That is true and if you have made your own facebook fan page, then you know just how easy it is. (We are making the assumption here that you have your own personal Facebook page, because you need one in order to make a Fan Page.)  Here is a direct link to Facebook’s explanation on how to do it.  It is listed under “Advertising” so many people get spooked and don’t bother to go there.  If you are more of a video watcher here is a good one (they are talking about restaurants, but it fits for anyone).  It is well worth the 10 minutes to see the step by step using screenshots – so you can see exactly what to do!

Why should my business have a Facebook Fan Page?

Marketers are talkers and of course they are all talking about why your business should have one, it is the RAGE!  Here is  a great post about it, there are tons of great posts about it, but I like this one because it is concise and doesn’t use a lot of $10 words. The meat and potatoes of this post is this and I quote: *

• Facebook has more than 350 million active users
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook

*numbers as of 2/10

Your business wants to have as much “eye” time and be “top of mind” to as many people/perspective or current clients as possible.

Why you don’t want a FACEBOOK Fan Page?

Just because it is free doesn’t mean it is right for you, right now.  When a “FAN” opens up their Facebook account in their “News Feed” section, there is the latest news from their friends, the causes they follow, and POOF! there you are with your latest special event or feature that you want to share with the world – unless of course you haven’t updated your page for 6 months and therefore it doesn’t post anywhere.

When people plan to come to visit your store, restaurant or whatever, if they look thru Facebook they can find you, but they also find that your last post was from December 2009.  They figure you don’t think it’s important, so neither do they and perhaps they don’t search for you at all, they choose to do business with the business that is in their “News Feed” once or twice a week.

Managing Facebook Fan Pages is bigger than just making one.  They don’t take long, but they do take doing. Make somebody accountable for doing it, just like you do when you have someone answer your business phone.  There are many companies out there (Sephone included), that can help you do this.  It doesn’t have to be expensive, once you see how it goes for a few months you can decide if you would like to take over the reigns!

Everyone you know is on Facebook, people on TV are asking you to follow them on Twitter, you email inbox is full, your kids text you when they need a ride home – yes, it is okay if you want to scream — we get it (covering our ears).

We can help.

Twitter

If you are a larger business, you need to know what your clients, customers or former customers are saying about you.  Because believe us they are saying it.  Just because you dont hear it, doesnt mean it isnt being blasted about the internet, perhaps a TV station or newspaper has a story about you or your company.  It is being tweeted all over and you have no control over it spreading.  You do have control over it, IF you know what is being said and how you can communicate to address it.

If you are a smaller business – even tho you know that Facebook is FREE, how do you fold that into your all ready full day of work?  You are out there trying to generate revenue or wait on customers – this is the last thing you want to mess with, right?

We are social media JUNKIES.  We know that every social media strategy isn’t the same, just like all businesses and situations aren’t the same.  What works for one, may not work for another.  One size NEVER fits all. And maybe it isn’t even Facebook that you need (gasp!)

Let us help.
Give us a call, we love to hear your dreams and your goals.
Then of course, help you on the road to get there!

So email consumes us and with good connectivity it arrives instantly at its intended destination.  And then there is SPAM! SPAM you may not have known you asked for by subscribing to a newsletter and SPAM that you never asked for in the first place!

But where is this all going?  Do you want all your emails going to your blackberry (or other smart phone?)  Our clients send me large files that can be completely unusable to see on my blackberry so why do it?  AND sometimes I need thinking time for when people ask me questions and I need to talk to others in order to answer it.  These people (our team at Sephone),  don’t work 24/7 they actually have a life!

Is it really that important to be THAT available to EVERYONE you know in all facets of your life ALL the time (weekends, holidays, etc.) ? AND how do the people you are WITH physically all the time feel when you are constantly looking down, checking that flashing red light?  It is only going to get worse.

Then when you reply to those emails from your phone, are you really saying it how you really want it to be received? Or  you may not have your glasses on, you feel rushed to respond with an incomplete answer and have to go back and redo it and in the meantime you have an email out there that is misspelled and maybe not really what you meant it to say.  All in the name of our 24 hour “news” cycle! “We’ve come a long way baby,”right?

The solution is different for everybody.  But managing IT without IT managing YOU is the biggest challenge.  I struggle with it all the time.  In fact I find if I lose my blackberry or have a poor signal (we are in Maine after all),  I feel pretty stressed AND I don’t have all my email going to it!  I am really trying hard not to be run by technology.

What are your thoughts and ideas?

Would love to hear (and share) them!

Is there something you’ve heard about lately that’s piqued your interest? How about something you’ve always wondered about the web or social media but haven’t had the chance to ask? Here’s your chance. We’re going to start a series of posts with answers about using the web and social media in business, and we want your questions!

It’s simple. Just add a comment to this blog post or mention @Sephone on Twitter with a question about the web, social media, search, or anything else, really. We’ll do our best to answer right here on the blog. We’d love to hear all kinds of questions, from the very basic (”why is Twitter important for a business?”) to the more technical (”how can I add my Facebook page’s updates to my site?”).

Let the questions begin!

Some bad person or robot  decided to use my Twitter address to SPAM my followers by sending them a direct message about some quiz I wanted them to take.  My followers (I have only 800 or so) started sending me notes because they knew I don’t do that.  So I go in to my Twitter account and changed the password.  Then I believe that same robot kept trying to get into my account (using the old password) and I got locked out of Twitter when I tried to log in.  It also effected my Tweetdeck Account. Twitter is such a great tool for me, when I couldnt use it, it completely threw me off guard and my schedule just flew out the window. AND I had to wait for Twitter and Tweetdeck to unlock my access, which took a lot longer than I thought it would.  If you are looking for any help like this on Twitter, click here.

THEN, I tried to synchronize my Blackberry using Desktop Manager. Unfortunately, because I had tried a trial version of MissingSynch earlier this year and didnt like it, I decided to never used it again. Couldnt figure out how to uninstall it. When I tried to synch using Desktop Manager it kept bumping into MissingSynch which kept telling me to buy it for $39.95 and wouldn’t allow Desktop Manager to synchronize for me.  SOMEHOW, as I looked over at my Blackberry I noticed that I had this spinning hourglass on the screen that was all it did, spin and spin.  When I “Googled” the error code it was horrible news.  Google sent us to Crackberry.com. At first glance it looks like a store, it is more than that! There are helpful forums and here is a link to them. So I learned then my whole operating system was history.  I still don’t know exactly how it happened, but with the help of Central Maine Wireless and my business partner Scott, I was able to get a loaner Blackberry and uninstall MissingSynch (the uninstall file was missing, so we had to be cautiously creative to remove it!) I will never recommend this application to anyone, even though I am not sure what happened in my situation but I am very leary of it.

The good news is, I have a copy in a secure cloud of my stuff that didn’t get effected.  The bad news was, I didn’t dare synchronize it with my loaner because I didn’t want to risk anything else happening! So finding people’s phone numbers and other information that I had in my original phone has been problematic.

Maybe it has been the full moon or just technology gremlins, but when it happens to you, take a deep breath and know the world isnt over, it just has slowed down a bit!!

Who’da thunk it?

My friends, family and business partners can attest for it, but what about in Social Media areas?  How do people know that you REALLY CARE?

Or better yet, “How  do you know who doesn’t and is just pretending to care?”  It seems like these days 60-75% of my work time is dedicated to doing something in Social Media and it is increasing every week.

Social Media brings us together and yet distances us all at the same time. Periodic non-visible online interactions take longer to sort out who is real and who isn’t.

I recently attended a conference where Chris Brogan spoke (it was my first time meeting him and I was sooo excited)  Mike Volpe also made a great presentation.  If you don’t know Chris, he is amazing you should follow him.  He is as real as they come and in person, he can make you laugh so hard that your sides split.

Mike Volpe of Hubspot fame was a lot different than I thought he would be.  I watch their podcasts religiously and read their blogs and I would recommend anyone feeling intimidated about social media and applications you can lurk around on any of these sites and learn a ton.

What did I mean when I said Mike Volpe was different than I thought?  I knew he was smart, I knew he knew his stuff.  His podcast partner Karen Rubin, is mega bubbly.   When I met Mike at the conference, what I met was a kind of shy guy.  Not what I expected.  He puts forth so much confidence on his sites and podcasts, I was a bit intimidated at the idea at the face-to-face.

Chris Brogan has this message that he calls “Be Human”, he has a great post here outlining what this means.  In fact, when you Google the term “be human” his blog entry comes up in the first 5 searches.  Rather than to reiterate what these captains of industry have to say, I included several links here so you can easily find them.

Clients will ask me, “Why do I care if someone’s eating high fibre cereal for breakfast?’ or “That their kids soccer game was a blow out?” Truth is YOU may not care, but one of the thousands of other readers may. If you were one of the people in the battle to fight cancer, you could provide support to many in different situations and stages just by seeing these buzz words.

This makes a “human” connection that is important to an often hard to connect with medium.  Some of us don’t use real photos as profile shots all the time.  Some of us are vague about how to find us.  Maybe our user names aren’t exactly intuitive. The internet is full of great people as well as weirdos.  That doesn’t necessarily make you a “Nervous Nellie,” but if someone is trying to learn about you or your business, you may seem a little less “human.”  What you have to deliver and say becomes that much more important.

First impressions can be misleading.  Establish yourself or your business as the someone you ARE.  Stick with it on blog comments, blog posts, other platforms.  Because after all, the keyboard doesn’t type itself. A HUMAN does!

I know I have mentioned before, my old boss used to say, “You can eat an elephant one bite at a time.”  And though often I failed to see eye to eye with him on many occasions, now that I am older I can really see his wisdom in so many things I thought before as crazy, misguided prattle.  (Jeez – I hope he doesn’t read this blog!  AH!)

But he was THE GUY that told me in the early 90’s that the internet was a fad.  And to his defense, he held on to fundamentals.  Sales and Marketing as a plan not as a lark and certainly the internet to him, was “a Lark” back then. WHO KNEW back then what the internet would be today?  So thanks Phil, for making me work harder and understand the world I was in, while allowing me to reach into the fire and find out which time I would get burned.  I love him for that, truly.

So here we are again.  The NEW lark -  “Social Media” – Wow!  There are so many!  But which one to try first?  I say, try one that works for YOU FIRST – PERSONALLY. Then you will feel more confident about trying something or appreciating the web for your business promotion.  If you have a TWITTER account, start looking for people that are interested in the same things you find interesting.  If you have a FACEBOOK account, start REALLY reading what the folks are doing and engaging to a point that you feel comfortable.  If you don’t have one, then start one, you wont be sorry. It is easy to use and you can connect with family, friends and even business contacts.

I have to admit, I have tons of social media outposts and some I use all the time and some I haven’t had time to use at all.  But I do try to make an effort to play with a new toy at least twice a month.  But that is ME.  Doesn’t mean it is YOU.

Not forgetting to “eat your peas” or “eating an elephant one bite at a time” is a recognition that it is OK, NOT to take the plunge, but to just stick your toe in the water and find your way at your own pace.  Don’t be overwhelmed my the technology, just try it, it is FREE and if you don’t like a certain one, dump it and move on.

The appreciation of all of it, is really useful in making your own decisions in trying to navigate the new way to promote and connect!

Look, social media is changing every second and I am a believer of trying things out – even if you do them WRONG as this person’s post indicated, relax -you can always fix it.

OBJECTIVE is key if you decide to use Facebook, Twitter or if you decide you want to blog (or to pay someone else to do it), on your behalf.  A PLAN is important too and a stash of content, stuff you read, links, etc. for when you are in the mood to write.  Frequency in posts makes you interesting and lets face it, it is like a re-run of Seinfeld.  You may love Seinfeld, but you will find yourself surfing off the channel because you know what is coming up… new posts regularly is always a good thing.

To say that we, (Sephone) haven’t had the challenges you may have, would not be truthful.  We get busy, customers need jobs done and our Sephone Blog may become stale.  My own personal blog has fallen victim of that.  Sometimes, I just don’t feel the urge or sometimes I just don’t feel interesting enough to post anything.

I look to people that I only know online to encourage me.  I call Chris Brogan my online therapist! (We have never met in person.)  Here is a post he wrote two weeks ago that really hits the nail on the head for me. Brogan helps, he doesn’t scold.  You are an adult you don’t need scolding, when you are trying to learn something new. Generally, you are trying to teach yourself – in between work, home, kids, etc. Chris Brogan has a book.  Yeah a hard cover book, an old-fashioned printed on paper BOOK!  It is called “Trust Agents,” VERY easy to read and to understand and not intimidating.

So what is my point?

Learning is GREAT.
Learning about Social Media and how it can work to promote your business is GREATER.

Don’t feel guilty, if you don’t get it right the first time.  Some “EXPERTS“  can be arrogant, generally, they are the same in person and it takes a bit longer to recognize it online.

Reaching out and asking for help from someone that understands that you are finding your way is the GREATEST!

So don’t be discouraged or embarrassed. Don’t feel intimidated enough to turn away.  You can do it and there are so many people to help that don’t “ball you out “ when it isn’t perfect.

Most people aren’t trying to “cheat,” they are just doing something that is familiar to them and within some of the social media platforms-Facebook for example, are rigid.  These aren’t bad, but you need to learn them and sometimes you make mistakes.

NEWS FLASH you are human.

Marketers have always had a tendency to jump on the bandwagon of some latest craze and pound it to death.  I can say that because I am one to the core and with the advent of social media the buzz is louder and the clicking sound is that of a smoking keyboard or cell phone with all of “those people” talking to each other agreeing and singing the praises of the ideas that are exchanged between them.

Sound familiar?  But are the Marketing people the only people “getting it?”  Is this all a fad that will fade away like the Cabbage Patch Doll?

Being from Maine, Maine folks are known for not appreciating a lot of “fluff,” also we adapt to things that most need attending to, like shoveling the driveway, taking a friend to a doctor’s appointment, making sure the bills are being paid.  IMPORTANT stuff.

Right now Social Media, just may not seem that important and it is okay to feel like that, but it is July (almost) and the snow shoveling is a few months away, make part of your summer reading articles in periodicals that can give you the quick info you really need to know!

First take a quick 3 minute look at this video.

Then here are 3 quick things to read that may help you make sense of it:

1. Twitter a 140 character exchange between people from the mundane to the very important.  This article is from the periodical “The Week.”
2. Something  from a “traditional” type media about Twitter is an article in Business Week and its effect on recent events in Iran, certainly one type of media did not change life in Iran, but the fact when used along with “the old fashioned way” of doing things it helps support what was all ready happening.
3. Facebook isn’t necessarily only something your kids use to keep track of their friends whereabouts, it is really creating some unique opportunities for businesses to advertise to “specific” demographics at very reasonable costs.  Business Week has an interesting article here.

We know you don’t have time for this.
We hear this all the time.

If you want to promote your business yourself and not pay for yellow page ads (which are becoming dinosaurs) and daily news papers, (depending on which one you read, readership has declined in some cases nearly 75%).  How do you know someone, the RIGHT someone even sees your ad?  Cash a bit tight these days? Think again about Social Media.

If you have a rainy day (which so far this summer, it seems like all we have had is rainy days), go to YouTube.COM and search for “How To” or use other keywords to learn about things you may have questions about.  YouTube isn’t just a collection of senseless videos, there really are great things there – and if your business wants to produce something that you want the world to know about, here is your free way to promote it.

Also, looking for something to talk about with your nieces and nephews, or grandchildren?  Ask them about their facebook page or about how they text to keep in touch with their friends.  You may be surprised what you can learn and where you can learn it!

Have you ever wondered if people are talking about you on twitter.  There is a relatively simple way to tell.  Search.twitter.com is the place to go.

To put it very simply, search.twitter.com is like google for twitter and works much the same.

One of the very covenant features of this search is that the results can be tracked via a feed.   Once I have this twitter search in my feed reader, any time somebody mentions me on twitter, I see it.  This feed is available near the top right hand side of the search results.  It’s the RSS icon, that says “Feed for this query” right next to it.  For those of you who don’t know much about feeds, go back and read our feed reader article.

To really get the most of the this functional I recommend you use the plus and minus signs.  Plus means that the search must contain that word and minus means that the search results must not contain that word.  For example say I wanted to search for tweets that had  ‘cream’ but not ‘ice’, then I would search from “-ice +cream“.

Remember the horror of 911 and then shear joy of watching the firefighter that sang the Star Spangled Banner? It was covered on all networks – we heard it over and over.  It gave us hope. People still traveled to New York City for visits, people dealt with inconvenience related to air travel, we picked ourselves up by the bootstraps and moved on, though we never forgot.

So now we are in an economic slump. This is no 911, for sure. But searching for some GOOD news out there, some hope, some light at the end of the tunnel is human nature in any crisis.

Considering there are so many news stories about Social Media today you gotta wonder, “Is this my silver bullet?”  “Will this solve my business downturn?”  Everybody is jumping on the band wagon. Media professionals are pretending to be experts, when truthfully learning about this is ongoing for everyone.  Even the “experts.” The reason you are hearing about it, is because it is a “Marketing thing” and Marketers talk, and talk and talk – sometimes until it comes true.

Here is a post from Mark Collier that I found after I had written this blog post. He figured this out last August and I am just daring to write about it now!  I am no expert, I like to call myself a “student” as situations and options evolve I am always striving to learn about them.

Social Media and all the “faces” it takes, Facebook, MySpace, Stumble, Digg, Twitter (the list goes on and on), can really feel overwhelming to any business owner.  In addition to the fact that JUST when you think you have it figured out, Google shows up and we need to change something again.

Remember, YOU know YOUR business.  YOU know YOUR business better than ANYONE.  What you need is a solution that works for YOU and YOUR business.

If you feel you need more traffic to your website and that will grow sales, great.  If you need more people to come to your retail store and that will grow sales, great. If your website is getting traffic but people are ditching it on the first page, not so  great. Each business has a unique set of criteria of how they succeed.

What the “experts” need to do for you is “LISTEN.”  LISTEN to what your goals are, LISTEN to your challenges, come up with measurable tasks and help you decide what your strategy is to accomplish these goals. WHICH tools should you use?

Social Media is not a “silver bullet,” nor does it have to feel like “mumbo-jumbo” and just like anything it is a means to an end. While some words spread quickly, other words more slowly, the important thing is to get started and you don’t have to do it alone. Spreading the word is great, but getting people to act, to buy, is most important.

Social Media does not change the fact that you still are the expert about your goals and when we listen we can help you get there.

They call it Micro-payments cuz they will be real small and hopefully we won’t notice the hit in our wallets sin e it will be billed to a credit card like iTunes.  Infact, iTunes was the inspiration!

The author cited that the high costs of production including the journalists,and photogs costs are increasing so some one has to foot the bill.

Don’t TV stations have the same dilemma? Do we pay for the news in that format?

Micro-payments shmicro-babble. That’s what that is. Don’t fall for it and more importantly don’t pay for it!

Like Agent Mulder used to say “the truth is out there”. Well so is the news and you shouldn’t have to pay to get it. It is the Free press anyway. Right?

Now Paying for something that you want or need is still reality-

Ya can’t get somethin’ for nuttin’, as they say

and in this world of ‘economization’ and down-sizing, what is wrong with smaller payments-  As far as paying for what you use or as you go- then a Micro-Payment for a different kind of subscription or service may not be a bad idea-

I guess my only beef is paying for hearing or reading about something that is public knowledge and is readily available from other outlets.

Hey-  what about micro-payments at restaurants-  A Micro-Payment based on the size of the serving you get-  If wallets ruled the waist line- maybe our bottom lines would be fatter at the end of the month.

More and more when you call companies you get hung up in voice mail someplace only to find if you DO get to a HUMAN, often it is not the HUMAN you were looking for.  When you send an email to a company you get an “auto response”  that reads “Thank you for…” again no HUMAN.

How does that make you feel?  Does it make you feel like anyone cares if you spend your hard earned money to do business with that particular company?

Or if you ARE getting a HUMAN, are THEY telling YOU what the rules are in order to do business with them?

Especially when I am “out of my element” and not in my area of expertise, I feel very uneasy without SOME sort of personal contact.  I like to know I can trust the person and the company I am dealing with. I also like to know that this HUMAN listens to what I need and I am not getting talked down to, because they are smarter than me.  They may be smarter than me, but I have the money, right?

With Sephone being located in Bangor, Maine, we have a clientele of what is categorized as small business.  Even though our market reaches nationally we still work with primarily small to medium-sized businesses. Many of our customers don’t have dedicated IT personnel and even those that do, these folks are stretched thin.  Our customers come to us for our expertise in web design, hosting questions or online applications that allow them to work more efficiently as well as to save money.

This is not a process that can be handled by a website with an “auto-responder”, a voice mail tree, or a form that you fill out that has fields determined by a faceless company that never has actually listened to learn which problems you are trying to solve and what priority they may be in.

We are just like you. HUMANS. And we don’t tell you how it is, we ask you what your goals are and together we work through a process to get there.  Sometimes being a bit on the “geeky” side we don’t always understand things the way you say them. Sometimes we have to ask questions again, we want to make sure we are all on the same page.

That is not to say we don’t use automation, obviously we are in the web business and we use the tools that we build as well as reach out to those services that we don’t build when that makes sense.

Blogging is a way that we try to leverage “community intelligence” to solve a problem, get answers or just plain learn.  And this is a way that the world is going when it comes to Customer Service.  The Sephone Blog (where you are now reading this), is to share information with you, when it is convenient for you to view it.  Have a question about an application, datAvenger or SPAM, you may find it here in the blog.  If you DON’T see it here, please let us know as we are always working to give you the tools you need, when you need them.  (For me I need them at 3am and I am trying to update something!)  Email me personally at kelly.cotaux@sephone.com

Blogging maybe something that may make sense for your company, Blogs are FREE to set up and are very easy to use, let us know if we can help you with one that can help you give more accessible customer service to your customers.  I have a couple I read often that talk about customer service and how to effectively use the tools that are being used.  I liked this one at first because it is called The Church of the Customer!  The amusing title grabbed my attention and the content of the blog keeps me coming back.  Another blogger I like is Guy Kawasaki, his blog title, “How to Change the World” also has some good reading. Here is a post on his views on blogging and Customer Service. I also have a blog called Techno-Trapped In My 40’s that focuses on dealing with today’s technology with a 46 year old brain!

Please never think for one minute that any of the tools that we use are instead of great HUMAN TO HUMAN customer service, or that we think we are smarter than you.  We are in this together.  Thank you for trusting  us, because this IS what we do to support you so you can concentrate on your core competency and together we can help you meet your goals.

If any of these online solutions frustrate you, pick up the phone and we will answer it.

Do you know what an employer or a potential employer may see about you before you may meet them? Or is there someone within your daughter’s Youth Group that could be a real resource for you professionally?

Even if you aren’t looking for a job, it is a great New Year’s Resolution to get your online profiles together and make sure they say what you want them to say about you. Sure you may be on the web site for your son’s Little League Team, or perhaps you have contributed to your favorite recipe blog. These are good, but more and more potential employers and other folks are looking YOU up on the internet GOOGL-ING “your name.”

The FIRST STEP is, sign-up for a LinkedIn account. You may be surprised at how many people you can network with this way. You can find old college buddies, old bosses or that fancy neighbor down the street that is in your Neighborhood Watch program. You can send them an unobtrusive message and learn more about them as they can about you. You also may be very surprised at the resources you have at your finger tips that you just aren’t using!

I started following this person on Twitter, named Guy Kawasaki. He wrote this blog entry called 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn. And it is terrific. Like all his posts, it is very direct and very easy to understand. So rather than to regurgitate his all ready well written article, I urge you to check it out and try some of his ideas.

Remember…YOU have control over the information of your online professional profile.

Don’t say you don’t have time to do this. Make the time, start today, one step at a time.

So if and when you are asked to “clean out your desk” you can feel some power of being YOU! Or along the way, you may connect or reconnect with someone that can really help in your dream job! Try LinkedIn as your way to build YOU as a brand and as a valuable asset to ANY company!

Has the millennia morphed the lovable nerd into today’s computer geek?  Are you feeling that maybe the things you do best or the things you like to do most are disappearing and being replaced with folks that don’t speak the same language that you do or perhaps don’t want to talk WITH you at all?  That “IT” guy that uses big words makes your eyes glaze over and you think, “HELP!  End this, PLEASE!”

Don’t give up, do what you are good at.  As I mentioned earlier, I am somewhere in between the nerd world and the jock world, but now I have heard people refer to me as “a creative type.”  Well, when I think of a “creative type” I cringe.   I picture me as an old hippie drifting down Central Street in my wrap around Indian print skirt, a tie-dye t-shirt and some bad sandals.

I wonder what nerds or geeks think when they are referred to as such?

I started poking around in some blogs today and came across one from Brett Slater, of Slater’s Garage. He was talking about exercising your creative muscle.  It is a good one that makes you feel better about the occasional off the wall idea, or outburst you may have.   I also found this woman named Shannon on my Twitter and she wrote an article on her blog called “Is everyone in PR wearing the same dress? “

I loved this post.  Though she is a lot younger than I am, I completely agreed with what she said.  Here she is from Detroit, MI and I learned from her without buying a book or going to a conference!  Pretty GROOVY!  (That’s one for the hippies!)

I am thinking us “social-ites” that have been long doing the social things – some fun, like cocktail parties, business after hours, receptions, volunteering and some not so fun, funerals, hospital visits, weddings, showers (whoops!)  are quickly becoming “social networking – outcasts” and need to make sure we embrace the new ways of learning and socializing, because “The Beat Goes On!”