I just spent a very pleasant couple of hours with about a dozen BC government workers who are all interested in “citizen engagement”, aka finding effective ways of generating conversation, listening to feedback, soliciting input from the public, mainly via digital media. The organizer of the Citizen Engagement Drinks event is Heather Bauer, @HBtwocents on Twitter.
Heather is inspiring! Figuring she had to fit time into her busy day to blog, she has developed her own strategy: use the 20 minute cycle commute to work to record her video blog! And why not? That’s when she gets her ideas, and her iPhone is set up with a clip that attaches to her bicycle handlebars, so she can pedal and record at the same time. The result? It’s something like this:
How cool is that? OK, there must have been some time invested in editing and so on, but she’s fitting both the cycling and the vlogging (video blogging) into her life, and Heather is a self-confessed workaholic. If you don’t cycle you could try drive vlogging, dinner prep vlogging, laundry vlogging, bath vlogging… ok maybe not. But the possibilities are endless!
BTW, yes I missed yesterday’s blog because I “didn’t have time”. This post is my comeuppance.
I’m home late tonight, because I just got back from eWomen Network, a group I’ve been attending for 4 years pretty consistently.
EWomen Network is a business networking group for women, and it’s run very well by Kerry Brown. Tonight there must’ve been 75 women there – and I knew easily 50 of them! In that group, I have met the woman who sold my house, the woman who recruited me to work in her design group for the last two years, the woman who arranged our mortgage, the woman who helped us stage our home, the woman who coached me while I ran my own business, many social media clients, and many great friends.
I love my group of women, and recommend eWomen Network wholeheartedly for any woman running a business, or even just thinking about it. But that might not be your calling. In that case, I hope your take-away from this post is to find yourself a group to call your own.
It might be a church, a community organization, a business networking group, a running club or any number of organizations where people get together and share an interest. Don’t stay on the fringes. Get in there and get to know people. Offer your talents, take some phone numbers, go out for coffee.
As a kid, I was told “You get out of it what you put in.” EWomen Network has shown me, on a monthly basis, how true that is. Thank you to my wonderful network of friends.
Along with my (sort of) new job writing and working on social media for Netscribe, I’ve got some big plans for the next year or so: grad school.
I haven’t officially applied, but here in Victoria we are fortunate to have Royal Roads University, which is geared toward working professionals. They’ve got a Professional Communications graduate program which looks like a perfect fit for both my interests and my qualifications.
As well, I’ve learned about an interesting organization of academics and researchers called HASTAC (pronounced “haystack”) who are keeping each other and the wider public informed about Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology and how it relates to digital collaboration. I mention that because when it comes time to do involved research and a thesis, I’ll want to have a community of people who are interested similar fields of inquiry.
I hope to get going in January 2012 – should be well into the blogging habit then, so this isn’t the last that you’ll hear about it.
