ErgonomixPR

A couple of weeks ago, @JennieBinSC intereviewed me and three others for a blog post to be published on February 4th at The Sassy, Steel Magnolia. Among our group were Kristin Bostic, Financial Management Group; Shauna Heathman, Mackenzie Image Consulting; Kelley Glenn, Coldwell Banker.

She identified us, in her eyes, as women-on-the-verge, career-driven, in-charge of our burgeoning growth, and under 30. I struggled to prepare answers to some of her questions. Some days I feel like I don’t fit that description. Granted, I have very firm views, but what would I hope to impart on someone in college. That I didn’t know at the time, until today.

Ever since I was 7, and I got my first American Girl doll and books, I wanted to emulate Samantha. One thing I will always remember is this phrase, “Action Speak Louder Than Words”. Then, these words formed together in my head and tickled out from under my finger tips…

If there are lessons to be learned:

resilience is a challenge;

humility, the largest pill to swallow

and grace is a gift.

Sometimes you have those days. You know, the wee-bit of worry that gets out of hand. In the hustle and bustle you get caught up in-between-the-lines, on the lines, and in the margins. We do it with work, our friendships, our families, our calendar…

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Today was one of those days that was loud. It wasn’t loud around me, it was loud inside of me. I let my list start talking to me over and over again. Thank goodness Kelly Cutrone was tweeting about her new book, “If You Have To Cry, Go Outside!”. I’m sure for those who are familiar with Kelly Cutrone, friendly may not be the first word that comes to mind, but I LOVE HER!

She is definitely a strong woman with an inner voice. Amidst the very loud + fast-paced fashion PR enigma that People’s Revolution has become, Cutrone single-handedly gave me the slap across the face that I needed. After reading excerpts from her book, I was rejuvenated to keep the faith*.

Here are the high points that I have gathered:

“Gather your courage like an armful of free clothes at a McQueen sample sale & follow your inner voice where ever it takes you.”

“Sometimes, if not most times, you find out who you are by figuring out who & what you are not.”

“If this book inspires you to do one thing, I hope it’s to take years when you’re young and go balls out on tuition…”

Today, as a Gen-Y entrepreneur, I lost my inner voice. But then I found someone else’s voice, it is my friend Miah who is out-of-town, IN MOROCCO, and he said this to me. Mmmyea, I’m going to make you click that link over there to see what he said, however, it did remind me that I was on a journey or quest, as he put it. I am traveling with an intuition visa in the entrepreneurial badlands and my inner voice as the travel agent.

So, I stepped out of range from the loud within to pen this postcard from my journey.

The island of Kaua'i in '08.

Aloha from 2008. Your days of chasing the sun are numbered.

Princeville on the North Shore

Let the sun find you. Set your own orbit,

pursue your own path. Quiet the noise and listen to you.

*One time in DC, my friend and I were on the metro and the engineer overshot the track. To diffuse the panic he talked to us and said things like, “keep the faith.”

flickr user chrys (@exposur3)

Yesterday was my first experience in the co-work environment. It was a much smaller group compared to the door-busting crowd that welcomed the movement to the Lowcountry last week. I’m glad it was not too overwhelming because I became better acquainted with my peers and could embrace exactly where the co-working movement was headed. I left Rehava abuzz with so many new million-dollar ideas in my head and with so much electricity to want to do more.

If you are unfamiliar with the co-working concept, then these principles come to mind:

• collaborative community
• sustaining a local economy
• accessible + efficient

Co-working is the best alternative for freelancers, sole proprietors, creatives, and ingenues to be immersed in a homogenous think tank for mobilization. I would happily contribute to keeping this alive with some of the sharpest minds in the Lowcountry than pay rent to work alone. For Ergonomix, co-working enables me to cultivate ideas in a hotbed of my peers + potentially stakeholders. I am able to sharpen my thought process and bounce it off of a different wavelength.

Yesterday, I joined a podcast led by Sean McCambridge of Chucktown Deals. He hosted a round table with Jared Smith, Mike Close, Kenneth Andrews, Steve deGuzman, Chrys Rynerson, and myself. It has been interesting to see how co-work emerged from BarCampCHS and become something like a weekly CHStweetup for this burgeoning “creative class”. If you’ve never read Who’s Your City? by Richard Florida, run to get it, now! (Not just because he RTed me + Ken Hawkins that one day.)

Here’s how I see it…Not-for-profit co-work v. for-profit incubators reinvests interests back into the community. Many of us feel that providing a home for co-work is expense enough. Rehava has been generous enough to share their workspace with the co-work crowd while the City of North Charleston embraces and prepares for a more static home in Park Circle. This is the ultimate gesture of community, not just for our creative class, but toward a sustainable, and inclusive, business culture. The collaboration with Rehava can only enhance the appeal of the Lowcountry as creatives become attracted to our fair Lowcountry and hope to surge our saturated real estate market. To really appreciate this beyond la vie boheme you should read Richard Florida’s books!

For more insight on how co-work got started and what it means to us, spare us 20 minutes, it has posted to Chucktown Deals:

Facebook as a social media tactic has expired it’s window of opportunity. In the rapid pace of creating a Live Feed v. a News Feed, killing groups for Fan Pages, pokes to superpokes, the function got lost in the shuffle. Updates in general become a kerfuffle of information that I, personally, have opted to remove from the stream of information. If you were taking quizzes ad nauseam, I am not subscribing to your feed, in fact I’ve taken it off the table completely.

This is the curious conundrum of ingenuity and obscurity. Zuckerman + Co. clearly made the FB empire expand it’s breadth and width too quickly. People do not adjust well to change and once they have mastered on new application it was time to learn another. What irks me is how today, which is a step-up from yesterday, those in the public relations industry are defending FB as a tactic.

I have been told that, “FB is an important marketing tool for PR reps.” To that, I am standing on my soap box, “You’re right. That is the best way to describe it, FB is a marketing tactic and not for public relations!” I value the support marketing can lend to PR and what PR brings to the marketing table. That, however, is not my schtick. It’s great if your niche can benefit from the exposure, but where do you draw the line between direct mailers, e-blasts, e-vites, fan page updates? To me, as close to a PR purist as I can be, they are one-in-the-same. People are inundated with their friend feed to take notice of your fan page.

Although, in this particular discussion, this person has garnered attention around their client into the thousands, which is a tremendous milestone. I applaud their work and call it marketing. They have created nested a little corner of FB and provided a glorifed discussion board for their public. Here I am thinking, discussion boards have become extinct, but I am reminded by my good friends about the Sound Tribe Sector 9 “Lowdown” that is somewhere near religion for that circle. At a much closer glance, you see that the agency managing that particular fan page has liked many of their own posts.

A wonderful following is fantastic, but when does the focus become your client above your own self-promotion? I am reduced to the integrity of the content and the relationship with the public. If it takes 4,000 fans to get a, “Yooo, braaahhh! See you on Tuesday, man I was hungry last night”, then I’ll take building a following with some intellectual integrity over time. FB has diminished it’s value for me and I maintain a few fan pages for the crowd that believes they are so 2.0, when it’s so 2.n0. These stakeholders will not bend for what’s to come, but that’s what makes trailblazers early adopters. We set trends for most and help those that follow find their way. FB is not a terrible tool, but it’s not the wisest decision to make when you are targeting a public of influencers.

In keeping with my brief, and short-lived trend, I’ve provided another episode from Supernews to exaggerate my point.

On a more personal note, I had an acquaintance that beamed into this marketing ploy for $1,000. You join the FB fan page, add something to it’s wall and get as many people to “like” it. As of yesterday, she asked me to join and click on somebody or other to vote—on FB chat, mind you for the second time. Usually, people have the courtesy to send it in a group or a thread to your inbox. This person had the gall to just word vomit without periods and end with HOPE YOU’RE DOING WELL. Well, I hope they take their medicine because I didn’t have the opportunity to “ignore the request” and opt out of the group, instead I opted out of her Facebook friendship.

As a PR professional, I value the importance of creating a platform or channel to your public, but do not become your public. Gaining your public’s trust is an investment of time and having a game plan for better or worse. It’s not the no-comment, but how can I address your concern ESPECIALLY if it’s negative. It is thanking your public for recommending you to others and not just spamming to get, only, your message across. Above all, your organization should cultivate accessibility, not just visibility.

Does this sound familiar? Multi-tasking in the board room, at the office, at lunch, while you’re already multi-tasking. We are all pretty familiar with this deficit in human interaction which can arguably be attributed or relieved, depending on your view, by technology.

I have been working on developing my thoughts on what this says about the hegemony of co-dependence in the workplace, and ultimately in our lives. Let’s just break down communication. We are conditioned to reinforce positive and negative actions through feedback. Recently I had a chat with, Thomas Beckett, Esq., about the client relationship.  We agreed that contracts can condition expectations, thus providing feedback. Should any of us have a superior over our project, we would naturally run new ideas by them. However, the need for instantaneous feedback has become an epidemic that crushes realistic expectations and time.

For me, being connected on Twitter, Facebook, Google Voice, Google Chat, Skype, and now Orkut makes me even more accessible to my clients. Nothing can take place of physical face time, but if you need something it will be expedited quickly. People tend to say that I answer emails fast because I try to keep my inbox as close to zero as possible, click for more on this principle of inbox zero. I can confidently provide this feedback, but I struggle when I have expectations for the same in return. I think that being in an office environment conditions the rate at which you manifest a reply. You can tell the leadership dictates the rate of reply and as a sole proprietor that works from home + coffee shops my rate of reply is determined by my activity online. When I’m offline, I’m connected, the direct messages from my über-personal Twitter gets sent as a text message to my phone. My Google Voice acts as a screen for me to hand out my direct mobile number, but it still goes to my phone.

The way most Americans work is at a fever pace. One thing I will try to muster is patience, particularly with myself. I need to disconnect often and realize there is a life to live, and plenty more Supernews to watch! Is it wrong to be diligent or right to become work-centric? The answer is balance for health, wellness, and piece of mind. You can be overly committed, so eliminate stress, I see many of my friends booked solid through the week. This year I will be taking a little more selfish me time to recharge those batteries and struggle to avoid the online feedback while I’m offline.

In the meantime, I will be synermonigizing tonight with my CHStwestival committee over some brews + basketball.

Dr. Josh Cole has recently moved to Charleston to join his brother Dr. Luke at his practice in Mt. Pleasant. Together they are targeting acute pain relief and preventative treatments. The Cole brothers have access to technology that can be an asset for any athlete. They are able to create analytic videos based on your performance + posture, while providing corrective exercises to harness your potential,  like golfers and baseball players for example.

Cole Chiropractic provides lifestyle tips to ease your pain. They contribute to hyper-local news site TheDigitel.com and post articles to their own site. Unlike, most practices, they investigate the source of the discomfort beyond the bones and can customize a treatment for you.

Charleston has joined the roster of international cities to participate in the worldwide Twestival! We look forward to building our team and reaching out to the Charleston community in global giving. As we count down the weeks, we ask you to save the date on March 25th! This year’s fundraiser will support Concern Worldwide. Their education programs and initiatives target the world’s poorest countries.

All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects. In a 24 hour period, hundreds of international cities will unite under one cause and impact education at once! Join us as we begin to plan an event for the Charleston community to attend. Support us as we begin seeking sponsorships and put education at the top of your priorities in 2010.

I must say how thankful I am to have had a fabulous 4th quarter, which was technically my 1st quarter ever. I have met so many wonderful people with marvelous talents and contributions to the Holy City. Charleston has changed so much in the time that I have spent away in Clemson and Asheville. It’s nice to come back to something familiar, and a little challenging, while stretching my toes in the sand. Clearly it’s the dichotomy of a laid-back challenge that I am drawn to and perhaps, the dense salt air. I’m definitely reeducating myself on the city and grooving to a newer beat in town. However, I must say some parts of this place seems like it’s stuck in time.

Thank you for all the support, camaraderie, and advice! Who would have ever thought I would finally launch this site? It’s been a long time coming!