I’m at WordCamp Providence Today!

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I will be speaking in the beginner’s track at WordCamp Providence today debuting my “Writing Tools for WordPress” talk. In addition to highlighting tools that can help any publisher bring life back to their blog or website, we’ll be getting a bit interactive with an in-session brainstorm and a little WordPress mobile application action to get the Providence crowd publishing on the spot.

If you attended my session, please post a link in the comments of this post sharing what you learned at WordCamp today and any goals you have for your site now that you have… no more excuses!

Rockin’ the new WordPress application…

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Really loving easy access to posts, pages, and comments with the new Facebook-esque navigation in the new WordPress application. (I guess Facebook can’t be doing mobile totally wrong if we are seeing UI copycats, right?)

The constant prompting to link my .com account to the app is kind of strange though, particularly since I use the application to manage my self hosted WordPress site. I guess this integration has been around for awhile, but it’s much more noticeable now. Would have been nice to include a setup wizard to guide users through the process with this new major release.

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On the Go

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On Tuesday I started my 36 hour journey across New England with stops in Providence, NYC, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Boston (+1 brief pit stop in Detroit to catch a connecting flight). I helped demo an amazing VIP project with Helen in NYC and played nice with a new potential client in Philly. I played Wii Boxing and Angry Birds with Elisio. I successfully made each of my trains, flights, and cabs. All in all it was a successful tour.

Today I’m feeling more than a little exhausted and my brain is still trying to grasp the fact that it’s somehow Thursday already. Almost feels like spinning in circles. Maybe because I did.


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Look how time flies…

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It’s been two months since my last post here, but I’ve been busy dropping content in other places across the web.

The first two weeks in March were consumed by planning, promoting and executing Providence Twestival with Jane Couto. It was Providence’s first Twestival and with the help of our attendees and sponsors we raised $400 for the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. I’ve been really intrigued by the concept of social good for about a year now, closely following the Pepsi Refresh and Chase Community Giving campaigns. It was great to take a concept that has rejuvenated US communities, fed disaster victims across the word and raised our collective conscience and boil it down to a hyper-local level. In a few words… it was a great success!

I’ve also been working with Social Media Club Providence to plan our May event, Egypt’s Social Media Revolution with Dr. Richard Lobban. Dr. Lobban was on the ground in Egypt during the revolution and leveraged social media to document his experience there. Should be a fantastic event and I hope you can join us in person or by following the hashtag (#smcpvd). You can learn more about what the club has been up to on our Social Media Club blog (props to the Social Media Club team for the site redesign!).

And last, but certainly not least, I’ve been sharing some thoughts on social media on the (add)ventures blog. I’ve written about the importance of engaging CEO’s in brand social media strategies and how innovative brands are leveraging photo sharing applications like Instagram and Hipstamatic. Check out my posts there and read some thoughts from other talented (add)venturists on branding, marketing, design and video production.

In the coming weeks I will be taking some time to do some house cleaning here and post some new content for you to read, share and comment on.

What has kept you busy over the last two months?

You Might be a Social Media Guru if…

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There is an inherent hazard to being involved in the social media world that few people publicly talk about. We snicker about it, exchange knowing glances, agonize when our clients have been bamboozled by it, and blast out cryptic tweets when we come across it, but few of us put this pervasive evil on display to allow the world to enjoy a collective eye roll at its expense. What is it that I’m talking about, you ask? It’s the Social Media Guru, of course!

I think it might be time to build a public profile of these imposters who certainly don’t get it and would do everyone a favor by ceasing to share their particular brand of Koolaid. Without further ado… ten signs that you might be (or have encountered) a Social Media Guru:

1. You might be a Social Media Guru if you begin every conversation with your Twitter follower count, Facebook friend count, or with the phrase “I’m huge on [insert social network of choice here].”

2. You might be a Social Media Guru if you claim, and actually believe, that you can teach anyone how to “do Social Media” in a day for just $30.00.

3. You might be a Social Media Guru if you use name dropping as a substitute for a quality portfolio of work.

4. You might be a Social Media Guru if you use auto DMs and insist they actually work for you.

5. You might be a Social Media Guru if you think the first step to blogger relations is throwing free crap at them. Because, hey, bloggers can be bought.

6. You might be a Social Media Guru if at every networking event you attend the people you meet have suddenly run out of business cards.

7. You might be a Social Media Guru if “automate” and “broadcast” are the two most frequently used words in your vocabulary.

8. You might be a Social Media Guru if you secretly admire a Twitter-bot’s ability to accumulate so many followers so quickly.

9. You might be a Social Media Guru if you self-identify as an influencer, even though you’ve never created a unique piece of content in your life.

10. You might be a Social Media Guru if you think the mere presence of “Guru” in your title will convince people that you actually know what you’re talking about.

Have you come across any other tell-tale traits of the Social Media Guru? Share them in the comments!

PS: Check out my friend Maria’s blog post for an inside perspective on the ways of the South Florida Social Media Gurus and the destruction they’re capable of.

Eating Social: The Intimate Relationship Between Food and Our Social Networks

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Eating is probably one of the most social things we do in our day. Regardless of how “plugged-in” we are, most of us can pry the iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android from our hands for long enough to enjoy a meal with our friends. But not before we source a restaurant from Urban Spoon, Yelp, or our trusty Twitter and Facebook communities. And then there’s the obligatory check-in on our location-based poison of choice when we arrive at the restaurant, followed by a quick scan of available tips to help us determine “what’s good here.”  We usually relinquish our online social selves once we take our seats, at least momentarily, until the food arrives and we snap a quick picture of what we’re chowing down on and share the snapshot on Twitter, Facebook, our blogs, or wherever else we share content.

According to a recent Foursquare blog post, Foursquare check-ins categorized in the “Food” category far outranked check-ins at any other type of venue.

Foodspotting, an application dedicated to visually sharing the most scrumptious food we come across to our followers so they can “Nom,” “Want,” and eventually claim it for themselves, reached over 450,000 users last year. BlogWorld Expo, a conference known for having its finger on the pulse of blogging trends, offered a food blogging track for the first time in 2010. There’s also a ton of other conferences dedicated solely to the art of food blogging (check out this great post from NamelyMarley for a list of the 2011 events).

You could say 2010 was a big year for food and how we consume it. It crossed over from being an old-time staple in our offline social lives, to the shiny, new main event in our online social communities. Our eating experiences are no longer confined to the restaurant table. Instead, they’re immortalized online in photos, tips, reviews, and blogs to be viewed, shared, and admired by the social web. Eating social is my favorite example of how our online behaviors and connections fuel our offline actions which, in turn, influence the content we create and share with our social networks.

So, with all this eating we did in 2010, do you think our offline attempts to burn the calories will creep into the content we share online? My friend Mike LaMonica noticed the social fitness trend starting among South Florida Tweeters in 2010, but I haven’t seen the same prevalence in my new Providence ‘hood. Yet. Great apps like RunKeeper and Nike’s fitness application make me think this year will be the year we feel the burn, even in the midst of the Northeast’s bitter cold.

Facebook Press Conference: Announcement of Features or Brand Positioning?

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By now most of us have either watched the live stream of the Facebook press conference yesterday or sifted through the recap blog posts today (Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and All Facebook have some nice recaps and follow up interviews). While the revamped “Groups” are pretty exciting for focusing and improving conversations on Facebook’s social graph and the “Download Your Information” and “Applications You Use” are solid steps forward for users who want easier access to their information, it was Mark Zuckerberg’s soliloquies (minus the “and, ums”) about “what Facebook is” that were most interesting to me

Watching Mark speak reminded me of sitting in the classroom furiously scribbling down notes while the enlightened PhD opened my mind to new ways of reading Faulkner or Shakespeare. He truly has vision when it comes to the social web and for the first time in awhile he closely aligned that vision with the Facebook brand, using just a few words: Facebook solves social problems. That’s what Facebook does. The Facebook team sits in Silicon Valley, engineering algorithms and building the platform and applications that connect us, finding ways to break down the barriers that divide us. When we run into frustrations on the social web Facebook will be there to ease our annoyances.

Seems like a pretty drastic departure from the big bad privacy violator Facebook was just a couple of months ago. Or the egocentric, pet project, of a shady Harvard kid that Facebook was, well, just a week ago. And the best part? The presses largely agree. Tons of fawning posts steadily streamed out over the past 24 hours and none of my emails subscriptions featured links to pesky movie reviews.

Props to the Facebook PR team for crafting some targeted messages that allowed Mark to steer the conversation away from the controversy and back to the revolutionary ideas and social products his team is cranking out.

Refresh Lauderdale and Refresh Miami Team Up for Demo Night

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Last night Refresh Miami and Refresh Lauderdale hosted a joint meet-up at FAU for an Ignite-style Demo night, featuring Jonathan Bradley from Studdr.com, Jonathan Marcus from Flavors.me, and Mike Cuesta from CareCloud.com.

Here’s the breakdown of what these kids were selling:

Studdr.com

Essentially a multimedia version of FML where you can post epic monologues (500+ characters allowed), photos, and videos to embarrass anyone you feels deserves it. Why anyone would devote this much time to poking fun at someone else’s stupidity I’m not sure, but the founder is pretty excited about the idea. At this point it’s more of a basement project than a real live start up, but Johnathan had some great input in regards to best practices for rapid development so you can get your idea out there quickly, namely using an existing framework for your site that you can build off of, instead of going with a custom solution.

Flavors.me

Oh, Flavors. I don’t want to like you. You remind me of those trendy kids with haircuts that don’t make sense, neon closets, and peculiar piercings. Alas, I kind of love you. Flavors is a great solution for anyone looking to aggregate their social web presence. Free accounts allow you to aggregate your social feeds from 4 different sources, while the $20 a year accounts let you aggregate from over 20 + sources like Etsy, any popular blogging platform, YouTube, Twitter, etc. It’s an easy, stylish solution for all of you life-streamers out there and a unique way to build a portfolio site for all of you social media job seekers.

Carecloud.com

I don’t claim to understand the intricacies of the CareCloud product, but I totally dig the effort CareCloud has put into streamlining the online user experience for patients, doctors and insurance companies so they can, as Mike Cuesta so elegantly put, “communicate on a human level, and transact on a business level.” There was an audible gasp with Mike said the project has over 4.5 million dollars in funding, making it the stand out, all-star start up of the night. It’s apparent that these guys are on to something, especially with the Obama administration’s push to get medical records online. I appreciated Mike’s thorough knowledge of the product. He’s pretty dev savvy for a UX guy.

Overall, the combo Refesh meetup was a great success. Would love to see more of these in the future.

This isn’t your First Grader’s Brainstorm

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Sitting in my first grade classroom I had visions of towering thunder clouds intertwining with hippie-esque waves as my teacher carefully drew a map on the chalkboard and explained the “brainstorming” process we were about to experience. I don’t remember what the purpose of my first brainstorm was, just that the idea felt so wild and unrestrained that I couldn’t understand why the teacher insisted on trapping our thoughts on a stick and bubble diagram.

Then comes the agency world where brainstorms jump off the chalkboard and become tangible, real life creations. Sometimes they manifest themselves as larger than life brand personalities like the Burger King or the Old Spice guy. Sometimes they lay the foundation for fund raising initiatives that save lives. But regardless of their purpose, they are perpetual enemies to the stick and bubble diagram.

The participants don’t sit quietly in their desks, they pace around the room trying to feel out their thoughts. Dry erase markers fly across white boards in a chaotic attempt to document the genius moments. You laugh at the clever ideas, furrow your eyebrows at the complex ones, and fall silent when the epiphany finally comes. Your brain is firing on all cylinders and when you’re done you feel a sense of satisfying mental exhaustion.

There are few experiences that transform into something even more magical than what they once were in childhood, but brainstorming is definitely one of them.