Musings

I’ve been thinking for quite some time that there are just SO many places I want to see for myself, I can’t even think of an organized way in which to attack my wish list. Being a Virgo, I am left with the option of making a list and crossing things off. Maybe if you’ve been to some of these places you could offer me tips, or maybe this will inspire you to make your own list, which could be fun. I’m all about cross-referencing 🙂 Who knows, maybe we’ll even end up in a tour group together! Anyway, in no particular order:

1. The Shiloh battlefield
2. Atlanta – in general
3. New Orleans, especially the Garden District
4. Venice
5. Savannah, Georgia
6. Rome
7. Paris
8. Versailles
9. Hampton Court in England
10. Mark Twain’s House in Connecticut
11. Gettysburg – I’ve been there before but the trip was short and marred by car problems
12. Portland
13. Seattle
14. Salem, Massachusetts
15. The Grand Canyon
16. The Black Hills
17. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s house in DeSmet, South Dakota
18. Charleston, South Carolina
19. Dublin
20. Belfast
21. Glasgow
22. San Diego Comic Con, especially if Benedict Cumberbatch is gonna be there again
23. New York City. I know, it’s crazy. I’ve never been there.
24. Miami – my cousin lives there 🙂
25. The White House – I’ve seen it from a distance but never got a tour
26. New Salem, Illinois, where Lincoln “grew up”
27. Vicksburg
28. Santa Fe, New Mexico
29. Albequerque, New Mexico (Maybe I’ll run into Saul Goodman)
30. Alaska in general
31. Puerto Rico to take up my friend Raúl’s invitation
32. Harper’s Ferry
33. Arlington Mansion (I should retour the cemetery as well. I was a kid the last time I was there)
34. Andersonville Prison
35. the James A. Garfield home
36. Vienna (especially where Mozart lived)
37. Van Gogh’s home (any of them)
38. A Broadway play
39. Stratford on Avon
40. Hadrian’s Wall
41. The Great Wall of China
42. The Holocaust Museum
43. Monticello
44. Independence Hall (and Philly in general)
45. Edison’s lab in New Jersey
46. Where Emily Dickinson lived, if any of that is still around
47. Memphis, Tennessee
48. The Alamo
49. Mexico City
50. the hobbit village in New Zealand (amongst other sites)
51. Sydney, Australia
52. Ghana, to see my friends the Federwitz family
53. Montreal
54. The Galapagos Islands
55. The Great Barrier Reef (while it still exists)
56. The Charleston Tea Plantation (I love their tea)
57. Yorkshire
58. Cardiff, Wales so I can look for Doctor Who
59. Barcelona
60. Madrid
61. Seville
62. Salamanca
63. The Rock of Gibraltar
64. Morocco
65. Cairo
66. The Great Pyramid
67. Athens and the Acropolis
68. Buenos Aires
69. Guatemala to visit my friend Nic Wirtz (boy would that shock him) 🙂
70. SXSW – I would like to go some time. Just because.
71. Los Angeles – I feel like I should see it. Ya know?
72. Vancouver
73. Yellowstone
74. Mount Rushmore
75. Ocean City, New Jersey – I want to see the hubub all of my friends are making about this place!
76. Baltimore – I was only a kid when I was there and it was a very brief stay
77. Tokyo – although I would want  a very experienced tour guide who could deal with my crowd aversion 🙂
78. Jerusalem (if peace ever gets there)
79. Amsterdam
80. Odessa, Russia – ancestral home for at least part of my family
81. the old Czarist palace, or whatever is left of those places
82. Helsinki
83. Zurich
84. Ground Zero – I am not sure I will ever be able to gather up the strength to do this, but I feel I should
85. Berlin
86. Bombay
87. Vatican City
88. Nepal
89. Lisbon
90. Boulder, Colorado (and a trip to see the Vickery family)
91. Kauai
92. Costa Rica
93.  Moscow
94. the fjords of Norway
95. Copenhagen
96. Florence
97. the painted caves – wherever those are in France
98. the Anasazi ruins out west
99. Old Faithful
100. Switzerland, where my great grandfather came from

Boy, that 100 goes fast. I could go on forever 🙂

Now it’s your turn.

Dear you,

I hope you’re feeling better today. I am feeling nostalgic this week. On Monday, the sky was that perfect summer blue and it was filled with big July puffy clouds. The locusts were singing, the trees are at the height of their greenness, and I was transported immediately back to my childhood and summer vacation. I wasted so much of my summer vacations, spending hours upon hours inside watching VH1 and MTV, which actually showed music videos at the time. That’s how old I am.

Of course, it’s hard to appreciate a vacation after it has been going for a couple of months, I suppose. Maybe you need the contrast between a hustle and bustle day versus one where the porch is the epicenter of your plan. Maybe we should go to school all year round and get summer vacation as adults. But then how would that work for teachers? Somebody figure this out for me.

I have not touched on the news of the day, which is that a Black care giver was shot in North Miami while he was lying on the ground with his hands up. The police officer was asked why he shot this man, who was completely unarmed, and his response was, “I don’t know.” I think it would be better to say, “I have racist programming in my head that I can’t overcome, and when I see a Black man my first instinct is to shoot.” Saying “I don’t know” makes it seem like you decided to destroy an ant hill or something. “I don’t know. I didn’t have anything else to do.”

It will be interesting to see how this one gets turned around. “By lying down I assumed he was taking an aggressive position.” Maybe.

Anyway, enough of that.

I hope you’re well. Let me know what you’re up to. Talk later.

~Margie

The Twitter chat I co-founded called #Tweetdiner has never been quite like other chats. First of all, for some reason, most chats don’t incorporate digital food fights. Clearly they are the weird ones. #Tweetdiner never really had any particular topic, except on rare occasions. Rather, the chat has mostly been about friends getting together and chatting conversationally in real time. Last year we got together to remember our friend, Claudia Jackson, who passed away quite unexpectedly. This month, July 28th to be precise, I’d like to host a #Tweetdiner to help out our long-time diner family member, James Fierce.

The deal is this. James has been having a heckuva time over the last few years, but he refuses to be defeated. He wants to start his own importing and consulting business, but he needs a little bit of a boost to get that going. If you know James you’ve probably been supported by him in one way or another, so you know that he certainly merits a little help. James has started a GoFundMe campaign that explains all of the obstacles he has had to deal with along with where he is hoping to go next.

The goal of our chat will be two-fold. Well, actually three-fold. First, it’ll be a reunion, which is always fun. Second, we will strive to get James up and over his campaign goal over the course of the chat. And finally, per James’ request (and this shows how awesome he is) we’ll be talking about how men are impacted by depression and chronic illness. Men often feel pressure to stay quiet about these things, leaving them to either despair on their own or having no option but to pull their own selves up by the bootstraps.

The chat will run from 8-9 PM ET on Thursday, July 28th.

Spread the word, and I hope to see you there!

Six years ago today, I wrote my first blog post. It was not here. It was at a little Blogger site called The Real Mad Man. I had started tweeting a little beforehand.

My reasons for joining Twitter were pretty simple. I had been invited to talk about social media before a group of manufacturers at a small trade show. I knew the concepts behind social media for marketing, but I thought it was important to actually show that I knew what I was talking about. I feverishly tried to build a Twitter presence. Facebook wasn’t quite as important to marketers back in the day.

I realized pretty quickly that just trying to tweet was not really working. I needed something to share that gave me more than 140 characters to show my personality. Enter the blog site.

As time went on, over the next probably 7 years or so, I found myself, remarkably, climbing up the ladder amongst social media marketers. I found my blog posts getting shared by people who had written books and who had huge followings. I found myself on “best of” lists. I started to think about books to write so that I could go out on a speaking tour. When the great recession hit all of this seemed like it would be easier than clawing for business in the traditional way. With all of the support I was getting, it seemed like I could really do this. I became that person who humble bragged about getting mentioned by this or that person. I fiercely lamented decreases in any of my follower counts. How could anyone want to unfollow me? I was great!

Yeah. I started to get REAL cocky. I began to question myself. And I haven’t stopped.

The Social Media Marketing Corner – Is This Real Life?

A lot has changed about the social media marketing segment of the social media world over the last few years. There are people writing books today who are terrible writers. There are people writing about social good and how to be a hero to people when they treat people in abysmal fashion off the blog sites and social media platforms. Individual consultants have grouped together like amoeba to form consortiums of consultants, and they spend much of their time (so it seems to me) talking to each other online. It’s kind of like those disgusting dating or married couples who post to each other on Facebook all day. “I love you. No I love you more. I miss youuuu.” Like yuck, man.

In the old days (five years ago) people with big followings tended to show gratitude for kind words and interest in differing opinions. Today the good words are clearly expected, and even slightly differing opinions are dismissed. It is no wonder that so much of the social media marketing world consists now of talk about “influencers.” When you consider yourself an influencer, talking about how important you are works out pretty well.

No Longer Riding on the Merry-Go-Round

When I say I am leaving the social media game, I do not mean I am leaving social media. I just mean I am excusing myself from the  remarkably ugly world that social media marketers have created. Here is the reality for me. My clients are primarily B2B manufacturers. Do any of the leading social media marketers know what a plumb borehole is? Do they know the difference between a cylindrical floor machine brush and a rotary floor machine brush? Can they speak to lean manufacturing and what goes into getting ISO-certified? Maybe some of them, but overall, these folks are not remotely speaking the language that the manufacturers I know need to hear. Virtual reality is great, but let’s talk about not being able to attract the right kind of work force for the work that needs to be done. Let’s talk about China knock-offs and what lower oil & gas prices really mean for businesses in the industrial sector.

I don’t need to be on a “best of” list to be able to talk to my clients about marketing of any kind. I need to be able to talk to them in a way that shows I really understand where they’re coming from. The social media marketing world does not provide that context or that venue.

What I’ll Be Using Social Media for Now

I’m going to be using social media for two things moving forward. One is not new. I am going to be trying to reach out to companies that need help in today’s increasingly confusing marketing and business world. I’ll be running social media campaigns for some of my clients, too. And I will not be bowing to the gurus in that case either. Influencers for my clients would likely be names you would never recognize unless you’re in the marketing sector too.

But I am also going to be honing my presence for an important purpose. I am going to be striving to reach out to young people who are growing up small. Whether they have achondroplastic dwarfism or another kind like me, these kids are not provided with a whole lot of real life role models. Tyrion Lannister is great but may not be the best example to follow. I want to give young people someone to reach out to who has survived the humiliation and pain of bullying to reach the humiliation of the adult life while still living a fairly regular life. I want to show what kinds of obstacles they might face so they can prepare for them. I want to give parents ideas of how to support their kids.

When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to meet a city leader who was an achondroplastic dwarf – that means she was the kind of dwarf Peter Dinklage or the people on the TLC shows are. A bit before we were due to meet, she canceled. I was heartbroken. I finally had a chance to hear from someone who had found success – a person I could talk to, not just Danny DeVito. It felt like a real slap in the face.

I want to make up for that now. With the voice that I have online, I hope I can reach some kids who need that kind of understanding. Yes, you can make it, even though it’s hard sometimes.

So, that’s where I am on my sixth anniversary of starting to do online…things. As always, there are people who have been with me this whole time, and to them I owe a huge debt of gratitude. I hope I can continue to earn your support and friendship.