What I’ve found troublesome so far is that the atmosphere/culture Google+ has far less “personality” than the other services do. I don’t see as much intimate content there (yet?) as I do other services. And the intimate content that is posted there doesn’t seem to resonate as much with readers.

I’m theorizing that this is entirely due to Circles. Because people have the ability to limit their more intimate moments to smaller groups of people, they seem to be automatically choosing to keep most intimate moments extremely private. This is a boon for issues of safety and vulnerability, for sure– as an advocate for privacy controls elsewhere, and against egregious privacy changes, I of course see the value.

But I’m mourning a little bit the loss of what often, for me, makes social networking so interesting: the very human, authentic versions of ourselves being shared in a wider public way. That kind of sharing initiates trust-building, validates others who have similar experiences, educates those who don’t, among many other sociological phenomena. But really, bottom line here, it made everyone seem actually human.

Google+ feels like a personal branding engine. And I hate personal branding. I’m often reminded of this quote from Tara Hunt in my book:

“People shouldn’t be acting more like brands,” she said. “We’re humans! Instead of having a personal brand, why not just have a personality?”

People on Google+ are sharing what they think wider audiences want to hear from them. Audiences. As in, “let me broadcast to you.” There is a missing emotional connection there that makes posting something “sharing.”

The last few years, we’ve had this remarkable revolution in sharing that has made it a little safer, and a little more fun, to make ourselves a teensy bit vulnerable. Now that we have a toy that gives us the option to hide our vulnerability, it feels like we’re choosing the easy way out.

The other thing that bothers me is the amount of people on Google+ talking about their exodus from the new red-headed stepchild of the moment, Facebook. I’m no lover of how Facebook handles a lot of its policies, mind you, but it still holds lots of value for me. One of my (many, many) cousins, who just had her first baby, isn’t on Google+ to share photos of him. Neither is my brother, who posts rare but utterly hilarious status updates. Nor are a huge swath of people from whom I want to learn, and about whose lives I want to hear.

Maybe you’re saying, “Not yet.” And maybe you’re right– maybe there will be a huge exodus someday, just as we all left Friendster and MySpace. But the tone of these anti-Facebook-community statements reminds me too much of what danah boyd talked about in her Personal Democracy Forum 2009 keynote, “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.” If you haven’t heard or read it, go now.

The basic point is that because social networks are social, they are completely wrapped up in all of the class, race, gender and other identity parameters that we carry with us in our offline lives. When the exodus from MySpace to Facebook started, it started with predominantly white, affluent kids who decided to get away from the “ghetto” of MySpace. A key quote from boyd:

They narrated MySpace as the dangerous underbelly of the Internet while Facebook was the utopian savior.

It sounds achingly familiar to what I read on Google+ == getting away from family members, getting away from app/game users, getting away from the inconsequential jabbering. There have also been sexist/ageist analyses saying “your mom won’t use Google+.” Because it started with the tech elite (who, I dare say, don’t have the highest emotional intelligence a lot of the time), this sad course of Escaping The Other(s) has started to be set.

This is all anecdotal, so I’m trying to raise a red flag and ask people to thing about their migratory behaviors and thought processes.

And, for the record, personally, I’m a big fan of inconsequential jabbering.

In that spirit, here’s some simple advice about how to treat others with respect and still have fun online. The number one rule? Ask first.

Mind-blowing concept, I know! But with the ease with which we can refer to and tag each other on different services, we forget that sometimes people don’t want to be referred to or tagged. Just because someone has a public profile, doesn’t mean they want to be quoted at every juncture! Here are some standard questions I use:

• Can I post what you just said to Twitter and Facebook? Should I credit you, or should it be anonymous/overheard?
• I took a great picture of us–check it out. Can I post it and tag you with it?
• I’m checking into Foursquare for this restaurant. Can I say that I’m having dinner with you?

Not only does this tell your friend that you actually care about their privacy (most people like that), but it also helps spread the reminder that they should do the same for you and others.

The more you do it, the more comfortable it’ll be for both you and your friends. Now, onward with your sharing!

At the beginning of December, Aspen Baker, the executive director of Exhale, wrote me an email. “I’m looking for a social media coordinator and web person for a short-term project,” she said. “Interested?” I’ve always been a fan of Aspen’s work at Exhale — they’re a nonprofit organization which provides the first and only nonjudgmental national, multilingual after-abortion talkline. One of the things I love most about Exhale, which I learned largely through their campaign, is their advocacy of “pro-voice” in dealing with abortion. Every woman’s voice deserves to be heard; women (in numerous political contexts) don’t need to be talked at, shamed, have numbers and percentages thrown at them as much as they need to be listened to, and told that they are loved.

The project Aspen had in mind was exciting from the outset–large with names but fraught with challenges. It turns out that MTV approached them when they decided to do a special on abortion for their program “16 & Pregnant.” Now, if you’re not familiar, MTV has two reality shows about teen pregnancy running; “16 & Pregnant” is one of them, and the other is “Teen Mom.” They’ve both been running for two seasons, and up until this special, neither series showed any teen having an abortion. This is noteworthy because 37% of all teen pregnancies do end in abortion; many have criticized MTV for not showing a large portion of the teen pregnancy experience.

MTV came to Exhale originally looking for women who would be willing to go on the show and talk about their experience having an abortion. Exhale ultimately got the opportunity to help shape how the show was put together, and used this opportunity to do some pro-voice educating with the production team. They wanted to show that it was possible to have an honest, thoughtful, nuanced conversation about abortion that wouldn’t be polarizing and inflammatory. And, most importantly, they wanted MTV’s young viewers who have had abortions to personally relate to the stories shared on the special.

Aspen then wanted to create a social media campaign and website to accompany the airing of the special. It was slated to air at 11:30pm on Dec 28th, just a few days after Christmas, and there would be no commercial interruptions, and no promotions announcing that the show would be on. So, despite the bonus of having a nationwide audience, we ran the risk of no one hearing about it. The other challenge was that we weren’t allowed to announce the show ourselves until MTV was ready, which likely (given their desire to fly this under the radar) wasn’t going to be until right before the show.

HOW WE BUILT THE CAMPAIGN

I quickly enlisted the help of Sonal Bains, with whom I work often: we split client work quite nicely, with me on the strategic development and technology end of things, and Sonal on the implementation and media relation end of things. Both of us come from strong offline organizing backgrounds, and this informs our style of work and collaboration. (Plus, Sonal’s hilarious.) The takeaway here is that as you assess your campaign, it’s helpful to write down what your strong points are, what you bring to the table. I know that I don’t have the relationships with bloggers and journalists that Sonal does, for example. If you’re working within an organization, get your key players together and write down concrete skills and time availability as part of your campaign brainstorming. On Exhale’s side, their Director of Programs, Jovida Ross, played a critical role in the implementation of the campaign and was a great partner for Sonal and I. We had a small yet mighty team of high-functioning, excellent communicators.

Aspen’s campaign idea was to create a digital safe space where the women who decided to tell their stories on the show–and by extension, all women who’d had abortions–would feel loved and supported. Central to this space would be a website where anyone could submit a message of love or support. Any political messages (from any corner of the debate) would not be accepted; Aspen’s vision was a zone free of typical advocacy posturing, and wanted it only to focus on the women. Why? In Exhale’s extensive counseling experience, they have found that political rhetoric can shut down women seeking emotional support after abortion. This would be a space where we wouldn’t allow that to happen.

It was important to me to give the campaign a catchy name that had emotional resonance. I rejected our original names that were things like “Your story matters” and “You are loved.” They were all vague, emotionally absent, and just didn’t hit on the enormity of what we were trying to pull off. I asked our group to think of names that were plays on the title of the show, allowing us to capitalize on the already-popular brand; it was Aspen that landed “16 & Loved.”

ELEMENTS OF THE CAMPAIGN

• Set up metrics and analytics to track how the campaign performs
• Build a quick ‘n’ dirty website to capture submissions of love
• Rename the Twitter profile from “xhaleisprovoice” to “ExhaleProVoice” and use the hashtag #16andloved to capture the conversations about the campaign
• Build the Facebook Page for Exhale as an organization, and use it to share the love, and updates about the campaign.
• Involved the reproductive justice blogging community by organizing a private, embargoed call before the special airs, and inviting people to participate in a live blog during the show.

METRICS

I’m a big fan of Rowfeeder for my social media tracking needs. I work with individuals and small organizations, so we pretty much can’t afford tools like Radian6, which is one of the more popular services in the non-profit sphere. For $35/month, Rowfeeder lets us track up to 3 terms on both Twitter and Facebook. On top of providing interesting metrics reports that you can tweak and do fun things with in Excel (if you’re that kind of nerd; not that I know anything about that), it also dumps all the mentions/posts it finds into a Google doc for you, so that you have the raw data.

We chose to have it track #16andloved, ExhaleProVoice and xhaleprovoice (in case there were tons of people using the old Twitter handle). In retrospect, I should have chosen 16andloved without the hash sign; that would have also captured mentions of the website where neither the hashtag nor Twitter handle were used.

WEBSITE

We purchased 16andloved.com and set up hosting with LivingDot.com (their “One” plan for $10.95/month). We installed WordPress, and chose the Therapy theme from WooThemes for $75. I recreated the “16 & Pregnant” logo to read “16 & Loved” by hand using my Wacom Intuos drawing tablet.

For the submissions and posting, we used a few WordPress plugins. The submission form was created by Contact Form 7, and we had to sent to a special email address that we hooked up to Postie. Postie turned the submission emails into draft blog posts, and we checked regularly and approved/discarded the posts. We also used an extension for Contact Form 7 that captured the submissions and added all the info to a table in the database that could be exported. We also used the Really Simple CAPTCHA to keep out spam/bot submissions.

I installed the WP Supercache plugin in case the site got really popular and crashed (it did once). For social sharing, we used the Facebook Likes It plugin (this seems to have been abandoned; I can’t find its install page anymore), and the WP Tweet button plugin.

TWITTER

Before we got word we could talk about the special, we started working on building the community engagement by joining existing abortion conversations, following and engaging with influential folks that we identified, and also posting a few teasers about having Exciting News! to share very soon.

Once we got the go ahead, we launched the website and started soliciting submissions. We received several dozen on the first day, and tweeted some of our favorites. We continued to solicit, post favorites, retweet others’ Twitter posts, and respond to inquiries. Because of the short time period for the campaign, we didn’t do as much curating as I normally advocate for. That’s not to say that we used Twitter as a broadcast tool (a big no-no!); we still maintained a very conversational focus. It’s just that for this case, most of the focus was on “16 & Loved.”

We also used Twitter to promote airing of the show, watching the live blog we were putting together, and to continue to curate responses.

FACEBOOK

Prior to this campaign, Exhale had a Page that they didn’t use, but they did have a Cause with ~1,000 members. My experiences with Causes haven’t been overly fantastic; I feel like it takes a lot of time and resource investment to get minimal material return. Especially for the purposes of our campaign (promoting submissions to the site, and getting the word out about the show), I feel like a Page would serve our purposes much better. The biggest thing is that status updates and links from Pages are more likely to appear in a fan’s news feed, and that was absolutely critical for us.

I asked 25 friends quick to Like it before we even did that much with it so that we could land a username, making it easier to share the Page with the wider world. We chose http://facebook.com/ExhaleProVoice. We then started posting periodic updates to the Cause, asking people to Like the page so that they could stay in touch with Exhale and its Very Exciting News! that was coming.

After that, we used a similar posting strategy as to what we had going on at Twitter.

BLOGGER CALL AND LIVEBLOG

Sonal got to work right away on putting together a conference call for the blogging and journalist communities. She contacted about 10-12 people who write about abortion issues and women’s rights on a larger scale. The Friday before we launched, we hosted the call just using FreeConferenceCall.com. We scheduled a short talk with Aspen, a few words from a spokesperson who had had an abortion. We stressed that the information we were sharing was embargoed, and we would let them know as soon as we could when they could share with their communities. We had a few key asks: 1. to see who wanted to participate in our live blog, 2. to see who was willing to write about the show and our campaign, and 3. to stress the importance of the pro-voice angle of our movement, and ask that they respect that as much as possible. We then opened it up to Q&A, and altogether, we spent about an hour on the phone together.

Five or six of the bloggers on the call volunteered to participate in the live blog the night that the show aired. In addition, the Women’s Media Center offered to create a “watch-in,” and they shared it with their community. How that worked: They created a Facebook event in which people were invited to watch the show (in their own homes) and voice their opinions about it.

For the liveblog, we used CoverItLive. They make it very easy to get a group of approved panelists, as they’re called, to come together and chat live. You can embed the CoverItLive tool in any website very easily, and we encouraged our panelists to do so, widening our reach. I monitored the comments from the community and approved appropriate messages as the show aired. Sonal worked on monitoring the new submissions to the website. After the special was over, people could also re-read the liveblog.

RESULTS! (That’s what you’ve been waiting for, right?)

The straight-up numbers*…

• Website: ~9,000 visits, with most of those happening between Dec. 22nd and Dec. 30th. Users spent an average of 2:26 minutes on the site, and visited 2.1 pages while they stayed. 200+ submissions.
• Twitter: Followers increased from 235 to 465; 548 mentions of @ExhaleProVoice (from 12/20/10, that’s ~27/day); 1563 mentions of #16andloved (from 12/20/10, that’s ~78/day)
• Facebook: Fans went from under 25 to 616; 617 likes of posts with 1,152 active users; Dec. 29th was the most popular day for likes and comments; 86% female fans; 62% are 18-34
• Liveblog:  During the show, we maxed at ~120 viewers at once, with a total of 422 viewers. 175 panelist comments were published; 234 reader comments were sent (98 were published). Since then, the live blog has been replayed over 900 times.
• Media: About 25 blog posts and articles, including feminist strongholds of Feministing, Feministe, Jezebel; independent media such as Salon.com, Change.org, and Care2; mainstream media such as ABCNews, NY Post, Washington Post. Two weeks later, an article on the campaign appeared in the NY Times.

Were these good numbers? All told, yes! We were very happy with them. Moreover, we were even more thrilled with our qualitative metrics, which for me are the real measure of a social media campaign: The overwhelming messages of love and support often left us emotional and speechless. We received very few negative submissions (less than 5), and very few negative comments online. (There was a minor campaign by a conservative blogger, but it never caught traction.) All around, a huge, huge set of cultural wins for the pro-voice movement.

* Exhale agreed to let me publish these numbers. Normally, all quantitative and qualitative metrics are kept private as part of my contracts.

• New York Times: Is There Life After Facebook? (CNN.com refers to the Times story here.)

I spent an hour on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show, talking with host Kerri Miller and CNET’s Caroline McCarthy:

I went on CNN International and spoke with awesome host Fionnuala Sweeney:

Twitter reported its outage being caused by a denial-of-service attack. (Quick explanation: when skilled nerds/hackers write programs to flood a server with tasks and requests, so that the server is overloaded and taken down.) What happens when we come to rely on the social web for all kinds of things, and then those services disappear? Sure, we can all merrily hop over to the next one, but as Allyson Kapin pointed out, to a certain degree, we’d all have to start over on building our networks. Our social capital translates across platforms, sure, but the physical reconnecting of users to users is one big pain in the butt.

This all points to a larger problem with how market-driven application development can be highly problematic. Yes, it creates competition, but moreso, it creates closed networks and proprietary systems. Each service — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, etc — uses its own private structure to amass our networks for us. While messages can be passed between them, there’s no way to really share the data that accumulates over time between services.

Twitter disappears, for example, and we all go over to FriendFeed. But I have probably a fifth of the community on FriendFeed that I have elsewhere, because I haven’t spent any time cultivating it. And I can’t immediately transfer all of my Twitter community to FriendFeed. I can check my Gmail contacts and see who’s on FriendFeed, but I can’t just say, “Bring over my Twitter group to this service.” That’d be problematic for anyone trying to make money off of building these services, I guess, if we could all just drop them and run. It reminds me of the same onus that contract-cancellation fees of the mobile networks put on subscribers to stick with them.

It also frightens me, to some extent, about the future of the Web when it comes to ubiquitous-yet-proprietary services. I think about what we might be dealing with today had something like email been developed as a proprietary service. Right now, email works the way that it does because there were early, agreed-upon protocols for transporting the information. Developers implemented service improvements and new ways to interact with email over time, but the fundamental-ness of those early protocols remains true today. Anyone can email anyone else. There is no, “wait, you’re on Gmail, I’m on Hotmail, we can’t talk to each other.”

(Nerd moment: Remember when the early online services were like this, btw? When AOL wouldn’t let its users access different parts of the Internet, like Usenet? Ah, the grand old days of walled gardens. And where are they now?)

In the case of social media services that focus on rapid-fire, short status updates, there is no agreed-upon protocol. I’m the worst kind of technologist when it comes to these things, too, because I know there’s a service that’s open source and based on open principles. It’s called identi.ca. Why don’t I use it, if I’m so worried? Because hardly anyone else I know does, because it’s not very pretty, and because I still can’t search my contacts to see who else is on. I’m a sucker, like everyone else, for ease of use.

So, what do we do? My heart says: all you smart designers and coders, go work on identi.ca and get it looking and working nicer. But my head knows that’s probably not going to happen, at least not right away… so I’ll just be here, staring at the blinking cursors, waiting for Twitter to come back up.

Update, 7/13/09: Two things. There’s a post on my progress and thoughts here, and also, to reflect the offline donations I’m getting, I’m now gradually lowering the goal of the ChipIn.

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Friends, colleagues, clients! Lend me your ears…

I’m writing you with some exciting news that makes me very happy. I just signed a contract from Berrett-Koehler publishers to write a book I’ve been imagining for a long time. But it’s going to take some very hard work on my part, and I hope you can help me succeed.

The book I’m writing is on the topic that has been all the rage in the media — social networking and all that implies with Twitter, Facebook, and much more. Here’s the purpose of the book: how do we ensure that these tools are in being used most effectively by those who have too often been on the sidelines of technology advances– women, people of color, queer folk, and more?

This is a fabulous opportunity for many social change advocates to jump into the new tech conversations and help shape the future, and I want to make sure that happens. Specific topics I want to cover about women’s experiences online include privacy and security, as well as shifting cultural values through organizing and action. I’m also going to be highlighting the voices of experts working in with social media in communities of color and more– voices you don’t hear when tech is being talked about.

Here’s my challenge and why I need your help: Berrett-Koehler is an incredible publisher — supportive, collaborative, and incredibly innovative– and I’m thrilled to be working with them. But they don’t pay advances. So, to do this book (and it is incredibly fast-tracked), I need to stop working as a consultant for the next three months and do nothing but write the book. Thus, I need investors. I need you to help me raise $15,000 to cover my expenses, travel, and research. Please toss some money into a “Feed Deanna” pot!

I’m off to a good start: the Hightower Lowdown (Jim Hightower’s monthly newsletter), where I’ve worked for 4 years, is covering my rent through the summer. And Don Hazen, editor of AlterNet.org (where I also have worked) and Doug Kreeger (AlterNet’s board chair) will put the first $2,000 in if people will match it. All donations of $250 and over can be made through the Independent Media Institute, so they’ll be tax-deductible.

So, here I am, hat in hand for a good cause. I’ll make you proud. You can donate via PayPal at http://www.deannazandt.com/chipin or send a check to me (address below).

I know it is a tough time to be asking for money with many people out of work and struggling. I hope you’ll forgive my chutzpah. Yet I want this all to happen so badly I can taste it; it’s more than anything I’ve wanted in a very long time. It’s a dream come true in many ways, and I hope even if you can’t give at this time, you’ll join me in celebrating the moment.

much love,
deanna

P.S. — For anyone who donates $100 or more, I will give you a copy of the book with an inscription of my heartfelt thanks. One more time, that donation link is:

http://www.deannazandt.com/chipin

P.P.S. — Thanks in advance for anything and everything that you can do to support this wildly excited, somewhat humbled first-time author. Here’s more info about the book: http://www.deannazandt.com/bookannounce , and I’ll be blogging as much of the book’s content as possible at http://www.deannazandt.com/ throughout the summer.

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For donations over $250, checks can be made payable to:

Independent Media Institute
77 Federal St
San Francisco, CA 94107

Memo: Deanna Zandt Project

First, from an American media perspective, here was another great moment for folks to demand what they wanted to see covered on national news media. What a moment of media dissonance: As protests erupted — and in some cases, turned violent –  in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, major broadcast media in the US had little to no news on the events at all. By using the hashtag¹ #CNNfail to collect all of the dissatisfaction on Twitter, Americans were able to shift the focus of the conversation and eventually influence CNN’s decision makers to start covering stories by Sunday.

It’s reminiscent of #AmazonFAIL (when Amazon accidentally delisted 58,000 books, fueling a social media revolt), in the sense that within a pretty short timeframe (less than 24 hours), major news organizations simply could not ignore the story unfolding — via reportage and commentary — on social media. I remind folks to think about how this sort of situation would have unfolded even five years ago: Bloggers would blog, perhaps media watchdog organizations would get a grassroots campaign together, and maybe within a week, if we were lucky, we’d see some influence. Now, with so many people participating in the conversation, we have immense power to quickly shift both focus and perception.

This is why, when it comes to politics and advocacy work, it’s important to look at a bigger picture beyond just who’s using Facebook to get votes, or which representatives of governments tweet with pizazz. It’s less about celebrity and more about connection, humanity and the ability to inject our values into the wider culture in a fundamentally populist way.

Another fascinating angle of this story is the bootstrapping of access to technology after the Iranian government began blocking access. Facebook was blocked in late May, when reformist candidate Moussavi had around 5,200 supporters. Not long into the protests this weekend, access to major portions of the Internet (including Twitter), as well as SMS texting, were blocked. Not to be stopped, protesters within Iran are receiving information about accessing proxy servers from folks setting them up outside of the country, and stories continue to flood out.

Honestly, there is just no blocking The Internet, y’all. What the Iranian government is trying to do is, in effect, akin to trying to stop water or electricity from flowing. There is so much infrastructure in place at this point, they’d basically have to blow up most of it to stop people from accessing the outside world. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past Ahmadinejad, now that I think about it…

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¹ What’s a hashtag? It’s a keyword that people add to their tweets, so that conversations around a particular topic can be easily tracked.

I talked in pretty simple terms about some different approaches in “The non-fanatical beginner’s guide to Twitter.” With this post, I’m going to flesh out some of the nitty gritty and help to answer some of the tougher questions.

It used to be said with one of the very first popular online social tools — email — that you shouldn’t write anything in a message that you wouldn’t want to appear in the New York Times. Few people ever followed that rule, thank goodness. How boring would our lives be if we all subjected ourselves to Grey Lady standards of information sharing?

Nowadays, new tools make it easier to share as much of ourselves as we want, and especially if you’re just getting going, it can be difficult to know what’s okay to post and what isn’t. A flat-out easy beginner’s guidepost comes from the illustrious Susan Mernit, who told participants in a workshop we led: “If you’re wondering whether you should post something or not, you probably shouldn’t.”

The genesis of this proverb comes from a key principle of social media: Authenticity is king. That word is being thrown around quite a bit these days (“authenticity,” not “king,” heh).  Social media “gurus” and “mavens” often slip “authenticity” into smarmy marketing posts. Ignore them. They are not the guides you are looking for. But authenticity is.

First of all, let’s make it clear that despite technology’s best efforts, we still have multiple authentic selves. We are the same person, for sure, at work and at home, but the mix of personality components we use is at least a little bit different in each setting. Social media makes the mix slightly more transparent, thus we have to think more about which parts we present, as well as when and how. But just like our personalities in the offline world, it’s those different parts that make us unique — and our perspective and experiences interesting.

One of my cousins, who’s a therapist in D.C., told me recently about a model of thinking about intimacy in relationships as a stereo equalizer, where things like reliability, trust, availability, etc., are the main components. Skew one of those bands outta whack, and the whole mix is off.

Social media authenticity works much the same way. It’s a mix of personal insights, professional announcements, expertise (whether it’s a job or a hobby), general passion, lots of opinion, and often humor. (Question to advanced users: What other bands would you add to the equalizer?) It takes some experimentation to figure out what mix sounds right to you. This is why Susan’s advice is so dead-on: What you perceive to be good, what you feel comfortable with, that’s what people will pick up on as they share in your experiences. For people who are largely private folks who don’t want to tell the world about the silly stuff their kid just did, that’s fine. Share more about what you thought when you read an article related to your work. It also doesn’t have to be your most familiar voice, either, if that doesn’t make you feel comfortable. You can maintain a fairly professional tone in social media (though do try not to be emotionless) and still provide value.

It’s all about the mix that’s going to make your voice sound good — to you and others.

For some people, it’s easy to share personal news and events. Me, I have no bones about tweeting funny things my mom says, details of a party I’m at, or (loads of) pictures of my dog. It’s a way for me to keep a running log of things that are important to me. That said, my guidepost is to not share things that would make me feel vulnerable, like details of my dating life. I share things once in a while about my health, either to reach out for help or to show solidarity with others, but I consciously keep it to a minimum … simply because that’s what feels right to me.

The experimentation can be uncomfortable to start with, but know that it’s okay to make mistakes here and there; social media is quite a bit more forgiving than more traditional forms of media (and I would say, also more forgiving than blogging). Worried about it all being Out There? Jaclyn Friedman made a great point recently in a workshop I was leading about how our perception of social media is rapidly changing, similar to how our perception of tattoos has changed in the last 50 years. Think about the attitudes toward a person who got a tattoo in 1959, versus attitudes now. It’s the same with social media. Ten years ago, someone getting a swig of TMI via Google might have had an adverse reaction, versus today, when seeing something a little off-topic in a Twitter stream is no big whoop.

That said, I do want to mention that there are some folks in jobs where more attention needs to be paid to privacy and security (you know who you are). There are different parameters to work with when establishing your mix, but you shouldn’t keep yourself out of social media altogether. Almost all of us are, in some way, already represented online. Social media sites generally appear within the top 10 search results; you should do your best to influence how you appear, even if it’s to show that you’re largely a very private person.

In a really big picture sense, I see all of our social media voices combining into this huge, glorious mix that has a real chance to change our cultural perceptions and values. (Note: this is the premise of the book I’m writing this summer for Berrett-Koehler.) All of this social technology has a humanizing effect on our digital interactions. Much like everyone getting tattoos, if we’re all presenting our authentic selves and experiences — versus relying on gatekeepers to tell our stories — we stand a chance to cause a tidal wave of change and inject our values, finally, into a culture that has long ignored too many of our experiences.

Her story: She was rescued by the super awesome folks over at Rat Terrier ResQ from a backyard breeder in Texas. Which means, pretty much, that she spent the first three years of her life in a cage outdoors, and has had to overcome incredible obstacles. Thanks to the love and patience of her foster mom, Jacki, she’s done just that, and is slowly adjusting to life with me in Brooklyn. As I type this, she’s snoozing on the window shelf I built for her next to my desk. It’s a dog’s life!

There are a bunch of ways you can keep up with her progress online, if you’re into that sort of thing– I’ll be posting more periodic updates in my own accounts, but here are her locations online:

• Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/izzylouise/
• Updates: http://twitter.com/izzylouise
• Dogbook, on Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/dogbook/profile/view/5218571
• Dogster: http://www.dogster.com/dogs/902462