Taking a deep breath and a minute to update my blog. It's been a wild ride over the last 2 months since starting my new position at Lithium.I've joined a fantastic marketing team here, I'm learning a lot from my new colleagues and having a lot of fun at the same time. And getting used to the new commute hasn't been as bad as anticipated.

Here's what I want to share: a very good perspective from Greg Verdino on balancing your personal social self with your business self. Well, he's actually talking about companies having a balanced brand, remembering to be part human along with the business, but I think it applies to your personal brand as well.

I'm faced with a choice every single day - just exactly how much to share personally with my followers now that I'm identifying with a corporate brand. Even though I don't (technically) speak for the company, or work in customer service, I do tweet quite a bit about our products and services, and I just updated my Twitter profile to include Lithium (full disclosure and all that). So I'm becoming much more cautious about every update and Tweet I send... does that mean less human? less personality? Does "more professional" equal "more boring"?

How do you balance your social selves? Drop me a line and let me know...

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Sorting through my Mom's things - boxes and boxes and boxes of memories - my sister and I found an old file folder of newspaper clippings. Funny stories, jokes, pictures, interesting tidbits of community news.

That's how they tweeted back in the day. Mom's Twitter account... and email account, and blog, was newspaper clippings passed around to friends and family.

How about you? Seen any old clippings laying around recently?

 

I'm at the end of a long trip, a planes, trains and automobiles kind of trip, going through US states that I've never been to - West Virginia, southern Ohio and across Kentucky. Living in San Francisco, I forget how spoiled we all are with non-stop access to the Internet. We complain constantly about dropped calls on our smartphones, or "slow" access speeds if it takes more than 10 seconds for a page to load.

How about waiting 2 hours just for one email to send?

After a frustrating couple of sessions trying to get some work done at the beginning of the trip, I finally unplugged and settled for good old fashioned phone calls when needing to communicate.

Kind of like being back in the 80's.

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Thank god for the blogger lounge... a phrase I repeated many times during the show. A place to wind down, chat, drink & eat, meet some new blogger types, pick up free books, get a few tips and tricks - and even scored my own personal half hour how-to session from Keith Burtis on WordPress.

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Sent from my iPhone

Yep. That's Dennis Crowley in the yellow tee. Right after playing foursquare with the founder of Foursquare, I asked him for a quick interview for my little blog and he very graciously said yes. I started up my iPhone videocam, pointed it at him and asked him the question of SxSW 2010: "So, Dennis, who's winning the location wars here at south-by - Foursquare or Gowalla?" He gave me a great answer, I shook his hand and said thank you, then walked to my next session.

And then realized my videocam wasn't on after all.

Sigh. Chalk it up to another rookie mistake by a newbie blogger. Lesson learned: always make sure you know how to work your equipment before landing the biggest interview at the show.

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Sent from my iPhone

Inundated with sessions, parties, people, crowds, info, schedules, it goes on and on... sxsw interactive does not let up. But the biggest challenge by far is to be in the physical world and online at the same time. Multiple conversations happening simultaneously on all different levels. Challenging, exhausting, fun!
First time posting via email, let's see if it works...

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