When your passion aligns with your work, you are one lucky person. That’s what I consider myself. I’m Astek’s Senior Community Manager. What’s a community manager you ask? In simple terms, I’ll say it’s the voice of the brand to the community and the voice of the community to the brand. In even simplier terms, I sum it up as “Be helpful”
So why is community management my passion? And maybe more importantly, how did I know I wanted to do this for work?
I did not grow up wishing I would be a community manager (actually I wanted to be a surf bum in Baja California, but that’s a completely different story!). It was something that happened over the course of the last 5 years. Beginning with my days in residential real estate, where I learned about self branding, marketing and social media. My quest for learning lead me to Social Media Club Chicago, where I became director of communications and was responsible for growing and managing our community which has grown from 300 to over 3000 in the last 3 years.
As I transitioned out of real estate, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I had the opportunity to work as Zaarly‘s Chicago Ambassordor last summer and had a meeting with Rachel Yeomans that started as an idea for a panel of speakers on community management, evolved into the Chicago Community Manager Group and then led me to form My Community Manager. (more details on the My Community Manager story here) And of course, but not least, begin discussion with Rachel and Andy about coming to work for Astek.
I still am actively involved with Social Media Club, am growing a community with My Community Manager and enjoy every day I get to work with Astek on community management for them and our clients as we continue to grow!

I might be the last person on boat here, but I’ve recently discovered the googlemaps can now plot both biking and walking routes!! If you type in the starting address and ending destination, you can now select these additional options. Then google uses the maps of all the bike lanes in the city to plot the most bike-friendly route to take. While I know my everyday routes pretty well, when I’m going to a neighborhood I don’t know as well this is super handy!

As for the walking routes, there are plenty of places in the city that walkers can pass through that cars can’t (especially one way streets!), this is handy for those of you that are fans of the walking.

Thanks, Google, for making me safer and smarter!

As we entered the new year, one thing that most of us face is the overwhelming amount of information we dissect every day. As a community manager for several different clients, the amount is amplified.  While trying to find a way to continue to provide relative and useful information for our clients and their communities, I finally decided to check out Yahoo Pipes. I’ve heard people talk about Yahoo Pipes, even used programs and services that stated they used Yahoo Pipes, but I had never know exactly what they were.

According to Yahoo, “Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” In plain language, you fetch information, add filters and produce specific content you desire. What is so nice about Pipes is it has drag and drop modules that requires no programming background. In addition to creating your own Pipes, you can also view Pipes that others have made. How about using Pipes as an eBay price watch for certain items?

So far, I’ve only created a simple RSS feed for search Twitter for Tweets using the #cmgr hashtag, but making sure it includes common keywords. This is then sent to my Google Reader as an RSS.

Have you used Yahoo Pipes? What ways are you finding to use them? Just hearing about Yahoo Pipes? How do you see them being useful?

Or, at least all of the electrons that form the cat videos and pornography zipping around it?

Impossible to calculate exactly but, like most bizarre science facts (the planet Saturn could float on water since it’s only 2/3 as dense, the national debt as a stack of pennies would stretch out of the solar system, etc.) this is entertaining because of the scales involved.

The guys who put this together are called VSauce and their YouTube channel has a lot of other interesting time-waster material.

This month we are sharing things that inspire us. Personally, crafting is my passion and is a huge influence on my personal aesthetic. My work on various crafts has informed the way I look at form, function, materials and, yep, even web design.

And in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d share a simple craft project that is an olfactory delight – cloving oranges!

Over the weekend, we sat down to decorated some oranges with cloves for the Astek conference table. Now the whole office smells like Christmas! If you want to decorate your own oranges it is very easy. Here’s how we did it:

Simply take some oranges…

And a bowl of whole cloves (available with the spices in any grocery store)

Press the pointy end of the clove into the orange. Make patterns or images.

We couldn’t resist turning a green spot on one of the oranges into the Astek logo.

If you want to get really fancy you can take a zester or a tool like this v-shaped pumpkin carving tool and peel away just the top layer of skin for additional patterns and decor options.

Place in a pretty bowl and display where ever fragrant holiday cheer is appreciated. The best smells come for the first 48 hours, but display can be left for a week or more, though oranges may shrivel a bit after a few days. Enjoy!

Inspiration for ideas comes in many different forms, including: Observations while walking down the street, discovering a new product at the store, or hearing about an unusual experience on the nightly news. Inspiration for blog posts can come from any of these, but more often than not, most won’t be related to your business goals or objectives.

One of the best sources of inspiration for a blog post comes from reading other blog posts. You may ask, how does this help me if someone else has already written it? There are several ways.

1. Can you expand on their idea?
2. Do you have a different viewpoint?
3. Have you experienced a situation you can use as a case study?
4. If examples were given, are there others that develop into another story?
5. Does it remind you of a book your read that you can review?

These are just a few of the ideas that can come from reading someone else’s blog post. You should never copy someone else’s work. Always put your thoughts in your words. It’s ok to quote a piece of their content if you give proper attribution.  And if you do get direct inspiration from their blog, be sure to mention it in your blog post, including the authors name and title of the blog post with a link back to the original post.

What are some other sources of inspiration for blog content that you can think of? Did reading this post inspire a new idea for you?

I was doing some news research at CNN.com and stumbled upon the latest and greatest (and greenest) idea I’ve seen lately: CleanPrint.

When you click the little print icon in the top right corner of the story page a CleanPrint window pops up. This window allows you to actually format & edit what you are printing!

Each as you roll over each paragraph, byline, headline, photo and even weblinks a red ‘x’ appears in place of your mouse pointer. If you click it that piece of content is removed. Futhermore there is a toolbar on the left side that allows you to do the following:

Remove photos Make font bigger/smaller Print with less ink Undo your last change Add a note on the page Export as a pdf

How awesome is that? And perhaps my favorite feature (albeit a vanity feature) is the ticker in the upper right corner that tells you how many pages of paper have been saved by using this feature.

And here’s even MORE good news…you can install it in your own browsers to use on all websites you browse! Based on my highly unofficial testing it does not seem to work on every webpage, but it does seem to work on almost all news/article sites. Installing it is super easy, just go to the CleanPrint website and drag the icon to your bookmarks folder and voila!

Happy printing! And even better; Happy not printing online ads ever again!!

One of my favorite moments during a work conference was when I met up with a colleague for a meeting, and we both talked not about social media or technology – but books and BBC America. It was so rejuvenating after being inundated with the new ideas, opinions, and the latest and greatest. In fact, walking back to my hotel from that conversation, I had one of the best campaign ideas I had that entire month.

My takeaway: Don’t be afraid to let your outside inspiration influence your work.

This seems like common sense, but I have found myself feeling guilty when I just need a break from work and put it aside to read a novel or watch a movie. Yet I’m the one in meetings saying things like, “You know that scene in XYZ movie? That would be a perfect tie-in for this campaign for your product!”. My personal hobbies influence my work ideas constantly – and I feel the more that I let myself enjoy my hobbies, the stronger my work performance is.

My father had a similar suggestion when I was younger. I’d be doing homework and feeling overwhelmed with a certain subject matter. Dad would tell me to put it aside and do homework on another subject to let the other parts of my brain do some work for a bit. And it worked!

It’s a simple concept, but this little bit of acceptance of not “living and breathing” work, but rather just living and breathing and seeing how positively that affects your work is literally, quite an epiphany.

So with that being said, here is a  list of some of the things that inspire me to get outside of my social media box.

1. Fashion (runway shows, fashion magazines, fashion events, blogs and of course – shopping)
2. Anything BBC (from Dr. Who to Downton Abbey and all other Masterpiece Classic shows just make me happy)
3. Reading novels
4. Going to the movies (prefer foreign or independent films – anything in French is a given)
5. Going to my family’s lake house and doing nothing
6. Long walks
7. Listening to music

Now your turn! What are yours?

I was recently given a season subscription to the Joffrey Ballet. Naturally I began clicking around on their website to try and figure out where my seats were, and lo and behold, a new variation on social media integration smacked me in the face: seat tracking!

By linking to your facebook profile you can view where your friends who have already bought tickets are sitting and choose your seat accordingly! How cool is that?!

Of course each person has to link to their Facebook profile to activate the feature, but that is hardly a deterrent in today’s über-linking state of mind. I am curious to see if this will become standard practice for entertainment venues. It certainly is one step towards connecting their audiences.

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in 1972

The death of Steve Jobs has been discussed and his life memorialized over the last couple weeks, and for good reason.  Jobs was one of those rare celebrities that the computer industry produces.  He was a very public face for a very celebrated line of products and an evangelist for a way of thinking about how we, as a culture, use technology and integrate it into our lives.

Another computer legend died recently and, while his name recognition is no where near Jobs’s, without his work the current computer world might look very different, especially Apple products.

Dennis Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) created both the C programming language and (as one of many engineers) the UNIX operating system, both while employed at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 60′s and early 70′s.

The C Programming Language

Computers are only capable of carrying out a very specific number of simple instructions; they achieve complex tasks by stringing many (MANY) of these simple instructions together. This “machine code” can be complicated for humans to work with directly, especially on a large scale project, and so most computer programs are written in a “programming language” that translates ( or “compiles”) a human-friendly set of instructions into a computer-friendly set of instructions.  Roughly speaking: the friendlier a computer language is to humans, the “higher-level” it is.  The friendlier a language is to computers, the “lower-level” it is.

With C Ritchie created a bridge between the high and low-level. An elegant, structured language easy for humans to speak that translated very fluently to machine language.  It was also very easy to create versions of C for different types of computers.

C has been so successful it has inspired or evolved into many other languages including C++ (its immediate successor), JavaScript (running in your web browser), Java (used in everything from cars, home appliances and ground-control for space missions), ActionScript (the language that makes Flash animations do clever things), and PHP (which runs this WordPress blog).  Of the top ten most popular programming languages in 2011 at least seven of them are descended from C (or are, in fact, C itself.)

The UNIX Operating System

It’s hard to over-estimate the importance of the UNIX operating system.  There are a lot of reasons that it’s become such a workhorse of the information age.  Bell Labs distributed UNIX for free to universities, which meant an entire generation of computer professionals became deeply familiar with it and brought it out into the industry.  Being written in C meant it was easy to port to new hardware.  It standardized a very reliable system of allowing multiple users to access the computer and run programs at the same time.  And, at the same time UNIX was being birthed, an agency of the U.S. Defense Department was beginning to develop the technology that would eventually evolve into the present-day Internet, and a version of UNIX called BSD (“Berkley Software Distribution,” one of those branches of UNIX that evolved from the free university distributions) ran most of it.

And finally: when Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, he almost immediately began putting together plans for what would become the NeXT computer which was unveiled in 1988.  NeXT’s operating system was called NeXTSTEP and it was based in large part on that same BSD UNIX operating system.  Returning to Apple in 1997 he brought NeXTSTEP with him and it eventually evolved into what is now OSX.

Any OSX user who opens the “Terminal” window is essentially opening a window onto a UNIX command line that any computer science major in 1975 would feel right at home with.