• I was on the phone one morning talking with the Queen of Lighting, Bobbi Lane. About three minutes into the call we got disconnected. It was instinct, since I originated the call, to just call her back. Nothing rude, no “Can you hear me now?” I just started talking where I left off.  It happens to all of us all the time – what do we call it?
• The other day I called our health insurance company and got frustrated with the robot giving  me default prompts. I know it was irrational, but I dropped the *F bomb on the robot. I wasn’t swearing at a live body, just screaming out of the frustration of asking for customer service and not being able to get there.  Any thoughts on what to call it?
• Tuesday morning I was in the concierge lounge at the Marriott getting my free continental breakfast. I was all excited about making a bagel and egg sandwich with a little slice of bacon and tabasco. I toasted my bagel put it all together and took the first bite. It was horrible – I didn’t have my glasses on and didn’t realize it was a fruit flavored bagel. The whole concoction was simply wrong.   This isn’t the first time I got the wrong thing because my glasses were in my pocket! Years ago I bought a Bonnie Raitt CD in a music store in NYC. On the way home I put it on in the car and was shocked at heavy metal and just not my style of music. I couldn’t believe Bonie Raitt would release an album like this. Here it is again – I didn’t have my reading glasses on and bought Ratt – The Detonator Album! So, there are two words here – one is for morons who don’t wear their glasses when they need to, the other for simply making stupid mistakes!

I know there’s a difference, but it sure looked like Raitt at the time! LOL

• I was writing an email last night and thought I had sent it, but the hotel system sent it into the black hole and I had to completely rewrite it.  It just seems to have deleted on its own and disappeared into cyberspace. We’ve all had to rewrite things because they weren’t saved and wound up lost with Tron and the gang! We all do it, but what do we call it.
• Monday, at IUSA a woman came up to me and just started talking. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t even recognize her name badge. I smiled, talked a little and then a little insulted, she said, “You don’t remember me do you?”  I realized later she was the marketing manager for a company I once called on, but that was three years ago. She walked away insulted and I felt badly for not being better at hiding the completely blank look on my face when it came to recognizing her. Once again, what should we call those awkward moments when you don’t hide them well?

New words show up on our doorstep every day. In fact, think about it for a minute. It’s only been a few years since we started “chimping”, “googling”, “posting”, “tweeting” and “blogging”. They’re all new words we use every day! So, each one of these situations needs a word for Skip & Webster’s New Contemporary Dictionary.

If you can’t come up with a word or two that’s fine, just don’t tell me I’m alone in having these things happen.

You’ve got to Tweet several times a day for people to know who you are. You need to post at least three times a week or more. Old posts serve absolutely no purpose and you won’t build brand recognition putting up a post here and there. Building traffic is about consistency and you’ve got to be out there all the time.  In the last few weeks I’ve been really surprised at the number of blogs I’ve run into that just aren’t kept up to date and many of them by some of the best photographers in our industry.

Facebook is the same. You’ve got to be involved to build traffic. You’ve got to be making a contribution for people to remember you’re out there.

Make it a point to at least “hit” the social media button in your day, first thing every morning. Try and develop a routine for both contributing to your own pages and reading other posts from people you enjoy. Pretty soon it’ll be second nature.

That’s it – end of point. Post and tweet regularly or forget about social media becoming an effective marketing tool for your business.

Think about how we communicate today?  If you Tweet you do it all in 140 characters!  U’v lurnd 2 spell evrything foneticly so that u can get in a gr8 message & do it in 140 spaces! And, when you realize you’ve been talking to dead air for the last ten minutes because the person on the other end lost the signal, you’re not upset, you just restate everything you said all over again when they call back.

Then there’s the nomad’s land of protocal on who calls who back.  If you’re disconnected on your cell phone is the person who made the call the one who has to call back or the person who was making the point at the time the call was cut off?   It’s a real challenge and takes the diplomacy of a junior Henry Kissinger to work out.

The bottom line conclusion to this increbily deep message this morning is actually there is no bottom line – we’ve become a society of abbreviations, unintentional bad grammar – we text, we tweet, we blog – all verbs that as little as a few years ago had totally different meanings.  Text was a paragraph or two, usually in a book…tweet was something a bird did, usually annoying in the morning when you’re trying to sleep and the window’s open and blog, well blog really is new – although it sort of sounds like it’s related to being bloated and should have been a good solid noun…”I’m so blogged up after eating corned beef and cabbage!”

Then there’s the new definition of “friend” and “follow“…if somebody followed you a few years ago it was rude, spooky and you probably called the police.  Nobody would ever try and “friend” you – it’s not even a word you would have used.  I have almost 4000 friends on Facebook – does that make me shallow, since 3900 of them I’ve never met?

On that note – it’s the right time to remind you that tonight we pick the first random follower for a Jill-e Designed woman’s bag and this week, if you’re following me on Twitter it’s the medium size men’s bag next weekend! 

So, enjoy your Sunday.  Tweet, follow, blog and friend anybody you want.  And when your cell phone loses the signal if the guy with the glasses is behind you with the other 300 people in your support group – be happy about it.  They used to hang out with me, but I guess with the storms in Akron they must have headed south!

Can you hear me now?