I must admit that I was pretty scornful of my husbands desire for a record player. I mean, who listens to records anymore? But you know what? He was right to want one. It’s a real trip to put one of those old warped pieces of black plastic on the turntable and hear that sound. You know the one. A bit scratchy, with the odd skip… And whenever anyone comes over for dinner you can guess what happens. Just like in 1980, everyone ends up in the “record” room spinning their favourites. Maybe this kind of entertainment isn’t quite dead yet.

Going through those old records, here are my top 10 memories:

1. First ever album purchase, Bat Out of Hell – Meatloaf.
2. First concert, The Cult at Masonic Temple in Toronto.
3. Dancing around to Sweet Transvestite, Rocky Horror Picture Show before I know what it was about.
4. Watching Blue Peter, Don’t Walk Past at a high school dance.
5. Jon Cryer in Pretty in Pink, dancing around a used record store to Try a Little Tenderness by Otis Redding.
6. Herb Albert and the Tijuania Brass playing at my parents parties.
7. From the where are they now file, Thijs van Leer lulling my father to sleep in his chair.
8. JD Roberts (yes that’d be John D. Roberts) and co-host Jeannie Becker on The New Music – for some reason reminding me of The Boomtown Rats, I Don’t Like Mondays.
9. Performing the entire soundtrack to Grease with Shelley Day in our family room.
10. Rockin it out to AC/DC, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

I guess it won’t be so bad heading to the Great Glebe Garage Sale to pick up a few more LPs in a few weeks.

In case you were wondering, the first one I put on? “The Early Beatles: Eleven of Their 1964 American Hit Recordings“. Turns out it’s worth about $200 today. Good stuff I say. But please, don’t tell my husband I said so.

They kind of aren’t using it all.

Since the beginning of the week here’s how it breaks down:

• Harper: total 9 tweets including 1 @ reply, the rest stand alone tweets

• Ignatieff: total 4 tweets, all stand alone

• Layton: total 5 tweets, all stand alone

• May: total 9 tweets, including 1 retweet, 3 @ replies, 9 stand alone

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, even if it is the real deal tweeting (which I doubt) I suppose they don’t have a lot of time to be getting into conversations with people. But isn’t that kind of the point of being there?

Can’t help but think what it would do for a party to entertain the idea of really engaging with the great unwashed. Even if it’s just for an hour along the lines of #b2bchat. It just might allow people to get to know them a little, maybe even like them.

Maybe they need a little help with what to tweet about. Jason Wightman has a few ideas about that in “11 things Canada’s political leaders should tweet about”.

Would you jump into the conversation if the leaders were more engaged on Twitter?

Photo Credit: Nyoin

To politics that is. Why now? Two things really:

1. There’s an election going on in Canada (in case you didn’t know)
2. Watching it unfold real-time on social media is quite something

I’ve always been interested in politics, I have always voted, but I have never really followed election campaigns per se. I was one of those people who would watch the debates and read those newspaper articles comparing the policies of the parties the day before the vote. But that’s about it.

This time is different. Tucked under the covers every night in the dark, there I am scrolling around Hootsuite on my iPhone watching who said what to whom on Twitter.

Here’s a sampling of tweet’s from last week.

It was pretty hard to choose which ones to put up. I picked these because I think they illustrate best why I’m enjoying this so much.

Them’s fightin’ words!

It’s like the debates, but in print and I can consume it for 1 min or two hours whenever I like.

In the old world we would never know how reporter @RosieBarton might personally feel about comments from @SenatorJake. We’d never see @SenatorFinley get mad and quit answering questions. And we’d never see party leaders like @M_Ignatieff, @pmharper and @jacklayton throw barbs at each other and see how each responds. It’s crazy.

You should check it out, seriously. It doesn’t mean you have to start tweeting yourself. You can just sign up, and start following who you want. Search the hashtags #elxn41 and #cdnpoli and see what you find. Or you can check out the public list I’ve started on my Twitter page. It’s still small, but is a good starting point if you want to stay up late with your smart phone reading about politics.

The first post is from one of our writers, David Wegenast, bringing you some tips to build effective messaging in your marketing. Hope it gives you some good ideas to start fine-tuning.

What this means is that I get to change this blog to reflect a bit more of my personal interests. I’d like to think that will make it more interesting, but I’m making a rather large assumption that you’ll find the life of a work-from-home-Mom-of-2-year-old amusing. I think it’s hilarious but then again, I don’t get out much.

I’ve got some work ahead to re-define a few things. For one, I’m pretty sure the name has got to go. I’ll likely continue to talk about social media in all it’s wonderment, but it will be more than that. I also have to work out what I want this thing to stand for and revise the description accordingly. Weighty things indeed.

Anyway, I hope you like it. I think I’m going to have more fun doing it.

I wonder about this. One the one hand social media is supposed to be all about being yourself. In that sense I agree with Jay 100%. If you are someone who swears a lot why pretend to be someone else?

On the other hand, there’s probably no question that if you do swear a lot, you are probably going to offend some people sometimes. So I guess the question becomes; are you prepared to accept that you might turn people off by being yourself? And do you want that real you to be the permanent face you present to the world?

For me personally? I think not. Mind you I’m not the biggest swearer in the world, except when I hang around with my old boss. So I suppose it’s not much of an issue in my case. It would also probably be pretty weird to the people that know me if I suddenly started cursing up a storm plus I’d likely come off as a fake in writing.

I really enjoy Jay’s blog, he seems a funny, no bullshit kind of a guy and I hope he keeps doing what he does. It works for him. And if I wanted to hire someone to tell me the no-nonsense, unvarnished truth about things, I’d probably hire him. Hopefully that’s exactly the personal brand he was going for. And I guess that’s my point.

What picture of yourself you want to portray?

Photo Credit: Gregg O’Connell

Remember this from the point of view of a business. A personal twitter account is a different kettle of fish in my view – anything goes. And I should add that for as many blogs out there talking about this, there are even more reader comments with differing points of view. This post, is supposed to just give you an easy way to start – cause that’s what I felt I needed. There are lots of different ways to go about it and you can find your own way.

Here are my main sources, please do check them out. These guys have way more expertise than me.

What Should You Tweet About? from TwitTip

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business from Chris Brogan

What to Write on Twitter from Joel Mark Witt.

Twitter Principles

1. Be yourself
2. It’s more about others than yourself
3. Look for and read tweets from influential people in your space
4. Variety is good, too much of one thing – bad
5. It takes time to get anywhere
6. Activity breeds activity
7. Try to add value

What to Tweet?

1. Ask a question.
2. Share a link
3. Retweet/point out something interesting
4. Answer the question “What has my attention today?”
5. Tell people something about you as a person, not a business
6. Address somebody’s tweet with your own reply (@username)
7. Say something thoughtful: Wish someone happy birthday/holiday
8. Send a direct message to someone
9. Connect people you know on Twitter

There are a few things I didn’t include, but I’ve seen used. “Quote someone famous” is one, “Thank someone for a retweet” is another. I personally think the latter can mess up an already busy twitter stream and the former is just plain annoying. So I don’t go there. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t though. Go for it, if that’s your cup of tea.

I’m curious. What’s your tweet plan?

I was looking around in my WordPress Dashboard for the fun of it and I discovered something new. There is a cool little place called “Sharing” where you can click on various social media icons to facilitate you guessed it – sharing!

To get to it you open your Dashboard and click “Settings”. From the menu that opens up select “Sharing”. From there, you simply click and drag the icons you want to appear into the box and “presto” – they appear.

Here’s a graphic of what that looks like.

There are a multitude of ways you can facilitate the sharing of content. Here is a good post from Mashable on the “Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post” to give you some other ideas.

Now if only I could figure out how to enhance the comment functionality on WordPress.com I’d really be in business! (ah ha right? @TheGirlPie!)

Drum roll and Fireworks please – try out my new sharing features. There they are. Right there. See ‘em?

Take writing headlines.

Last week over the space of a few days I read a couple of really good posts on the subject.

Here’s the scoop:

“What Can You Learn from 1,117 Copyblogger Headlines” from freelance copywriter, Scribblemill looks at the stats on a bunch of headlines from the pre-eminent blogging copywriters. The results are summarized in a nifty graphic (not amateur at all Scribblemill!) with some interesting results:

• Average length of Copyblogger headline is 7.5 words
• 47% of the most popular Copyblogger headlines (and 1 in every 3.6) use either: You or Your
• 1 in every 15 headlines uses pop culture and movie references
  

“Is Your Headline Good or Bad? Give it the Breath Test” from Copyblogger makes the point that you should be able to read a good headline in one breath or if you can’t, using punctuation to break up the sentence will do the trick.

Finally, I went to my go-to-blog guy on this stuff, Chris Brogan, to see what he had to say. As usual he put in into a neat and tidy little nutshell in his post “Write Better Blog Posts Today”

There are two dimensions (at least) to considering how to title a post. First, if search traffic matters, write a title that someone might Google, meaning: don’t be too clever. Second, if clever matters, think long and hard about your title, as the value of the title often drives people to bother reading it in their RSS feeds of the day. Think on those two angles long and hard. A title can make or break a post. No, really.

The bottom line in my opinion? Keep it short. Keep it customer centered. For the most part I feel I don’t have a very “clever” knack with titles, so I don’t focus too hard on that. I just try to get to the point.

What’s is the best blog headline you’ve ever seen and why?

First things I did:

• Set up a Tweetdeck app with the relevant columns for my various accounts – in my case this means a couple of straight feeds, mentions and direct message columns
• Set up MobileRSS app to get all my feeds on the go (see Filtering the Social Media Firehose for ideas on how to organize this)
• Added the WordPress app – in theory I can blog on the go but this has proved challenging as you can see by the frequency of my recent posts
• Downloaded the following in no particular order: Baby Go, Virtuoso Piano, Curious George (TV shows) and Counting to keep my 2-year old occupied in a pinch (Counting is a huge winner, so much so that the little pudgy fingers froze the game out two days ago)

If I have a free minute, I check out what’s going on with Tweetdeck and Mobile RSS during the day. Maybe while I’m waiting for a meeting start or standing in line at lunch or whatever. When I go to bed I always take a 1/2 hour to review a bunch of the day’s tweets and I check the feed for interesting posts from today. A handful get “starred” for me to come back to later for a future post/re-tweet opportunity.

It has been a huge time saver with the added bonus of letting work comfortably in my p.j.’s under my cozy duvet in a rare daily moment of peace and quiet. I have found, to my surprise, I actually enjoy this time of day.

But this is not so much an endorsement of the iPhone (although it is!) as it is to point out that social media doesn’t have to be hard. There are lots of tools and tricks to make it easier so that you can take advantage of a moment or two of unused time.

How do you manage your social media initiatives?

Photo Credit: Mattjb

The following might be a bit of a rant. Sorry about that, it’s hot out.

If you read my previous post Twitter + List, is that a Twist? you will know that I recently reorganized the people I follow on Twitter into lists in order to help me find what’s most important to me. This has worked well when I on my laptop but I’ve discovered that the Tweetdeck app on my iPhone (or Precious as it’s known around here) does not allow me to view lists.

This means I have to plow through a lot of crap.

There is one person I ended up following via SocialToo’s auto-follow tool, let’s call him Buddy, who is messing everything up. I just did a quick check and he has posted 748 tweets in the past 24 hours. 748! He makes me so mad that even if I saw something interesting I will not click or respond out of principle.

Let’s be clear, Buddy is providing social media tips and tricks and inspirational quotes, it’s not spam exactly (well maybe those dratsit quotes are). He is, however, pushing me away as a potential customer because he is the Herb Tarlek of Twitter.

I un-followed Buddy today.  Are you making your customers do the same?