However, the time is right.  First, I took a very long break from social media work altogether.  My blog fell asleep, my tweets dwindled to practically nothing, and I rarely looked at my Wordspring page on Facebook.  Now that I’m back in the field, I’m working for other companies, rather than trying to run my own business.  My Wordspring “brand” is less important.  And being myself is far more important!  Since I have Twitter accounts for the places where I work, I can use my personal account for personal purposes.  Seems like something I should put my name to.

I’m glad to say that I’ve been in the social media “scene” in BC long enough for people to see beyond the Wordspring brand to the Catherine Novak behind it.  What’s more, I have always used some semblance of my own face as my profile picture.  So I should  not have too much trouble with losing people due to lack of recognition. Besides, I’ll be unfollowing a lot of people/brands/spammers that don’t have a personal relationship with me or give me great information. My personal account has long had a stream that goes by way too fast for me to make much sense of it.

Then at work, I’ll follow people and develop a following more based on the activities that I do at work.  You can find me already at @gowestgroup, and I just started tweeting as @NetscribeCath today.  Follow me in both places if you think I have something of value to say.  And friends, I am funnier, more irreverent and risk taking after hours than I am at work.  But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Netscribe's "Twavel" app

Tomorrow is my second “official” day at Netscribe Web Communications.  I think I said on Twitter earlier that I’m doing happy dances on the inside.  Between Netscribe and my work with Melinda Harris at Go West Design Group, that puts me firmly back in the land of social media/interactive web.

I think my favourite aspect of this turn of events is that I actually have worked at Netscribe already – five years ago.  At that time, I was newly back into the full-time work force, having spent 8 years mostly with very small children, though I always kept a bit of contract writing work on the side.  Netscribe was a much smaller company a few years ago, and I was on contract.  So at some point we gave each other hugs and kisses, and I went to seek my fortune elsewhere… and where I went in the meantime is a whole other story that doesn’t matter much right now.

Jump to 2011 – Netscribe is a thriving web apps firm, bursting at the seams with desks, computers and smart staff.  And Steve and Stella were looking for a social media person.  They managed to track me down at Social Media Camp Victoria, and I feel like we just picked up where we left off.

I’ll be doing writing, social media consulting and training work for clients in government, as well as managing the social media for Netscribe itself.  I guess I’ll have to set up a Twitter account for me with my Netscribe hat on – it’ll be very transparently me at the keys though.  Should I change my user name from Wordspring to NetscribeCath?

What happened in the meantime?  The short answer is – I needed a break.  2009 was an incredibly intense year, in which I found out what happens when you start a business on no money, and try to do everything yourself.  It magnifies both your strengths and your weaknesses.  And by the autumn of last year, I was running on empty.  So I escaped to the “security” of paid employment in a completely different field, and I did my best to take care of my family.  It took a bit longer to take care of myself as well, but that seems to be coming along, too.

As of right now, I am looking for more work in the communications field (where I have always been at my best). I’ve also signed up for Social Media Camp on October 3rd, and I’ve just finished the seminal book, “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky.  Those three things alone deserve separate posts.  So stay tuned.

It’s supports a wonderful local charity: Power To Be.  Kids with disabilities deserve to get out and try new things, and just be kids.  Power To Be gives them the opportunity to stretch themselves and find out just what they CAN do.  Check out their website at www.powertobe.ca.

It’s going to feature a great variety of local talent: CBC’s All Points West host Joanne Roberts will be the emcee through the evening, which will feature comedy by Mike Vardy, and music by Vikki Flawith and Easy, Char, Crimson Star, The Gruntles and RIPT.

Twestival has shown the power of social media – particularly Twitter – to build community quickly. While people organize hundreds of fundraisers every year for worthy causes, my experience has been that when you do most of your planning in person, and with phone calls, pulling together a fundraiser can take months.  Using Twitter both to organize and to get to know each other, we’ve been able to form a team in a very short time.  It’s amazing how powerful a sentence or two can be in conveying just the right information.

Here’s a fun little video that Cris Vleck cooked up for us to get the word out:  watch it and buy your tickets!

YYJ Twestival Video on You Tube

And remember to buy your tickets in advance and swish right past the people lining up at the door:

www.amiando.com/yyjtwestival

Only 7 more sleeps!  See you there?

Around Tuesday, people started discussing a tweetup for Friday morning at the Shoal Point Moka House.  Yesterday, CHEK TV asked either Vikki Flawth or Tim Ayres (or both) if they could send a camera person to see what the heck we Twitter people do at our tweetups.   The answer was “ok”

Problem #1 – no clear organizer of event.  It’s a tweetup, for heaven’s sake.

People showed up at 8 am to a mainly empty coffee shop and made their way to the back corner.  By the time I showed up at 8:20, one person was already saying goodbye to the eight others gathered there.  Believe me, it was not a rowdy crowd, though certainly when you get 8 people at one table there is cross talk.  Eight gabby twitter people, doubly so.

Problem #2: Maybe the Shoal Point Moka House isn’t used to gabby people before 8:30?

At the same time as me, a guy from CHEK TV showed up with his broadcast-quality camera and a tripod.  No big lights, no boom mic.  He talked with Tim Ayers for about 15 minutes while the rest of us yakked away in the background. We couldn’t have been that noisy because we didn’t want to overpower the interview happening behind us.

Around 8:45, a man holding a “to go” coffee mug stands beside our table and asks who we are.  I thought he might want to join us, actually until I took a second look at his face and it was clear he was none too pleased.  He said he was OK with a group of people having coffee, but definitely NOT ok with the TV camera.

Problem #3: Yes, someone should have given the owner a heads-up about CHEK.  But that’s related to problem #1.  Perhaps we could have gone somewhere else.

Here’s the part I don’t get.  If I owned an establishment as large (and as empty) as the Moka House, I would welcome the free publicity.  Yes!  Come in and enjoy the coffee, the wireless internet and the room for socializing!  Business people with a penchant for sending each other tweets are welcome here!

We felt like we had done something very wrong for even being there.  And that’s where the bad feelings set it.

Hope that helps the people following the grumpiness on Twitter today.

It seemed natural to me, a few months ago, to want to follow-back people who follow me on Twitter, and to make friends with people who wanted to befriend me on Facebook. On Facebook, I’ve befriended most people, and it’s not as if I’m being inundated with requests. So the philosophy works fine there. Twitter is another matter.

Back in January or so, when I gave Tweetlater.com instructions to automatically follow-back every person who followed me, Twitter was a great big party of users, some commercial and more just having fun. If someone followed me, I figured it was because they genuinely thought I had something to say. I didn’t mind the occasional marketer, because I could perhaps learn a thing or two from the way they used Twitter to engage potential clients.

Twitter being what it is (and I think that might be a constantly mutating, highly contagious virus right about now), things have changed since then. Every snake-oil salesman and would-be Internet millionaire is climbing aboard. People who have their accounts set to autofollow are sitting ducks for these hucksters.

Hucksters, I have news for you: you are BORING!! Honestly, if you are going to sell to me, at least make it interesting. Make me feel like you care about me. The philosophy of social media is engagement. Dance with me. Date me. Show me why I should fall in love with your product. I know you only have 140 characters to make an impression.

That makes Twitter a lot like real life, where you only have a few seconds before your customers have passed judgement on you. I’m sure you wouldn’t start a Real Life conversation “Hi. Let me show you how to get 16,000 new customers in a month” – even at a trade show.

Therefore, the autofollow is turned off, at least until the hucksters stop trying to stuff me in their sales funnel.  And really, it’s not as if I’m following Mr. Snake Oil’s advice and using Twitter Secrets to Gain 16,000 Followers This Month.  My following is growing at a nicely manageable speed of a couple of dozen people each day.  I can stay on top of that manually by going into my “following” list, and only selecting the people with real photos, real names, real bios and (if I have to really dig deep to decide if I’ll follow back) real conversations.

I am no longer a sitting duck!

A technical aside: I actually thought I had my autofollow turned off about a month ago, when I took that option off of SocialToo.com. But I forgot about my initial deal with Tweetlater. It’s a good idea to write down somewhere which third-party applications you are using, and what for. Keep it with your other administrative records.

Some web strategists say not to do that, but to keep your blog and your website separate so that your blog acts as an external referral source to your website. I figure there are plenty of methods out there to generate incoming links to your site, without the bother of having your blog on a different domain.  Take all this social media stuff I’ve been harping on about, for instance.  Everywhere I have a profile, I can put a link to my site.  I can link to my site almost everywhere that I submit a comment, as well. There is no reason you can’t set up links to your site almost anywhere you have something to say online.

Now I’m in the process of redirecting some of those external links, creating new copy and generally polishing up the new home. As this is a WordPress blog, it’s really easy for me to change the content on the site. If I were a web designer, I’d say that it’s really easy for me to change the layout, too – but I delegate that job out to ideazone.ca. They know what they are doing.

So thanks, Paul and Katharine, for a great job!  Welcome, everyone, to the new space.  Housewarming party TBA.

I am going through my “following” list on Twitter, and deleting one name after another. This involves reviewing my list, avatar after avatar, name after name and bio after bio, and assessing each for whether I want them to continue showing up in my stream or not.  I’m hoping to reduce my list from 1400-odd people I’m following to about half that.

When “Following” doesn’t equal “Friend”
I know that for many power Twitter users, 1400 people to follow seems a drop in the bucket.  Some people who want to build their following to huge numbers play the “following” game to great effect, picking up a hundred or so people each day, hoping to be followed back, then they trim back and add again, growing their list of followers in waves.   They can follow 200o people in less than a month, and as the number of followers they attract gets to about 1800, they can add still more people.   Twitter on “nutritional supplements” is how I think of it.   And if those people are chosen carefully, perhaps it can be a decent strategy for some.   While I love finding interesting new people to follow, this “forced growth” doesn’t seem like the strategy for me right now.

And I’m not “easy”, either
Autofollowing isn’t really doing the job for me, either.  Again, it’s not a strategy I dismiss entirely.  I like reciprocity as much as the next person.  But autofollowing does make me feel like an easy pushover for every marketing guru that comes along hoping to sell me something.  For the most part, it hasn’t enriched the quality of my Twitter experience.  It may have worked for Barack Obama, but even if he wrote his own tweets, I suspect his “people” monitored all the replies and direct messages he received.

Filters help, but can’t do all the work
I’ve got maybe 15% of the people I follow sorted into groups, which makes it easier to follow: local tweeps (for Victoria and Vancouver people) and Don’t Miss (for people both near and far that I’ve made a real connection with).  I could do more, but I feel like I have too many to sort! So I have decided that it’s time to simplify.

So over to my list I go, looking for familiar names and faces to hang onto.  Casually dismissing the spammers.  Agonising over “mom, runner, working from home, social media enthusiast” that I don’t recognize.  Is she using the service?  Is that enough in common to hang onto?  Am I dismissing a future friend or business partner?

Here’s how the cull works:

• If we have exchanged friendly shout-outs and even confided to each other in direct messages, you’re in.
• If you live in Victoria BC, you’re probably in.
• If something about your bio makes me say “oh wait… maybe not this one”.  You’re in.  For now.
• If you feed me wonderful content on a wonderful basis – news, links, terrific whitepapers and blog articles, you are in.
• If you are Ashton or Demi… you make me laugh.  You’re in.

The rest of you – well, you can @wordspring me.  Ask me to follow back so we can send direct messages to each other, then give me a little bit of yourself.  It doesn’t have to be much, just 140 characters of  The Real You.  Not your product, not your boss, your publicist or your intern.  Just you.  And I will follow you to the ends of the earth.  Or until Twitter is bought up by Google and the love is gone.

social media logos

It started innocently enough – having written my way down to part-time status with my main client, I found myself with some time on my hands, and a burning desire to “get good at something specific” in marketing. And I’d learn it over Christmas.

Diving into the social media pool
I decided that something should be social media.  After all, here I am – a marketer that spends considerable time writing web copy.  Why not check what all the fuss is about concerning using Facebook for business, Twitter and LinkedIn?

Freshening my Facebook
Facebook was easy – sort of.  I’d been on for a year and a half, collected way too many silly applications and a whole bunch of friends (ok, a hundred or so) representing a lifetime of moving around and trying to keep in touch.   First thing I did was grab Facebook by the scruff of the neck, turn off all sorts of notifications, and get it to stop bossing me around… at least long enough to invite a few more friends and make a page for my business.

Blogging for branding
Next, I took a look at my baby blog – started so that I could muse about ADHD, but named for my business.  OK, so I was having an identity crisis.  ADHD is still an abiding interest, but I’d have to blog about it elsewhere.  I’m still too swamped in the social media learning curve to have started that blog up, but if you joined me then and are wondering when I’m going to get around to blogging about coming “out of the fog” again, well, bear with me.

So the blog has made a right turn, and now it’s my repository for social media thoughts, especially for people who are new to it.  Because really, most people are new to it!  (I mean, if I can become the top of the Twitter elite for Victoria BC in less than a month, then you know that we’re still in the infancy stages of this stuff!)

Taking on Twitter
Then I cranked up Twitter, attached it to Facebook and Facebook to my blog, and badda boom badda bing, we have social media visibility!  Except that still, nothing looks quite the way I want it to.   I’ve just found a theme that I like on my free WordPress blog, so the upgrades are coming.  Once that’s done, can embedded YouTube videos and Flickr photo galleries be far behind?  They’re all complementary ways to connect…

LinkedIn, too…
Oh, and I fired up my LinkedIn account too, because after all, I am a business woman, and this site has wonderful connecting functions for people in business.

Learning from the Pros
As all this was happening, I was finding interesting, savvy social media people to follow on Twitter, and they’ve been educating me every single day about the best ways to connect with mentors, with potential clients, and with people who are just worth knowing.  Checking on TwitterGrader, I went from a fair-to-middling-for-a-newbie score of 54 (out of 100) in mid-December to over 96 a couple of days ago.  And 435 people think I’m interesting and relevant enough to follow.  Imagine!

Racing up the learning curve!
The thing is, my head is still spinning from jumping onto this merry-go-round so quickly.  Clients are starting to ask how they can use social media effectively, and I’m putting together proposals that will help them take advantage of the relationship-marketing heart of social media… without causing them to lose sleep or productive working hours.  I’ll do that for them!

And to be sure, there are wonderful tools to help sort all the posts on all the sites – like Ping.fm, TweetLater, TwitterFeed, Tweetdeck, and so on.  As well, I’d like to thank some amazing social media professionals, pro bloggers and simply fine people I met on-line who are my role models, like Mari Smith, Nancy Marmolejo, Sherman Hu, Chris Brogan, Maria Reyes McDavis, and Michele Price.

Do I feel ready to pass along what I’ve learned to the 99 percent of Victoria business owners who know social media is “out there” but don’t know how to make it work for them?  As ready as I’ll ever be…

Maven – An Expert by Another Name!

My expertise lies in finding just the right words to fit a given messaging situation.  One of my clients calls me the “Make a Word Department” – and that suits me just fine!  I love playing with words and phrases in order to make magic happen. Whether it’s a compelling sales letter, a “difficult” letter or even a new product name, that “BINGO” feeling when I hit on the right combination is what makes me an expert.

But right now, since it’s 2 days before Christmas and I’m working from home, I’ve got to go be an expert at baking savoury pastries.  Glad to he here, integrating WordSpring Writing and Marketing more fully into this blog.