5 Things To Do When You (Feel Like You) Suck At Everything

Have you ever have a day when you wake up and feel like a total failure of a human being? Yep. Welcome to the land of the unemployed. I’ve been out of a full-time employment for over a year now. While I have been freelancing steadily since August, it was never an easy transition to go back to sending out resumes, waiting by the phone, and getting rejections.  And when working on-and-off like I have been, constant fights with EDD over unemployment benefits never helps either. After so many turn-downs and/or lack of responses, not only I start to doubt...
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Freeing My Creative Mind

It’s  been over 10 years since I worked in a truly creative environment. I had given up on being creative professionally.  When I got home, I didn’t do much either except for the costuming for Halloween/Renaissance Faire, food gift labels for the holidays, and the now-tradition Christmas e-card. Oh, and occasional alcohol-fueled rock star moments at the piano. It only took three months working with and for these guys at Ignited to get me to WANT to be creative. All. The. Time. I was tasked with reviving the company’s social media presence. So, for the next month, I read several...
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Social Media Purists Are Unicorns

Recently, I found myself cursing at how corporate social media playing field has become. Folks are talking brands, driving sales, being all business-like. Nobody is actually interacting any more. Whatever happened to the SOCIAL part of “social media”? I believe in the SOCIAL in “social media”. I believe in connecting with people and sharing my ideas online. I believe in building relationships that lasts and engaging people in what I do and/or am interested in. I’m a Social Media Purist. There, I said it. However, today it seems the real relationship is being eaten up by companies and individuals faking...
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A Twitter Study 2: Your Ass is Getting Deleted

[ Read Part 1 ] I’m happy to report to you that I have finished cleaning up my client’s following list from over 3,100 down to just a little under 400. There is still some fat to trim and some tweeps to start following, but overall, we are off to a great start. Since I’ve gone through thousands of accounts, I came across many profiles and tweeting styles that baffled me. Some of them, in hindsight, I should’ve just taken a screenshot of as a lesson for all. More than anything, I have learned so many things about what one...
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A Twitter Study: Rules to “Follow” By

For this past month, I have been freelancing as a community manager for an advertising agency.  My job here was to interact with the community especially on the much neglected Twitter. I found it odd that there was so much junk and spam on their feed. And then I realized that this account was following over 3,100 people. And yes, the account was indeed following spammers, bots, fake accounts, and random people it should not be following. It seems that at one point in time, this account had an auto-follow set up where an application would automatically follow whoever follows...
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Chasing Down a Memory

If you can believe it, I was a shy international student when I arrived at the Orange County private school back in 1993.  I wasn’t “shy” because that was what I was. I was “shy” because I was insecure with my English skills and with being a total foreigner in a school full of mostly white kids. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to make friends. My host mom Bonnie, also one of our school’s counselor at the time, had it planned out for me perfectly. She enrolled me in handbell choir with ultra small class...
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