year I would pick resolutions and goals to help guide me in the upcoming year.
And every year I failed.

This year I picked three words, three themes for the year. I started this last year, copying the idea from other bloggers I read and follow. After years of making resolutions and abandoning them after a few months, I was ready to try something new. I hoped that this would prove to be a better influence in the long run.

I’m not going to lie… I did think that it wouldn’t make much of a difference. I thought that, ultimately, my “words” would off my radar after a few months, the same as my resolutions normally did.

I was wrong.

Last year’s words were: Simplify. Focus. Create. And somehow I managed to stay on track with these themes for most of the year.

This year’s three words are: Reduce. Balance. Invest.

REDUCE: This is exactly what it sounds like — I’m going to reduce the clutter in my life. And I do mean the things I have, the things I do, and the mental and emotional baggage I accumulate.

BALANCE: I am going to start including more time for fun, family, and friends. I need to start going out and actually doing things, living life, instead of reading about it. In addition, it’s hard to write about interesting things if you’re not doing interesting things.

INVEST: I am going to make an effort to invest time and money in myself. This includes the more formal personal and professional development and the more whimsical things that will feed my creativity and spirituality.

And I’m hoping that 2013 is a more productive and successful year.

 * * *

UPDATE: I’ve started a Storify board with stories and resources for these themes. Hope you enjoy it.

2012 ended up being a very different year than what I was expecting. This year my personal health challenges dominated everything, and impacted most of the year. I was either preparing for surgery, out for an extended leave because of surgery, or recovering from it. I honestly feel like I just got back to normal in time to ring in 2013. Great timing, I guess.

Despite the challenges of the year, or maybe cause of them, I had moments of clarity… aha! moments that made me sit up (figuratively) and take notice of things for which to be thankful, things to change, and things to share. Sometimes it takes big events to makes us take a look at the little things that shape our lives.

A few things I “learned” in 2012

You are who you friend (i.e., grouchiness is contagious).

I’m not talking about social networks, or rather I’m mostly talking about real life. I can’t speak for the rest of you, but the group of people I see and with whom I spend time in my offline life is slightly different than those with whom I interact online. I’m referring to those people who can take one look at you and tell that you’ve had a bad day, who you can call at 2am with an emergency, who will pick you up at the airport and possibly even feed you afterwards. Friends.

There’s a saying in Spanish: Dime con quien andas y the dire quien eres. Loosely translated it means that I can tell the kind of person you are by who your friends are.

I’ve realized the truth of that recently. I’ve found that if I spend my personal time with friends (beloved friends) who encourage me to dwell on the negative aspects of my life, I don’t crawl back out of that mood. And, slowly, the negativity becomes normal… an everyday occurrence. Then somehow the new personal projects don’t get started, or don’t get finished. If I spend my time with friends (and family) who are out creating, encouraging me and others, providing emotional and even virtual support, I’m more productive.

There’s no science behind this (not for me). Just the observable truth comparing 2012, and my friending habits, versus previous years. 2012 was more challenging, had bigger hiccups and roadblocks, and yet I accomplished more. More importantly, my reaction to the challenges was more positive.

Your support system is esential, at home and at work (i.e., you WILL need help eventually).

I am a very independent person.
I don’t like to ask for help, I want to do things myself.
I hate needing help; I don’t want others to see that I can’t do everything myself.

I had to ask for help.

If you’ve ever had to recover from major surgery, you know that there are days, weeks, months where you need to be nursed. Family members made it possible for me to simply recover without having to deal with the everyday details that would have added stress to the recovery.

Did you know there’s nothing good on daytime television? Friends made it possible for me to disconnect from personal relationships without boredom kicking in by providing entertainment on demand, and many many visits (when I was feeling better).

In the many weeks of recovery, I didn’t get one single “emergency” phone call from work. Colleagues made it possible for me to disconnect from work completely without having to worry about pending projects or emergencies.

I hope none of them ever need me to do the same for them, but know I will gladly step up and help them when it’s needed.

Other people don’t live inside your brain (i.e., write it down).

One of the most interesting things I realized this year is how much of my job processes I keep in my head. Since I work in an organization that achieves miracles with very few resources, it’s become almost mandatory that everyone take on many roles.

Because I had advance notice, and was able to schedule the time away from work. I was able to get everything set up for my absence. I wrote instructions, and more instructions, and guidelines, and style manuals, and best practice documents, etc. And I held training sessions, provided feedback on early transition projects, identified what the backup systems and people were, and put everything into place early.

If I had been hit by a bus, there are many projects that might have hit a snag because the plans were in my head.

Work will survive without you (i.e., you are not indispensable).

I was away from my office for seven weeks. Once I came back to work I wasn’t at full capacity for a few more weeks. Guess what? They survived just fine without me.

I tend to be that workaholic who stays another 30 minutes because “I really gotta finish this tonight.” I would stress over the workload that I still had pending, mostly without giving myself credit for the work that was successfully finished.

What I’ve seen since I’ve been back is that, while the deadline is still there, I’ve been better about prioritizing what actually has to be done today and what can wait until tomorrow. In addition, did you know that others can handle the hard stuff too? {{grin}}

I am not indispensable.
It’s a great feeling.

What did 2012 teach you?

Image by Paul Hudson.

I recently delivered a presentation that prompted me to think about failure, how it affects us, and how we react to it.

Delivering presentations is something I do regularly. I wouldn’t say that I am an outstanding presenter, but my skills have improved (are improving) and I usually can tell that my delivery was a success based on the audience interaction. The normal result is that I’m with the outcome when I give a presentation or lead a workshop. However, this one is NOT going down in the “success” column.

For the purpose if this blog post, I am not going to focus on the presentation itself, but on the overall experience.m

So, if it wasn’t a success, was it a failure?

I really don’t like to use that word — failure — and I’m going to venture that I’m not the only one with an aversion to it. Who wants to call herself a failure or admit to participating in one? But regardless of what I call it (less-than-stellar, not my best, could be improved, off-the-mark) I know that I could have and should have done better.

“I was distracted by the incident before the presentation… I had had only three hours of sleep for the two nights prior to that day… the person who asked me to speak didn’t adequately prepare me on the format and expected topic… and the dog ate my homework.” The WHY of my less-than-stellar performance isn’t important, not in the long run. The FACT that my delivery wasn’t good enough (for me) is what is important, and how I reacted.

It’s not the end of the world. Unless, of course, the thing you’re obsessing over is in fact the one thing that could have ended life as you know it… remind yourself that it’s NOT the end of the world. Keep it in perspective.

Is that what I did? No. I wallowed until one of my best friends told me to stop the drama. In fact, I think she used those words exactly.

We are our own worst critics, or at least I am my own worst critic. No one is going to be tougher on me than me. But I need to use these experiences as lessons, opportunities to improve.

I failed, (yes, I am using that word) but that won’t stop me from trying again, and doing better next time.

What did you learn from your last failure?

Suggested reading:

• You Screwed Up. Now What?, at Inc.

This is a storify storyboard I created for a presentation for HAHMP‘s November 2012 membership meeting.

Storify board re Houston Social Media Breakfast (#smbHOU) for Friday, November 9, 2012.

I recently attended an even hosted by Social Media Club Houston on Data Visualization. The topic has convinced me that there are topics that my liberal arts major and affinity for lifelong learning have not equipped me to understand. A few minutes into the presentation and I was lost!

I did walk away with three important takeaways, though:

1. Start with your goals. I was glad to hear this one, since it’s something I tell my social media clients and students quite frequently. If you don’t know what your goals are, you don’t know what to measure and you don’t know what success looks like.
2. Don’t run a report if you’re not going to do something with the data. How many of you are tracking information that doesn’t impact your processes or decision-making? When I think of how much time and energy I put into reports that just sit on someone’s desk… well, it’s depressing. 
3. Make a story from the numbers. You have to illustrate, with words, what the numbers mean to your organization, your customers, your employees, etc.

I was glad to walk away with info I understood. And I think I need to start delving into data more frequently, so I can at least know what’s being said next time.

Additional reading:

• Data Is Useless Without the Skills to Analyze It – Jeanne Harris – Harvard Business Review

NOTE: I wrote this on my ipad, then never published it because I kept thinking I’d come back to proof and edit. More than a month later, I published this with typos… promising to come back later and make it better… knowing I probably won’t. I decided it was better to get the content up than to never publish in expectation of perfection. It’s one of several posts I’ve published in this manner.

To the people who are in my circles on Google+, I am very very sorry. If you were actually on the network this morning you will have noticed that the stream was poluted by one single post (from my account) that was reposted many many many times. I apologize for the inconvenience.

And so, I think Google+ put me in “jail.”

It’s my fault, sort of… I began using a Chrome extension a few weeks (months) ago called Do Share to schedule updates to my Google+ account. I give +1 and comments to others’ posts all the time, but don’t often post myself. I’ve been waiting for Hootsuite to incorporate this as one of the channels I can add (I do already have my SandraSays Google+ page, which has little activity). I kept thinking that I would make more time to post better content. And, I should note, it never actually happened. One day I discovered the Do Share extension and started using that. My sharing on Google+ increased, the interactions I have with my network increased, and I was pleased.

Until this morning.

I’ve been getting better about scheduling one update to go out every morning. I usually pick something I think my connections will find interesting. And the update goes out about 6am or so.

This morning I hopped onto my account late morning and noticed that the same update was posted and reposted and reposted and reposted and reposted and resposted… well, you get the picture. From my attempts to delete the duplicates I believe that the update was reposted 20-30 times a minute from the time it was originally scheduled (and I don’t remember exactly what time that was supposed to happen) until about 6:45 am.

We’re talking about 20-30 times a minute for probably more than 30 minutes. That’s math I don’t want to do.

So I frantically deleted the extension and hoped for the best. I updated a few more times, in real time using the actual Google+ page. Everything seemed to be fine. Then I started to get the error message.

There was a problem saving your post. Please try again.

I started to see this message whenever I tried to post something new. Not for comments, those were working fine. Not with the +1s, those were working fine too. But every time I tried to post something new I got that error message.

I assumed that it meant I had been put in Google+ “jail” — i.e., that my access was temporarily suspended because of unsual activity. This happens on Facebook and Twitter when you have too much activity in one time span. But when that happens there (in the very rare cases that happens to me) I get a message telling me what’s up.

There was a problem saving your post. Please try again.

There’s no message on my profile page. I didn’t get an email. There’s no explanation… anywhere. So I did what any reasonable internet citizen does when presented with an unknown error message: I Googled it.

The results are lots of entries about it being linked to suspended account — different products, different reasons, but mostly suspension. So I’m going to assume that that’s why I’m getting the message.

I will try back tomorrow and see if my ban is lifted. Since I’ve actually deleted the offending extension, I’m hoping they’re going to take that into account.

Wish me luck. And, if you need to contact me, try Facebook; as of right now, that’s still working.

UPDATE: It looks like my suspension has been lifted! A learning event.