Archives: Social Media

A friend of mine Tweeted this yesterday afternoon, managing to precisely pinpoint the best way of getting what you want from 2011:

“Ink your goals rather than just thinking them”

Tamsyn O’Connor1

Rather than making resolutions that we won’t stick to, it’s much better at this time of year to set yourself goals and targets for the 12-24 months ahead and review your old ones.

The best way to ensure that you finish up 2011 and head into 2012 the way you want to is to take ten minutes today to sit and write down exactly what you want to get done this year.

You can scribble it on a piece of paper and stick it to the fridge; pop it on a post-it on the side of your computer screen; even make it public by posting it on your blog or Facebook profile.

Whatever way you do, the simple fact of having your goals and dreams for the year written down in a concrete form will force you to focus on what you want to achieve, keeping you eye on the proverbial prize.

The more we focus on what we want–rather than what we don’t want–the more success and happiness will come our way.

1. script writer, associate producer and Love Like Hers‘ spectacular 1st AD [↩]

A quite remarkable friend of mine1, photographer and filmmaker Holly Cocker, tweeted today that she hasn’t had a proper day off in over 3 months and another friend said he’d not had more than a few days off at a time all year.

Holly also mentioned her admiration that I take time out fairly frequently, which I decided to take as a compliment in the way it was intended, rather than a suggestion that I’m actually quite lazy.

It got me thinking, though: we all need to strike the right balance in life. There’s work, there’s play – for a lucky few of us there’s work that feels like play – and then there’s all the other things that happen in life.

I mentioned yesterday getting caught up in Twitter/Facebook streams and losing hours of your day. In the same way, it’s far too easy to get swept up in what you’re doing and losing sight of the fun times and the opportunities to just kick back, even if it’s just for a day here and there.

Striking the balance between driving yourself forward and keeping yourself happy and relaxed in life is always a tough thing to do, but it’s also one of the most important. In the lead up to Christmas, we’re all focused on taking some time out for ourselves and for our family, but we need to make a conscious effort to continue that focus into the New Year and beyond.

Remember: relaxation isn’t just for Christmas, it’s for life. In more ways than one.

1. For many reasons, not least also being post-transplant and chasing her dreams – with tremendous success so far. [↩]

When does promotion become procrastination?

When social media goes bad (cue over-the-top American-TV intro music and flashy title sequence)1.

We’ve all been there: listless, unmotivated, snowed under with things we just don’t want to be doing with our day.

We just sneak a peek at what the Twitterverse is up to before we get down to it. We just see who’s thrown a sheep2 at us before we put our noses back to that grindstone.

Before we know it, we’ve lost hours of our day to commenting, reTweeting and generally putting ourselves about, always telling ourselves that it’s all in the name of networking and promoting ourselves, our product or our project. Which it very often is.

But it’s vital not only to your productivity, but to the success of said product or project, that we pay attention to those warning signs of procrastination. There’s no point in marketing yourself if you’re never going to have anything to deliver.

So shut that browser down, Command-Q Tweetdeck and set yourself to task. You’ll be glad you did when you jump back on later to Tweet “I finished it!”

1. Apologies to my American readers, I couldn’t use British TV as all our shows are pretty bland and boring when held up against the US. Two ends of the same spectrum, I guess. [↩]
2. Does anyone actually throw sheep any more? [↩]

This weekend I took a couple of days respite from the rigours of the last couple of weeks chained to my desk finishing off a couple of projects. On Sunday morning, K and I headed to a nearby village to meet a couple of friends for some period festive merriment at a Dickensian-themed Christmas fair.

As we wandered around, my friend and I got chatting about the last 12 months: he was made redundant, which finally gave him the kick up the arse he needed to pursue his career as a magician and hypnotist full-time and I officially started – and started finding success with – my production company TinyButMighty. Then we naturally segued into our thoughts, plans, hopes and dreams for next year and the year after.

We’re both very similar people: highly motivated, hugely ambitious and very lucky to have supportive partners. But the more we chatted the more it struck me how important these real-world friendships are in these days of myriad virtual followers and “friends”.

My online friends tend to be my filmmaking buddies; the people I interact with most on Twitter are those that motivate and inspire me to push on with my film-related projects, hence the term ‘reel life’ friends.

My ‘real life’ friends are those who I’ve known a lot longer, have been through more with, but who aren’t necessarily engaged and enthused by the same things in life as I am.

Until this weekend, I’d always thought of the two sides of the reel/real coin as being entirely separate. Now I see that what they are is the yin and the yang of a cohesive whole.

Without my little online ‘tribe’, I’d have nowhere to turn when I hit that roadblock in developing ideas, concepts and screenplays. But without my friends to hang, chill out and relax with, I wouldn’t have the enjoyment and the richness in my life to motivate myself to push forward with anything.

Sometimes you need a push from someone who knows what you’re going through, who’s been there before and can sympathise, empathise and hold your (virtual) hand while you rough it out.

And sometimes it’s precisely because they’re from outside your ‘reel world’ that someone can offer more support and a bigger spur to your dedication and commitment than your hundreds (or thousands) of Twitter followers all tweeting you at once.

The yin/yang nature of online/offline connections should remind us of the balance we need to strike between our different worlds and how they can best help us achieve what we want in their own separate and inimitable ways.

Following yesterday morning’s excitable, if over-tired post, I decided the best use of my time was, clearly, to redesign the blog. There was some logic to it, since I see the blog becoming quite a key part of the new project, but mostly it was because I couldn’t really focus on anything work-related.

As part of the process, I figured it was about time to move the blog to its own server. Since migrating to olilewington.co.uk from my old blog about my transplant journey, I’ve used a masked-forwarder for the domain to hide the fact that I’ve been hosting it on the server of another of my websites.

To cut a very long (24 hour+) story short, the hosting company went all weird and ‘lost’ the domain, then when it reappeared it was still set up for the old site and the re-direct didn’t work and I’d copied the wrong database over. Deep breath.

In the end, though, it was Twitter that came to my rescue, providing as it did a HUGE volume of helpful responses from my various tech-savvy followers and, eventually, Mike Busson managed to help me get it all squared away.

The whole experience just goes to illustrate what the true power of social media is: helping people.

By offering practical advice and solutions – as was the case with my issues – supporting people having a hard day, celebrating your friends’ successes or RTing people’s good causes or crowdfunding campaigns, you are doing things for other people and forming an active part of a community.

Engagement and involvement is the ultimate key to getting the most not just from social media, but life itself. Only by being willing to give to others will you find others willing to give back.

So next time you’re asking people for a ReTweet, or encouraging people to click on the ‘Share’ buttons on your blog (did you pick up the subliminal message in there?), stop for a second and ask yourself: when was the last time I did this for someone else? What have I given in order for others to give back?

Call it Social Media Karma. Or SMarma. If that didn’t sound so much like smug and smarmy…