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Are We Done with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Yet?

Yesterday, I posted what I thought was an innocuous Twitter update asking if we’ve gone too far with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge because now it is more about famous people getting wet than actually raising ongoing, substantial, awareness for the disease.  Sure, we remember people doing stupid things for a video camera, but aren’t there more dangerous things going on in the world that more demand our rapt attention like, say Ferguson, Missouri and beheading Americans?

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LinkedIn and the Promise of Minority Equality in the Age of Internet Access

Yesterday, I posted an image Janna took over the weekend to my social media circles, and I was surprised to read this morning how concerned some were over what I thought was a joyous image of young Black females in the urban core being involved in a connected electronic Age.  The action was happening on LinkedIn, and here is that discussion — I don’t know if you can read it by default, or if you have to be linked to me first or not — and here is the image that started it all:

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On Unraveling the World and Letting the Queue Clear

We spend our lives creating, and waiting in, queues.  We do our best to manage the dead time in line and when we are responsible for the movement of any queue, we oftentimes become impatient with a process that more slowly unravels than the speed in which it tightened.

Sometimes there’s nothing to be done except to stand back and let the queue take on a life of its own and allow it to expire when the momentum of the movement is exhausted.

There are three kinds of basic queues that capture our daily lives: Physical, Virtual and Ethereal. Let’s examine them in kind.

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Seeding the Social Mesh with Sprout Social

I’ve been testing several social media managers to continue the brand consolidation of everything Bolesian — and to help make updating the Social Mesh a much easier, and more centralized task.  I used to spend all day writing new updates for each, individual, social network.

Yes, handcrafting unique updates is always best, but sometimes time and tide work against that noble effort because you’re propagating old work instead of creating something new.  The rise of Google+ Pages Vanity URLs broke the handcrafted dam.

My first shot into managing all the social profiles — LinkedIn, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages — was HootSuite.  I ultimately found the Hoot experience overwhelming and brittle and I hated using their image network and link-shortener.

Next, I tried Buffer — a good choice, but the vanity URL shrinker did not reliably work across all profiles, and images posted to my Twitter stream would not natively expand in view.  You had to click on the images to get them to show even though they were in the Twitter image bin.

Enter Sprout Social.  Yes, Sprout Social is expensive — a free 30-day trial does not equate with a free account like HootSuite and Buffer offer — but I knew NYU and other big organizations were using Sprout Social and, I thought, even though I now have over 20 social profiles to manage, and Sprout Social limits me to 10 accounts on their $39.00USD per month first-tier plan, I should still give them a try.

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Using HootSuite to Suit Your Social Networking Mesh

If you have more than one social network you want to update, you need a way to effectively interact with your Social Mesh — you need one centerstone from which all thoughts can spike and spire.

I am currently using HootSuite — a social media dashboard that you can configure to help manage updates to your online work life.  A major benefit of HootSuite is that I can think once and publish 20 times.

Propagation is now — the future is no longer singular — we are perpetually pluperfect.

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Revisiting the “Freshly Pressed Effect”

Yesterday, we were delighted to win a spot on the WordPress.com Freshly Pressed page for our Kaposi’s Sarcoma article, and that sort of public recognition has, in the past, meant big booms in readership and other quantifiable areas of blog publishing and — as I did in the past with our first Freshly Pressed win for Black Cat Bone — I will share those metrics with you now.

First, because of our Freshly Pressed feature on June 5th, we enjoyed our “Best day for Follows on Boles Blogs” — that is a big and huge record for us because followers tend to become dedicated readers and they stick around.

WordPress.com followers are counted, and not counted, in odd ways.  Facebook friends are counted in the final, public, tally, while  “moved” followers from old blogs to a new blog do not count.  No LinkedIn connections are counted as followers — even though they should be — to match the same relational logic as Facebook friends.

Continue reading → Revisiting the “Freshly Pressed Effect”