Month: February 2009

Six reasons I didn’t follow you back on Twitter

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

I’m certainly not the first person to give reasons why I choose not to follow people on Twitter, but there are a few Twitter habits “twabits?” that particularly annoy “twannoy?” me, in addition to the habit of making up new words by tacking a "tw" on the front “tweologizing?”.

1. You aren’t using your real name. This one bugs me in all social media channels. I know it’s not always possible to get your name as a user name “believe me, David B. Thomas, I know it can be hard to get common names”, but you can at least use some variation of a real name. There are very few people I follow who use an alias or nom de twit, and the ones I do at least are very clear in their profiles who they are. In short, I want to follow real people.

2. You don’t have a picture of yourself. And it’s not just that you don’t have a photo at all. I want to see a picture of you, not your pet. And as much as I love babies, I’ll go to your Flickr page to see your kids.

3. I don’t care what you had for lunch unless you link to the recipe for what you made, or a review of the restaurant where you ate. And I can’t think of any way you can make interesting the news that you missed your bus, unless it can’t stop because it can’t go slower than 55.

4. You tweet a lot of mystery links. Don’t just throw in a TinyURL and say "This is interesting." There are maybe three people in the whole world whose taste and interests are enough like mine that I would accept that. Give me a hint what it is I’ll be seeing if I choose to click on your link out of the dozens being suggested by the other people I’m following.

5. You don’t include any context. If all I see in your stream are tweets like "@scobleizer Yes! Exactly!" I’m probably not going to follow you.

6. I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. Maybe 20 percent of the tweets I see make little or no sense because they are poorly written, spelled, punctuated and shoehorned into 140 characters. It’s a challenge to write clearly and concisely, but it’s fun, too.

The right way and the wrong way

Dave

A week or so after my son was born, we had some friends over who were due to have their first son very soon after us. The experience of labor, delivery and post partum was fresh in my mind and there was a lot that the classes hadn’t prepared me for, so I wrote a long email to my friends with all the advice I could think of. I’ve forwarded that email to about a dozen people in the last year and nearly did it again on Friday when I realized I could put it on our baby blog and lots more people would be able to see it. Yes, it only took me a year to realize that. And I do this for a living.

Anyway, I posted it and a few days later found some rather inept comment spam from a company that makes electric butt sprayers or something. The comment went into excruciating detail about all the things that might happen below the waist of a woman who had just given birth, and why spraying warm water on most of it would be a good thing. It also provided a helpful link to their web site. I deleted it.

If the people who sell that product and are searching for blog posts about labor and delivery had spent just a little more time coming up with some useful advice for new parents that didn’t necessarily involve the spraying of warm water, I would have thought they were providing a valuable resource and contributing as a fellow traveler in the whole baby journey. Really, it probably would have taken them an extra 30 minutes to create something worthwhile. Instead, they created spam and got deleted.

My advice for getting through labor and the first week

Dave

I wrote this about a week after Conrad was born, to send to friends who were due not long after us. I found that the birthing classes and prenatal classes and books had given me a lot of good preparation, but there was a lot no one had ever mentioned. This is my attempt to catalog those things. I’ve emailed it to maybe a dozen people in the year “!” since Conrad was born and it’s finally occured to me to put it on the baby blog. Der.

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Bring your laptop to the hospital. You can use it to play music, watch movies, check the Internet if somebody tells you something odd, and send the birth email. As many people told me, labor is boring. You could be in the hospital for a long time waiting for things to happen, so it’s nice to have a source of entertainment. And after he’s born, he and mom will be sleeping a lot. That’s when I sent out the first email and pictures.

Create your email announcement list well in advance and check it a few times to see if you left people off.

Bring food to the hospital, especially snacks that mom can eat. After you arrive they won’t want to feed her, in case she needs a C-section at some point. That means she will go a long time without eating. Jean went more than 24 hours. Plus, once he’s born, they will be bringing food to the mom, but not to you “although I found out after three days that I could have requested it”. I’m sure, like Duke, that UNC has a handy cafeteria, but it’s nice to have food in the room. Based on what we brought I would recommend dates and dried fruit, maybe a bit of chocolate, and hard candy if you guys like it. Don’t bring cheese or salami. I thought I would have access to a fridge but it would have required getting a nurse to open and close it for me, or something.

Bring your cell phone, keep it charged and don’t give anybody the room phone number. Basically what I’m saying is don’t answer the phone. You will either be waiting anxiously or exhausted after the birth. So, don’t give out the room phone number, because you’ll be asleep when someone calls. Tell people to call your mobile, then turn the ringer off and return calls when you feel like it.

Know the complete address someone would need to send you flowers, in case one of those calls gets through. If someone does call and say they want to send flowers, ask them to send a small bouquet. In our small postpartum room the window sill was the only place we could put them and it helped that we didn’t have to find room for a giant bouquet.

Lots of doctor-looking people will be asking you lots of questions, and you don’t always have to answer. We had some guy doing a survey about flu shots come into the room and we politely told him to go away.

Have a birth plan, even if it’s very simple, and force someone to discuss it with you. Maybe print it big and tape it to the wall. Despite everything we’d been told about how great Duke was at listening to our needs, no one ever asked us if we had one, and I never thought to bring it up. As soon as you arrive, ask everyone who comes into the room “and there will be dozens” “Who do I talk to about our birth plan?” until someone tells you. Ours was very simple, only a few items, but one was “we want to have skin to skin contact with the baby as soon as possible after he’s born” and that didn’t happen because it was a forceps delivery and therefore a medical procedure, but still, no one even knew we wanted to do it.

Back to all those people coming into the room: Feel free to ask “Who are you and why are you here?” Not because I think anyone unauthorized will sneak in, but because it’s interesting to know, and in my experience they’re pretty bad about telling you.

You will likely be in the hospital for 72 hours or more. If you’re like me, you won’t want to leave your wife alone for very long, and you certainly won’t want to leave her and the baby. Bring a toilet kit, clothes to sleep in, slippers and maybe two changes of clothes. I brought more than I needed. Basically the 72 hours we were there felt like two long days.

Be careful not to bring too much stuff. If your postpartum room is like the one at Duke “tiny and crowded”, you’ll be tripping over stuff left and right.

Things we brought that we used:

  • laptop
  • playing cards
  • snacks
  • camera
  • cell phone
  • focal points “see below”
  • baby book “we had them put his footprints in it after they did it on the official form”
  • racquetball for Jean to squeeze during contractions
  • notepad and pen “this was crucial – in the minutes, hours and days after your child is born, you will think of hundreds of questions and forget them when the doctor or nurse is in the room”.

We brought several books and magazines each and never even looked at them. Even though labor is boring and there are long stretches with nothing happening but contractions, reading seemed odd. We also barely watched TV. The cards were good during the long wait for dilation.

Shower and use the bathroom whenever you have the chance. There will come a time when you can no longer leave your wife’s side to see to your own ablutions, so prepare for that moment.

This will sound odd, but think of things you want to say to her during labor. I found myself saying “Good job” so often that I began to feel ridiculous. Also, all the nurses during labor were saying “You’re doing really good” and I would say “You’re doing really well,” and found myself worrying that they thought I was correcting them.

Bring some “focal points” for mom to stare at during labor. Jean, who I didn’t think would care about that kind of thing, really did. It was very helpful for her to have objects in the middle distance “on top of the TV cabinet” to fixate on during contractions. I brought a hat with ears that we bought for the baby that she thought was very cute, and a little stuffed bunny that a friend’s daughter gave us.

Buy your wife a gift that you can give to her in the hospital after the baby is born. I gave Jean a pair of earrings. They aren’t as expensive as I would have liked, but they will always be the earrings I gave her in the hospital.

If you are able to take leave – paternity or otherwise – I suggest two weeks is the minimum. I get two weeks and I had a number of people suggest I take just one week at home and then something like a month of Fridays. I decided to take all two weeks together and I can’t imagine what it would be like if I was back at work this week. I can’t imagine what it will be like to go back on Monday. Plus, your wife will be overwhelmed, tired, sore and emotional and will need you to do most everything for her. The baby will be nursing roughly every three hours, and it takes about an hour at a time, so as you’ve figured out, your wife will not be sleeping more than two hours at a time.

When you get home, you will have lots of people offering to help. Have a list of things for people to do, and don’t be afraid to ask them to do things like clean the fridge or do laundry. Most people would rather spend the entire four hours swaddling and holding the baby, so you need to give them direction.

Also, when people want to come over, tell them to bring food. This is the one time you can get away with it. We ate a lot of chicken pot pies from Whole Foods as they were tasty and easy to heat up. Casseroles are good, too. The less you have to worry about, the better.

Also, don’t bother trying to “stock up” on sleep. I don’t think it works that way. One thing I will say is start eating well now: eat a balanced diet, get some exercise if you can, hydrate, stay away from junk food. Once you go into labor you will be running for a long time, and the cleaner the fuel you have inside you, the better you will feel. I did a 21-day fruit and veg cleansing diet in mid-January and it was the best thing I could have done to get ready.

SAS Social Media Manager job description

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

For a while we were thinking of this job as Digital Media Manager, but a Google search for that phrase gets a lot more hits for software packages that help manage your digital media than it does for people who manage Web 2.0 activities. I suggested changing the title to Social Media Manager, fully aware that a” the term may become hopelessly hackneyed and/or quaint in six to 18 months and 2″ that there are many people who believe you can’t manage social media. "Social media strategist" would have also been a perfectly good title, although with the trails I need to blaze, I didn’t feel like creating a whole new taxonomy for our HR department as well.

So in this blog’s spirit of looking behind the curtain, I present my job description.

Social Media Manager

Job Description

The SAS Social Media Manager is both internally- and externally-focused on developing & executing SAS’ social media strategy and advocating for the external community. Externally, he or she identifies influential opportunities, engages regularly with SAS’ audiences online and may be called upon to speak publicly as a thought-leader on SAS’ social media strategy. This person anticipates the evolution of social media. Internally the Social Media Manager sets the tone, philosophy and strategy “including budget” for Web 2.0, gains appropriate buy-in, then communicates relentlessly. He or she monitors Web 2.0 activities across departments and geographies, guiding participants on integration and best practices while encouraging successful participation. The Social Media Manager is obsessively focused on how results connect to corporate objectives, and is given the tools to measure those results.

Scope Geographic: Global

Internal/external: 50% internally focused/ 50% externally focused
Breadth of channels: Actively advises on, monitors and coordinates SAS’ activities on prioritized Web 2.0 channels, with responsibility for exploring & researching relevance of new channels.

Authority

Given ultimate authority to define SAS’ strategy & approach, including spend, for digital media channels that fall within the scope. Decisions that require budget will be appropriately coordinated with field marketing efforts.

Skills

Demonstrated experience with Web 2.0 channels & great affinity for learning new technologies.

Strong relationship building skills, including negotiation & executive interaction, ability to coach others

Project management

Ability to develop a business vision for social media, including goals & results

Leadership/decision-making: is skilled at articulating to executives and internal teams the importance of social applications and is able to make calm recommendations during crises. Is able to exercise good judgment with quick response time.

Flexible communication skills: Strong editorial writer. Is able to present needs and plans and communicate internally, has a distinct, personable voice for external engagement. Can manage negative situations toward positive outcomes.

Public speaking skills: This person will be the face of SAS Social Media Strategy, and will be called upon to speak to professional groups

Experienced manager: is able to manage budget and a team, if this function grows

Has foresight and vision: identifies Social Computing trends and is able to separate tools from fads

Tools required for success

Social networking analysis tools: To monitor/track results of digital media engagement.

Current mobile device”s”: To test mobile Web 2.0 applications, monitor flow & delivery of mobile traffic

Responsibilities

· Coordinate online media outreach and viral campaigns to promote SAS messages that increase awareness and/or drive traffic to the SAS site.

· Identify key/targeted bloggers by industry and solution area.

· Establish and cultivate positive relationships with key/targeted bloggers, and/or identify SAS marketers and PR managers who should be monitoring and influencing these relationships.

· Develop and manage pages on popular consumer social networking websites such as Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, MySpace, etc. as well as popular technology sites intended to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to the site.

· Develop and publish internal strategies for social media projects and technologies.

· Coordinate social media activities by actively engaging in consumer and industry conferences, blogs, video sharing, online chats, wikis, etc., to promote SAS messaging and increase brand awareness resulting in driving brand traffic to the site.

· Engage in regular participation within the customer community, including the review of user blogs, wikis and communities such as sascommunity.org.

· Recruit, develop and coach new bloggers and blog editors.

· Manage the day-to-day blogger activities; proactively identifying and developing blog posts, recruiting bloggers and assigning blog ideas to others.

· Track and monitor the success of online initiatives “i.e. impressions, reach and influence”, and provide reports for directors and execs.

· Identify and report on digital/social media trends to PR and marketing leaders.

· Educate staff on the implementation and use of new technologies.

· Promote and evangelize social media activities internally.