No one has been exempt from Facebook’s “curation” of our News Feeds. At any given time, you’re seeing 1/10th of the posts from all of the pages and friends you’ve liked, possibly even less.
As a non-profit (or small business) marketer, you’ve seen the flip side of this coin: your Facebook posts are going out to 20%, 10%, 3% or even less of your Facebook fan base.
If you’re on top of all the changes, you’ve improved your game by:
Six years ago, I combined several 100 Greatest Books lists and began reading my way through some of the greatest literature available.
Read about the journey so far here.
It’s been a truly rewarding experience, especially as I begin reading through the older Pulitzer Prize winners. Andersonville, by MacKinley Kantor (1958), for example, took me a month to get through, but the characters have continued to live on very vividly in my imagination. The Way West, by A.B. Guthrie (1950), too was a refreshing migration-westward novel.
Others were a bit forgettable or, rather, it was interesting to ponder why they’ve become so iconic (ahem, The Old Man and the Sea).
For the past year, I’ve been trying to minimize the amount of garbage, paper, plastic and glass leaving my home and heading for the landfill or recycling center. While I’ve long been a re-user and recycler further down the waste stream, this has been my attempt at reducing my footprint from the point of consumption.
In the first quarter of the year (January-March), I realized I was a long way from zero waste. Although, at an average of 0.79 lbs of trash per day, I was also a long way off from the average American household, which disposes of 4.4 lbs of trash per day!
I’m slowly but surely making my way through my list of “100” greatest books of all time. I put “100” in quotes because I merged several top 100 lists and recently added the Pulitzer Prize winners in the Novel (1917-1947) and Fiction (1948-present) categories. This leaves me with a list of the 300 greatest books from varied sources.
The list is below. The titles in bold are the ones I’ve read. With 65 out of 300 read, I’m at 21.67%. I’ve been working on this list since 2008, so if I continue at this pace, the list will provide me with good reading for the next 20 years.
That seems both daunting and delicious.
I’m personally and professionally fascinated by analytics and the idea of return on investment (ROI). I spend my working days in Google Analytics, Facebook and YouTube Insights, e-newsletter stats and more.
When it comes to my personal giving to non-profits, I’m just as intrigued by numbers. I tend to “invest” my thoughts, energy, time and finances quite vertically: I drive deeply down into issues and give there, rather than here and there to many causes.
In doing this, I come across terms like effectiveness, efficiency and overhead, which are very often cited by non-profits as reasons to believe an organization is “good.” This is, of course, in addition to (and sometimes an after-thought to!) the actual impact an organization has.
LinkedIn makes it very easy to add new skills to your professional profile – and this is what makes this section of the site irrelevant.
As of today, I have 11 skills for which colleagues have endorsed me. By clicking “Add to Profile,” these words will quickly appear on my profile and position me as an expert in Facebook, WordPress, Teaching, Research and more.
Facebook? Yes, I’m a pro. WordPress? Yes, I’m very good at that too. Teaching? Well, I’ve run some good workshops and I enjoy mentoring, but I dislike most forms of “teaching” and wouldn’t use that word to describe my skills. Research? Hmm, I like to learn and I Google a heck of a lot of stuff every day. Does that make me skilled at research?
I rushed home from work today to weigh my trash. I know, I’m weird like that: driven by results, a bit of environmentalism, and in love with personal experiments. It’s the end of the third quarter and the weigh-in must be done, as I attempt to get myself closer and closer to zero waste.
Without further ado, in the third quarter of 2013 (July-September), I tossed out:
To compare the quarters, it looks like this:
