Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Marc Quinn's sculpture "Alison Lapper Pregnant"
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Monday, February 15, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Ginger beer anyone?
Friday, February 12, 2010
My art in various stages of completion
Facebook | Staci sprinkling some love
Staci Jordan Shelton Real love is loving someone even when you're not getting what you think you want or need from them. Loving to get something in return is an arrangement. Separate the expectations from the love. It's okay to expect someone's best, just keep the love unconditional. ;-)
Thursday, February 11, 2010
TEDTalks (video) - Tom Shannon: The painter and the pendulum - Tom Shannon (2009)
The top 5 reasons brands fear social media
Brandon Williams Wrote:
Very smart. More companies should be utilizing social media.
I’ve been in the social media space now for quite a few years and I meet with at least 5 companies each week who have understood the importance of utilizing social media for their businesses but are still afraid of entering their brands into the new media age. What are they worried about? Here are the top five concerns that I’ve heard from executives and my response to them:
1) They’re afraid they’ll lose control of their brand and open themselves up to negative feedback — When you open a business and start marketing your services and exposing your brand to others, people will start talking about your brand. And this is what you wanted right? This is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place. People are going to be talking about your brand no matter what. The question is: Do you want to be a part of the dialogue or do you want to just play ostrich and ignore what people are saying? If a person is dissatisfied with your services, do you prefer he opens up this discussion in a “I hate ” group opened up by another hater or do you prefer that he come to your page and post the complaint there allowing you to respond appropriately and even perhaps win him back as a client? Social media didn’t create the dissatisfied customer — it only allowed him a platform to express his frustration. If you don’t give him the stage to speak, he will do it elsewhere and believe me, it will cause a great deal more damage to your brand if you’re not there to respond and open to criticism. When we speak of social media, we speak of conversational marketing — listening before selling, opening a dialogue with the user and not just throwing a blinking banner in his face. Brands need to make that switch in their heads and understand that social media is SOCIAL. Many conversations will be positive and you will have these nice messages recorded for everyone to see publicly — your bosses, your investors, your customers and potential customers: Some conversations may be negative but these conversations should be seen as welcomed opportunities to gain back customers. If you utilize social media effectively and are alert to what people are saying about you online, then you can also respond in a timely and intelligent manner. When you’re dazed and confused and too afraid to see what people may be saying about you, that’s when the conversation can get out of control and your branding and positioning can go out the window. Companies who understand social media know that by using social media they are increasing the number of positive responses to their brand and making sure to control and decrease the negative responses by showing people that they actually care about what they have to say.
2) They don’t understand it — Companies fear social media because they don’t understand what to do with it, what to talk about, who to turn to. They often time try to do it in-house without the appropriate guidance, fail miserably and then say that social media doesn’t work. Don’t hire your friend’s son who is very active on Facebook to do your marketing strategy for you. Just like you wouldn’t fix your car in-house or do your PR in-house, neither should you start doing social media on your own without having a social media guru at your side. And when I say guru, I mean someone who has had a good track record in creating successful social media campaigns for other companies in the past. Once you have such a guide at your side and you begin to understand what social media is all about, then you will not be afraid of it anymore and you will start to recognize the infinite number of amazing opportunities that social media will open your brand to.
3) The effectiveness of social media is hard to measure - Since social media is still in it’s diapers, it took a little while for tools tracking the ROI on social media campaigns to emerge, however today we have a suite of different tools that allow companies to track even the most minute details in the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. Tools like Google Analytics which allow us to track the traffic coming into our site as well as where it’s coming from has existed for years. Google alerts which allow us to see the blog posts and other sites linking back to our site have also existed for a long time. And we are now seeing an influx of services that not only allow you to easily monitor what people are saying about your brand but also see who are the top influencers, opinion leaders in your industry and more. There are numerous services that allow you to see the top influencers on twitter such as: Twitter grader and twitter analytics services such as Twitalyzer . Facebook also provides its own insights to page admins and enables admins to view information regarding the demographics of their fans and also how many interactions, comments, wall posts, etc. were found on the page. The more we learn about social media, the more tools we get to measure it. Not only are our efforts in the social media realm measurable but social media campaigns also allow us to target specific campaigns to specific niches like no other media today.
4) They’re afraid that employees will be on Facebook and twitter chatting all day — Facebook today has around 350 million users. If Facebook was a nation, it would be the world’s third most populous after China and India. Your employees are there anyway. Why not utilize the fact that they are there to help your cause? When you need to spread the word on Facebook, why not enable your employees to help you or when you finally open that fan page on Facebook, why not allow your employees to become fans and encourage them to take part in your social media activities. Dell for example, who is well known for their great twitter strategy (a strategy which has earned them $6.5 million to date), has around 200 employees working its twitter account, responding to people. In addition, not allowing your employees to have access to the vast amount of information that can be found on social networks as well as not enabling them to use these networks as research tools nor to network with people in the industry also puts your company at a great disadvantage to your competitors who do allow their employees (and even encourage them) to use social media tools.
5) Social media is costly — This last fear is not only something that companies should not fear but it is also not true. If you consider the millions of people that you can reach using social media as opposed to the cost of buying an ad on TV or buying a banner, you’ll see that social media is one of the most cost efficient ways of reaching your target audience today. To anyone who still thinks social media is a fad, WAKE UP. It’s not. Social media is here and it’s here to stay. If you took a look at the latest report that came out of Davos regarding social networks, you’ll see that Facebook is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google and that according to Nielsen since February 2009 people have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. The question for your brand is no longer whether to be there or not to be there. The question is WHEN will you be there and the longer you keep your head in the ground, the more you’ll lose touch with what’s happening out there in the real world. Great Ostrich pic credit: http://blog.karmona.comAyelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a consultancy specializing in helping brands use social media tools such as social networks, the blogosphere and social software to create brand awareness, recruit employees or achieve any other goal. See her business profile, contact Ayelet, follow her on Twitter
Original Link: http://www.socialmedia.biz/2010/02/10/the-top-five-reasons-brands-fear-social-media/
Winston and water
Winston loves water. He even hangs out and tries to get into the bath with me every day.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Untitled
Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome
Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news — who tells whom, who matters most in social networks — but they’ve had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. Do people prefer to spread good news or bad news? Would we rather scandalize or enlighten? Which stories do social creatures want to share, and why?
Now some answers are emerging thanks to a rich new source of data: you, Dear Reader.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”
But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger andKatherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)
“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”
To make sense of these trends in “virality,” the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article’s popularity after controlling for factors like the time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the Web home page.
A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers also used computer algorithms to track the ratio of emotional words in an article and to assess the relative positivity or negativity.
The computer textual analysis could identify “affect-laden” articles like “Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness” or “When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next.” It distinguished positive articles like “Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love With the City” from downers like “Germany: Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies.”
More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics. (The best way to test that, he said, would be for The Times to run shorter and longer versions of the same article that would be seen by different readers.)
Surprising articles, like one about free-range chickens on the streets of New York, were also more likely to be e-mailed — which was a hardly a surprising discovery, of course. But the researchers also kept finding popular articles with a quality that went beyond surprise.
“If I went into my classroom dressed up like a pirate, that would be surprising, but it wouldn’t be awe-inspiring,” Dr. Berger said. “An article about square watermelons is surprising, but it doesn’t inspire that awed feeling that the world is a broad place and I’m so small.”
Building on prior research, the Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”
They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.
“It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” write Dr. Berger and Dr. Milkman, who is a behavioral economist at Wharton.
“Seeing the Grand Canyon, standing in front of a beautiful piece of art, hearing a grand theory or listening to a beautiful symphony may all inspire awe. So may the revelation of something profound and important in something you may have once seen as ordinary or routine, or seeing a causal connection between important things and seemingly remote causes.”
The motivation for mailing these awe-inspiring articles is not as immediately obvious as with other kinds of articles, Dr. Berger said. Sharing recipes or financial tips or medical advice makes sense according to classic economic utility theory: I give you something of practical value in the hope that you’ll someday return the favor. There can also be self-interested reasons for sharing surprising articles: I get to show off how well informed I am by sending news that will shock you.
But why send someone an exposition on quantum mechanics? In some cases, it, too, could be a way of showing off, particularly if you accompanied the article with a note like, “Perhaps this will amuse, although of course it’s a superficial treatment. Why can’t they use Schrödinger’s full equation?”
But in general, people who share this kind of article seem to have loftier motives than trying to impress their friends. They’re seeking emotional communion, Dr. Berger said.
“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.” (Go tonytimes.com/tierneylab to discuss your motives for e-mailing articles.)
The Penn researchers found evidence of readers’ sharing other emotions, too, like anxiety— which, based on the old “fear sells” theory of journalism, might be expected to be the most influential emotion on readers. But of all the variables studied, Dr. Berger said, awe had the strongest relationship with an article making the most-e-mailed list, and that finding strikes me as a high compliment to the Times audience.
In fact, Dear Reader, you could consider this new study to be firm scientific evidence of your own awesomeness. And if you want to share that feeling with anyone, you know what to do next.
"From The New York Times, [date] © [year of publication] The New York Times All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited." The credit shall accompany the first or last page of the Content and if the Content is reprinted in digital format on a Website, User shall provide a link to [www.nytimes.com].
Cat nap time
Dustings of snow
T-shirt wars
How brillant is this? When I saw this I just had to share. I will be subscribing to their posts.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Tartuffe's Folly - Random musings from Marklewood
I love it when friends break free of constraints placed on them. Censorship is a choice of the individual. We have free will. Good for you Mark!
The fabulous Miss G
I go to the same store every day and the owners daughter, we'll call her the fabulous Miss G, (who is all of 4 years old). Loves when I come into the store. She is so cute a little Korean girl who has cut her own hair. The other day I went to make a purchase and she had a hot pink tea set for two set up at the counter. She greeted me by saying loudly: "my friend is here." I smile and greet both her and her mom. I made my purchase and she offers me some tea and I gladly took some. I asked what kind it was she said: "I don't know". She makes me smile.
Tonight I went in, she greeted me loudly as before with a hearty: "My friend is here." followed by a little giggle. I went to the back of the store to get what I needed and she followed. As I turned she exclaimed the raspberry, blueberry, strawberry tea shop is closed but the race track is open." and off she ran.
It's the tiny things like this that make life worth living.
It really is the best football photo
Popcorn Tweets: Twitter-Powered Popcorn Maker [VIDEO]
This just makes me laugh I just want to sit on twitter and tweet the #popcorn tweet.
Getting groceries
Monday, February 8, 2010
How lucky I am.
Facebook | Michael
Michael Moniz "You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection." Buddha
Michael is an excellent coach from Orlando Florida. He always makes me smile when we meet on Facebook
Gratitude. | gayguidetoronto.com
Feb
08
The past few weeks I have been in a little bit of limbo. Making some decisions on the direction that I wist to take moving forward. Life can be like that and having a good group of coaches as friends always helps pull one out of the pit. On Friday while I was in the thick of the pit that was my life. Shaun Proulx posted his usual friday question on Facebook of,
Shaun Proulx is asking: What are you appreciatiing on this Friday afternoon?
and over on HIMBO Shaun also does his Feel good Friday’s
My responce was what I thought was a simple reply,
Brandon Williamsjust the little things this week ShaunThis hit me like a tone of bricks. I am not appreciating all the little things in my life. Especially the tiny things. For it is the sum of all the good little things that totally out weigh the few grand experiences. In my coaching I often have to stop and remind my clients of exactly what they have accomplished over the course of our sessions. I detail every success and movement forward.
This helped me see that I have not been telling myself all the good that had taken place in my life all the things I come across in my daily life that just bring a simple smile to my face. I need this reminder. I took this on as a challenge and started a new blog called thetinythings.com in I capture in realtime, all the tiny things that make me smile.
I hope you enjoy. I hope you take the time to recount tyhe great things that happen to you over the course of this week and if you find yourself feeling a little down and out with the winter blues, take a piece of paper and start writing down all the things that make you feel good, bring a smile to your face or are just plain worth remembering.
You might also like:
Snickers: Betty White - 2010 Super Bowl Commercials -- NFL FanHouse
I love watching the superbowl. Go betty go!
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Facebook | Love, Staci
Love, Staci Light Leads The Way
Sometimes the simple act of keeping our eyes towards the light is enough to lead us out of darkness. Stay with the Light... Love, Staci Want more from Staci? Sign up for the FREE Newsletter or Have Staci speak at your next event! © 2010 Staci J. Shel ... More on Love, Staci™ http://post.ly/Mh2y
Ok so I am a huge fan of Staci so get use to seeing her here. You might as well sign up for her page on Facebook Love, Staci.
In this post she speaks of "light leading the way". That's the purpose of this microblog. Looking for the things in my life that are light and bright. The more I notice what's good in my life the more good I will see.
