Remember Your Voice: Riffs Conjured by Dave Grohl

I may not be sure about how I feel about SXSW, but what I’m crystal clear on are my feelings for Dave Grohl. Even though they exist, I’m not speaking of romantic feelings, but those of respect, admiration and envy. To be someone who can harness the inner drive to create an album playing every instrument himself – not to mention the talent he exudes doing so – is something I’ve always aspired to. Being in a funk lately, this talk seemed tailor-made for me.

Until recently, I saw Grohl purely as a musician. But when I watched his SXSW keynote (and then read and reread it several times), I was shocked at how deeply it affected me on multiple levels. He spoke of how ‘the musician comes first’ and ‘finding your voice’. That at all costs, it needs to be fed, nurtured and free to grow and change. No matter how much technology changes us, there is one thing that remains the same within us. There is something that can deeply move each of us to action. The problem is that many of us deny it. We push it down. We neglect it. Some of us may not even know what our ‘thing’ is. Many of us abandon it. We condemn ourselves to mundane societal norms, tasks and checklists that do nothing for our inner world. We are not truly living.

As a musician who abandoned her ‘voice’ many years ago, this got me thinking. I had just finished reading Getting Unstuck: A Guide to Finding Your Next Career Path and concluded that my ‘thing’ was creativity. To be happy in my career, I need to be able to use creativity to solve problems and find new ways to deliver results. This makes me happy. This is what I am good at. This is what I bring to the table. But how am I using this talent to feel like I’m living up to my potential? How can I use it better to meet the needs of an organization while not sacrificing anything? How do you turn your talent (voice) into a career?

Many of us have passion for what we do. We research. We strategize. We share results and ‘cool things’ we’ve found. But sometimes we get lost in the shuffling of electronic paper (Mashable posts) and our competitive nature (Klout scores). As marketers we get lumped in with people we’ve labeled as snake charmers and ladder climbers. When we lose sight of what’s really important, pursuing creative solutions, we are not pushing our voice to its limit. We’re lip syncing someone else’s song. A song that everyone else knows the words and pitches to. And it’s boring.

“It’s YOUR VOICE. Cherish it. Respect it. Nurture it. Challenge it. Stretch it and scream until it’s fucking gone. Because everyone is blessed with at least that, and who knows how long it will last . . .”

How are you finding ways to do this in your career and in your life every day?

The Scroll – A Strategic Social Media + Brand Move

Our social media baby has finally arrived: Hamilton College’s ‘The Scroll’ is a platform born of love, research, cold sweats and lots and lots of discussion. Still in beta testing, we’re adding in the last bits of functionality but released this on campus, to alums and the broader social media community today.

Not only a fun, interactive way to find a variety of conversations at once, The Scroll was the answer to our top five questions about social media use and authentic branding of our institution:

1. Many in our audience do not use Social Media/Twitter/Facebook/Etc. Or do they?

Perhaps the issue is that our audience never really knew they could engage with us in this way? The Scroll aims to be a solution: pull together all of the valuable conversations about our institution from a variety of platforms and audiences and allow them to be shared back out via the platform of the user’s choice. Even if you are not a social media user, like some of our older alumni, now, you can see the conversations as they happen and choose to participate or spectate as you so desire. Instead of creating a one time campaign, The Scroll can be used over and over again, highlighting daily and trending content, and adding in new accounts as they become available. It is platform agnostic, although primarily fed via Twitter (as we work out the inevitable, and ubiquitous Facebook and Tumblr kinks).

2. Departmental and community accounts fade/die.

While it may be easy to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, we all know that the difficulty lies in upkeep and maintaining your relevancy. Now, in order to be highlighted on The Scroll, accounts need to stay on top of their game to produce relevant and timely content. Competition among groups and accounts will hopefully sustain the content influx, along with targeted social media campaigns, especially those from events. Organic content trumps all, and the main content goal of The Scroll is authentic,transparent content, live from our students, alumni and community.

3. Our audience, if it does use social, doesn’t connect with us this way. Do they?

Beyond creation of accounts, we need to market them. We recently launched a companion campaign ‘Share & Engage’ to fully flesh out the reasoning behind projects like The Scroll: we invite our audience to share their thoughts, engage in a dialog with us and to push around and create content that is relevant to their individual Hamilton experience. By piecing these together, we create the real and total Hamiltonian experience Other projects in this include our social media directory, adding comment and sharing functionality to our news stories, a newly updated and social media inclusive alumni directory and an interactive map project.

4. There isn’t that much content being shared about us. Is there?

By creating a fire-hose of social media content, funneled from campus and alumni community accounts and tags, we’re able to unearth conversations that may have previously fallen through the cracks. By showcasing this content to our communities, we allow them greater opportunities to engage in discussions, reconnect with friends & faculty or just share funny ideas and memes. This will need to be maintained, but we’re already creating creative content campaigns where ever and whenever we can, built with alumni and student feedback. By giving ownership to our audience in many ways, we’re hoping to make this truly their platform.

5. It’s difficult to follow a conversation with multiple people, on multiple platforms in social media.

The hope is that The Scroll brings together all of the content that we may have not seen previously. Conversations on similar topics in a variety of places can now live together and a broader picture painted. We also allow for a variety of viewpoints so that the true nature of life at Hamilton can come through. As we began to see our reliance on a platform like Storify grow, we decided to try our hand at taking on something similar in-house.

It remains to be seen how The Scroll will be accepted and used, but ultimately it was a fun, calculated risk to take. We’re hoping conversations grow because of it and that our audience feels more in touch with the place that they call, have called or will call, home.

This Pup’s For You: How The Puppy Bowl is Really Winning

While most of America (well, not Giants or Patriots fans) are getting ready for Superbowl Sunday, a few pups are getting ready for their own major debut. The beloved Puppy Bowl takes place this Sunday, complete with a Kitty Halftime Show.

What sounds like a simple, funny alternative for those who are not football enthusiasts is so much more. Now in its ninth year, the Puppy Bowl showcases shelter pups via a partnership with a variety of shelters and care providers.

Ratings have continued to grow annually, as have tweets and the cast of animal characters. Social media has become an increasing factor, with the creation of a Facebook page (currently at 82K), a live cam (a personal fave), a growing volume of Tweets, tons of video content, and now, commentary via Twitter by a Bird.

What a fun, creative way to help dogs find homes. Its easy for these pups to capitalize on cuteness, raising awareness of the variety of sheltered dogs looking for their forever home.

How can we all capitalize on being more creative around seasonal, annual events that we may not be thinking of? In what ways can we pull at heartstrings, emotions and simple daily pleasures or routines that our brands can benefit from?

The #GIRLS Social Media Explosion

Reblogged from Tidal:

After being somewhat criticized for missing the social media opportunity with season one, Girls was back this week and with a vengeance. (Be careful what you wish for, Mark Drapeau!) This time around, love it or hate it HBO's Girls is a social media force to be reckoned with.

Capitalizing on animated GIFs, hash tags galore, a Tumblr blog…

How To Get More Followers: Be Relevant, True to Yourself

“How do I get more followers?” is something we are force-fed often via the interwebs. But, when recently contemplating the same question personally, it took some thought on my part.

Number one was the question of why more followers? What does this provide to you and how does it fit in with your social media goals? ‘To reach more people’ isn’t really a focused goal, but rather ‘reach more people who influence my job search/my community/who donate/etc’ is. For me personally, I do not want to gain followers for vanity or silly Klout score sake, but rather, to know that what I’m doing is relevant and that I’m providing something of value to the community at large. And, most of all, to find like-minded people to follow and discuss great content with.

I set out not to gain followers, but to provide content that would benefit a certain niche of people. People who shared the same interests as I do. One thing that I did was overhauled how I wrote my bio in Twitter. I became more descriptive in who I was and the content people can expect to see from me. This was a place for quirky one liners or a short professional bio, but I switched it up to showcase more of what I was about.

That was the single biggest change I could have made and one that required me to be the most honest with myself: what content do I regularly provide? What did I actually tweet? What do I actually like reading about and discussing? Yes, part of it was higher ed, college access and marketing. But another, much larger portion of that is social TV, branding, fitness and music industry. By revealing this to myself and my followers I was able to focus my content curation and sharing strategy and align my personal favorites with what I was providing to the Twittersphere.

I’ve seen a big jump in followers, but, I’m also following more people. I’m more engaged in Twitter now than ever before and that is due in large part to my finally understanding my own content desires.

When considering what followers mean to you, what drives what you do? Are you looking to find like-minded niches or just pushing content in circles?

Don’t Get Involved. It Won’t Make a Difference.

Experiencing and working in a variety of higher education institutions, I find that every day is a chance to better understand not only the educational system, but also the society that we live in. In some cases, the mission (of the institution and the student) seems to be bare bones education and a name to highlight on a resume in hopes of bettering the chance of finding suitable employment to then pay off student loans. Others seem to exist to train workers to do one particular job well and then require additional education to do another job. Still others find ways to expand a student’s ideals and agility, expose them to things they’d otherwise not encounter, and put them in positions to think about what’s next. I’m sure you can see which of these would be the most beneficial to individual happiness, freedom and our economy, but why is that the one we focus on the least? And why are we trying to do away with it so ferociously?

Some may say this is a class argument. That only those who can afford the luxury can attend a four-year institution that focuses on liberal arts and critical thinking. That for some, getting on the job training and placement is a necessity to enter the workforce immediately. Still others do not have the money or the time to commit to education, needing to get fulltime jobs out of high school to support their families. This is not merely a branding problem for institutions, but an economic issue and primarily an aspirational issue: how much emphasis are we putting on lifelong learning in this country over the ability to make money and ‘get by’? Have we turned people off completely to being involved in what happens to them civically due to the media’s sensationalizing of political corruption, misappropriation of funds and political negativity? Has our overall quality of life suffered as we succumb to our roles as worker bees in a society that feel we cannot change? When we stop caring, put our heads down and tinker on, we end up giving up on ourselves and our neighbors. Is this ignorance, truly bliss? Or is it merely avoiding awareness because we can see ourselves as better people if we do not view what is really happening around us, work together and change it?

At the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network Annual Conference, I had the privilege of listening to Ami Dar, founder of Idealist give the keynote address. All of what he said was rousing, but what really stuck with me was the idea that people want to do good and to help but often they don’t because of three reasons:

- Time

- Money

- “It wont make a difference.”

It wont make a difference? This, although an obvious thought, really struck me. That the majority of us does not take part in making things happen because we feel that we cannot affect change. Are we taught this? Since our ideals are usually realized from our parents, for those who are not providing aspirational educational and occupational goals for their children, how can we ‘be the change that we want to see in the world’ if we are all so busy just ‘getting by’? How large of a role does the media play in this? Perhaps a good time to read Chomsky’s ‘Media Control’ like I’ve been meaning to.

Recently, we’ve heard more focus on STEM: in education, in job creation, in careers. That ‘the humanities’ or liberal arts are wasteful. That no one needs to learn Latin or study Greek anymore, foregoing this for ‘real’ needs such as learning Chinese. The issue isn’t which language to learn, its to experience the steps and gain the outcomes of learning a language period. To use your brain. We are getting so caught up in how to get from A to B, from education to job, as fast as possible that we are losing the entire reason for getting – for going into debt for – more education in the first place. To use our brains. To learn the skills necessary to be nimble in any situation, not just the one in front of us. Could this also be a part of our abusively fast paced American culture?

Things are changing so rapidly, that we have no idea what we will need to know how to do tomorrow. Learning one thing is not enough. But, if we know how to figure it out, we can find our place in this world and truly be present and happy. Without that, we are continuously stuck in a cycle of learning, re-learning and un-learning for this particular point in time. Why do we not see the value in learning the skill that will enable us to be more independent and useful to ourselves, our employers and our communities? It is not a luxury to be present and involved in your own life. It is a human right.