This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review.

Push through the discomfort: It’s tempting to stop (or never start) using social media when you realize that you are opening yourself up to the world in a new way: “you mean people can write whatever they want on our wall?” But, often rewards await those who push through the discomfort of the unknown. You can always change your settings if you encounter a problem, but in the mean time you may be surprised at the trust that is built with your customer base if you are open and willing to talk about the good and bad sides of your businesses. Where else are you able to hear what people are really thinking? Use it to your advantage to build better products and better service.

This gem comes from Mike Knutson in Lessons Learned: Using Social Media to Support Entrepreneurship in Rural Communities on the Canadian Rural Research Network site. And it describes probably the most important success factor in any social media effort.

Mike’s post reminded me of a physical therapy session I was in the other day. I exercising for my shoulders when a muscle in my head started to hurt. “If it’s just uncomfortable, let’s keep going,” the physio said. “But if it’s painful, you should stop.”

A physiotherapist would call what I felt in my head “referred pain” — the parts of your body that hurt are the weak parts that can’t cope with knots, tension or dysfunction elsewhere (e.g. the pain in your neck caused by the tension in your mousing shoulder).

Your social media “pain” is similar: it’s caused by knots in your customer service, operations, HR or other area. Social media is just the place you feel it. If you’re getting smacked down publicly for your missteps, taken to task on YouTube for your poor products or lousy customer service, suffering organizational implosion from the overtime hours that are going into your Twitter presence, then maybe it’s time to stop what you’re doing.

Any of those pain points signal that you are not just going too hard too fast, but that you may be using the wrong muscles. Your social media relations team can’t overcome an outdated brand or tone-deaf advertising; your clever blog posts can’t disguise a fundamentally flawed value offering; your tweeting won’t be sustainable unless you’re prepared to expand or reallocate your staff resources. Most of the actual pain that organizations suffer from entering social media isn’t from social media: it’s from all the other organizational problems that social media simply begins to reveal.

But all that just speaks to pain. Mike talks about a different creature: social media discomfort. You will feel discomfort when you talk in a personal voice on your company blog, rather than The Official Voice found in press releases, and when you let your customer publicly declare their dissatisfaction with you. The Facebook wall, as Mike points out, is an invitation to discomfort.

For most of us, this discomfort often boils down to one question: “What if people say mean things about me?” Forget “what if.” People will say mean things about you, and it will be annoying and uncomfortable. But you should do what my physical therapist said I should do: Keep going. Respond to the substance of those comments (if they’re offered with anything other than violent or profane hostility); ask a colleague or two to read your response before you post, to make sure your discomfort isn’t leaking in and making you sound hostile. Then step back and see what happens: I’ll bet that after three or four cycles of responding to negative comments, you’ll discover that the discomfort doesn’t cause pain. You’ll probably even find that living with it, and responding to it, makes you more accessible to — and more liked by — your key audiences.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between discomfort and pain. In my physio session this morning, I decided to keep going; the discomfort was tolerable, and working through it helped my muscles get a little stronger. Tomorrow I’ll know that I can handle the uncomfortable sensation, and I’ll stand just a little bit taller. Work through your social media discomfort, and your organization can stand taller, too.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

What’s it like to be on a panel with rock stars Peter Shankman, Julien Smith, Chris Brogan and Russell Bowers? For all who have wondered, I can answer that question with a video — at the same time, answering a question that came in on Twitter during today’s panel at Mount Royal University’s Social Media Shift:

Everyone is dying to know what is on @awsamuel head. #MRUShift

5/10/2012 12:29 pm via Twitterrific for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@levindixon

Levin Dixon

The object on my head was a Looxie Camcorder: a tiny, over-the-ear videocamera that records a continuous loop of video, and lets you view or share clips by connecting to your iPhone. I got mine this past weekend as a birthday present, so I decided to take it for a spin this afternoon. A lot of the footage consists of me looking at my iPhone to make the camera work (!), or the screen of my iPad as I tried to send a mid-panel tweet:

This video gives you a bird’s eye view of my comments on the phenomenon of hashtag diffusion  – the spread of hashtags from Twitter to e-mail, text messaging and even bathroom graffiti. The clip also captures a follow-up comment from Chris.

SpeakerCam from Social Media Shift

“Speaker Cam” is hardly my best use case for the Looxcie. I’m hoping that if I can get in the habit of wearing it regularly, and leave it in continuous loop mode, I’ll be able to capture and share the moments that shed life on the joys of life on- and offline.

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Tonight Little Sweetie was thrilled to learn that she has been accepted into the Vancouver Maker Faire, a DIY festival we attended last year. She loved it, and immediately wanted to run her own booth, based on her Etsy store,  2 Dots 1 Symbol, which sells emoticon jewelry.

Her Etsy store has been a great way to develop a range of skills, and the Maker Faire has the opportunity to put that in overdrive. So tonight I began the process of developing a workbook that will help her get ready for the Maker Faire, and hone her math, research, analytic and creative skills in the process. I think of this as the Pre-School for Creative Startups, for which I owe a debt to Doug Richards.

Here’s what Lesson 1 looked like:

Profits and costs

Profit is the difference between how much it costs to make something, and how much you can sell it for. You have two kinds of costs for this project: fixed and marginal.

Fixed costs

Fixed costs: These are the costs that you will have no matter how much jewelry you sell.

Your fixed costs for the Maker Faire include the costs for your booth:

• $180 for registration
• $25 for one additional table

1. What are your total costs for the booth?

Labour costs: These are the costs of having people help you do your work at the Faire, or preparing for the Faire.

If we need help setting up, tearing down (cleaning and packing up), or looking after the booth, you will have to pay for that help.  The hours of the Maker Faire are:

• 10am to 6pm on June 23 and 24th to run the booth
• 12-8 pm for on June 22 to set up
• 6pm to midnight (12 am) on June 24 to tear down

1. How many hours will you need to run the booth?
2. How many hours will it take to set up the booth?
3. How many hours will it take to tear down the booth?
4. What are the total hours you will need to spend at the Maker Faire?

Labour costs: These are the costs of having someone work for you.

If we need someone to help us keep an eye on you and your friends while you are running the booth, we should pay them $15/hour.

1. If you pay someone to help out during the hours you are working on or at the booth, what will your labour costs be?

***

Little Sweetie dove into these problems with enormous enthusiasm, even though she’s normally the type to avoid doing her math homework. I’m hopeful that the real-world challenge of running her own Maker Faire booth will encourage her to work away at the various challenges I’ve now spelled out for her in a series of worksheets she will complete in the weeks ahead.

This is worksheet one of many. Follow the rest as I post them here in the coming weeks, or come see Little Sweetie’s completed work at the Maker Faire!

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Today’s practice: Write your thank yous instead of abbreviating them.

Last night, I caught myself on the verge of a profound etiquette violation. A colleague had replied quickly and helpfully to an email I had sent, asking for information, and my breezy reply ended “tx”. She had taken the time to answer my question in the middle of her busy day, and I couldn’t spare the  extra 2 seconds to type out the full “thank you”.

That’s the kind of violation that reminds me of the relationship between good manners and human decency. Saying “thank you” isn’t just a formality: it’s an actual expression of appreciation, an acknowledgement of the effort or kindness someone else has shown.

It’s easy for the fast pace of life online, or the slow pace of typing on an iphone, to erode our commitment to those deeply meaningful human courtesies. Especially when so many of us have bought into the idea that we should be sending pro forma thanks for each retweet or mention — a practice that cheapens the thank you, and pressures us into condensing it so that it fits in 140 characters.

If you’re writing a tweet, it is fine to embrace the “tx” — so that you have room for a more personalized acknowledgement. “Tx for the lovely tweet — it was so delightful to hear how my post helped you plan your new (very cool) campaign)” is a well-used abbreviation. “Tx for the RT” is meaningless, and training you in the bad habit of the empty thank-you.

And if you’re on email, the only time to use “tx” is as a sign-off (in place of “yours” or “xo”). As an expression of gratitude, it’s more of an f-you than a thank-you. As in, I’m too busy, or your contribution was too trivial, to warrant real appreciation.

A real thank-you deserves all eight letters. Maybe the practice of typing them will inspire you to offer even more articulate appreciation for the people who are helping you at work and beyond.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review.

Pinterest is the social media darling of the month, growing madly and reported to be driving more traffic to third-party sites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn put together.

Think of Pinterest as a hybrid between a photo-sharing service like Flickr and a social bookmarking service like delicious: on Pinterest, you “pin” images the way you bookmark URLs with Delicious. You can curate these images into thematic “pinboards” and follow other people’s pinboards to find inspiration or images you want to “repin.”

From the beginning Pinterest has seemed like it should be useful to marketers, and the hype has only amplified companies’ desire to be there and figure out who’s the Pinterest customer and how to reach her (so far, it’s predominantly her).

I’m here to help, because I am that customer. I’ve been an active Pinterest user for over a year, experimenting with how to use this new kind of social networking service, and watching how others use it. Here are some anecdotal observations from my year with Pinterest.

Shopping: Both compulsive shoppers and anti-shoppers who aim to get in and out of stores fast like and use Pinterest. I’m in the former camp. I created a Pinboard for my quest for the perfect grey boots, and used it to poll my friends on the best option; I’ve now got Pinboards going for Lego storage options and the perfect computer case. While Pinterest makes shopping even more fun for enthusiasts like me, Chris Tackett of The Atlantic points out that it can also reduce their actual volume of purchases by providing form of virtual acquisition that displaces a certain amount of consumption. Sometimes, just looking at all those pretty grey boots is enough.

What it means for your business: Target Pinterest users’ experience of shopping as a creative process, not just a potential transaction, by making your online presence as pleasurable as it is functional. Product photography matters more than ever; you want your prospective customers to pin your hot-looking products, and you may want to engage with the people who’ve pinned your products to see if you can nudge them toward a purchase.

Bonding: Pinterest nudges online shopping into something more like the real thing: a social experience shared by friends. When I joined Pinterest it was still an invitation-only site, so I used my invitations on the friends and colleagues with style I admire or share. Like many groups of Pinterest users, we follow each others’ pins to help each other find the kinds of clothes, shoes and home items we love. It’s the online equivalent of that age-old female bonding ritual, the shopping spree. Marketers might note the opportunity to foster and track the social influence on purchasing, but they should also see an opportunity to build on this experience and reinforce the social experience created here, just as retail stores pipe in music and offer snacks and other freebies to bring groups of friends into the store.

What it means for your business: Busting in on a circle of Pinterest pals to hawk your wares is not unlike sticking your head into the dressing room where two girlfriends are discussing whether that dress makes her butt look good. Better to send your pro-bonding signals from afar, perhaps with a product comparison page that encourages users to pin their top choices so their friends can help them choose what to buy.

Collaboration: It’s not all about shopping, though. I’ve also found Pinterest to be a powerful collaboration tool for both work and home. At work, I’ve used it build a shared file of visual inspiration for an ebook design project. At home, we used it to help find a fence that also appealed to our neighbours. By inviting other people to contribute to a board, Pinterest users can collaborate in way that is easier than Google Docs, more fun than Delicious, and quicker to scan than either one.

What it means for your business: Recognize that a single pinboard may reflect the tastes or interests of several contributors. If your customers are frequently comparing a similar set of products, consider collecting all those products on a single Pinboard.

Inspiration: Many pinboards are highly personal, eclectic or quirky collections of images that users find exciting or inspiring. When I joined Pinterest, I decided it was finally time to create a “vision board,” a widely-praised technique for visualizing your professional and personal goals; I collected representative images on a single pinboard that I occasionally look at to reinforce my focus. I now use a separate pinboard to create social media infographics that can inspire my research. For users like me, images that inspire are as pin-able as images that represent what we plan to buy or wear.

What it means for your business: Engagement and branding! Create inspirational custom graphics for your blog posts or website that will appeal to your customers or clients. Cultivate your own well of inspiration by identifying the major areas where you want to develop your professional skills, and curate pinboards of inspiring images or examples that will push your own practice forward.

I try a lot of social media tools, but only a handful become part of my daily workflow the way Pinterest has in the past year. That’s why I’m convinced it’s here to stay, and why you should start using it to target your customers in the year ahead.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice: Focus on healing your kids, not on figuring out how you’ve damaged them.

In the past year a number of very important and dear people in our lives have started or grown their families in a way not everybody knows is possible: by adopting kids who have been living in foster care. In fact, our friends and family now include at least five families with kids who have spent some part of their lives in foster care.

Watching our friends welcome their new kids into their homes and lives, I’m struck by how much of the parenthood journey is absolutely identical to what we experienced when we started our family by hatching our babies from giant eggs, and also, by some significant differences.

One of those differences involves the basic paradigm and level of self-criticism we bring to our role as parents. I constantly worry about how I may be screwing up my kids, how other people may think I’m screwing up my kids, or how I may yet screw them up in the future. My friends who have adopted older kids, on the other hand, focus less on how they are going to screw up their kids and more on how they are going to heal them.

This strikes me as a useful lens that any parent can effectively use. Instead of worrying about how we might be damaging our kids, we can make the painful but safe assumption that they are or will be damaged, or at least hurt in some way — because life is a hard journey, and we can’t bubble wrap our kids. (Thanks to whomever it was that spoke with me recently about the bubble wrap metaphor.)

So start with the assumption that your kids need to be healed. Approach them not with the fantasy of sheltering them, or moulding them, or turning them into specific kinds of people with specific skills. Stop worrying about the specific ways in which you are somehow falling short in that effort. Instead, think of them as people who are living this human journey through suffering and fear, and do what you can to help heal them on their way.

And if you have a few minutes to spare from the job of healing your kids, think about how you can help heal all the other pained people you see around you — on- and offline.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice: Tighten your online security.

You’d think that writing a dissertation about political computer hacking would make a girl sensitive to the challenges of online security. And it has, up to a point. But I recently decided to up my level of tech security, and in the process discovered some handy new tools that make good security easier to achieve.

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Today’s practice: Make a family tech schedule.

We recently took the bold, terrifying step of pulling all the gaming consoles (Xbox, Playstation and Wii) out of our home media center, and sending them on a vacation to the closet. We took this measure in response to our kid’s increasing obsession with video gaming, and on a certain level, it has worked: he’s gaming less, and we are having fewer arguments about how often, how much and which games he’s allowed to play.

Fewer, but not none. That is because our unilateral strategy missed the most crucial step: engaging both kids in a conversation about the role video games, iPads and other digital activities should play in our family.

We’re correcting that by making a family tech schedule: a list of days and hours when different amounts and types of tech activities will be available to each of us, so that the kids will know when gaming time is an option, and when it’s off the table. Most importantly, we’re including them in that process, so that we can encourage critical, intentional thinking about technology use.

I’ll let you know how it goes. And do tell me how your family manages tech access in your home!

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Today’s practice: Think about the social media experience you want to have, not the brand you want to build.

About three years ago, in a conversation that ultimately led to me shifting gears and joining Emily Carr, the very wise Morgan Brayton passed along a pivotal piece of career advice: Focus on the experience you want to have, not the form you think it should take.

That advice has been on my mind the past few weeks as I have worried over this recently-neglected blog. Life has been roaring along at a pace that has precluded daily updates, and I’ve been feeling terribly guilty about it — as well as selfishly nostalgic for the opportunity to think by blogging.

So today I’m taking Morgan’s wisdom to the web, and thinking about the experience I want to have with my blog — the experience of sharing thoughts in a form that fosters conversations with people who are thinking about similar questions — rather than obsessing over my structural commitment to a daily mega-post.

Stay tuned to see how it goes.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Why and how should CEOs use Twitter? That was the focus of my conversation with Michael Castner yesterday, on the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Wrap. You can listen to that interview below, or read the Wall Street Journal story we were riffing off: Better Leadership with Social Media. In it, I present six ways busy execs can use social media to make their work easier and more effective — instead of seeing social media as one more thing on a crowded plate.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

If you struggle to keep your Facebook Timeline dynamic and engaging, without creating what is simply a mirror of your Facebook or LinkedIn presence, the solution may not lie with you, but with your friends.

For the past few months, I’ve been running a private experiment in crowdsourcing the contents of my Facebook Timeline. Any tweet that somebody else has favorited gets cross-posted to Facebook, so that my Facebook Timeline reflects not only my Facebook life but also my Twitter life. (Yes, they are different.) It turns out that a decent cross-section of my tweets get favorited by somebody (though not every tweet gets favorited, by any means) so this is a good way of selecting just the more interesting tweets for permanent archiving on Facebook. And to keep even those from being tedious, I have them set so that they are only visible to me, and not to any of my friends.

Or I should say, had them set. A few days ago, the service I was using to do that cross-posting (Twitterfeed) updated its Facebook posting service. This resulted in a handful of changes and glitches, including an error in how Twitterfeed handles privacy settings on Facebook: suddenly, the tweets I’d set to have posted privately were begin posted to my default privacy level (a relatively limited circle of 100 friends, but still a lot more than just me!)

While I had set up private cross-posting to avoid annoying my friends, the sudden appearance of these cross-posted tweets hasn’t caused any waves yet. On the contrary: a number of friends are liking and commenting on the tweets that are now appearing on my Timeline.

My serendipity could be your strategy. By using a service like favstar, which generates an RSS feed of any tweet that has been favorited, you can crowdsource the job of choosing which of your tweets, or which of your company’s, get cross-posted to other social networks. Use Twitterfeed to cross-post to Facebook or LinkedIn; or use If This Then That to pipe your favstar RSS feed into any one of wide range of blogs and social networks.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Sometimes the only thing that makes the glitchiness of the Internet tolerable is the expectation that one day we will laugh nostalgically about the old days.

Remember how we used to have iPads, but they couldn’t see anything in Flash?

Oh yeah — FLASH!!! LOL

Remember how we used to use our phones to post to Facebook, but you could never get the privacy settings right from your phone?

LOL — privacy!!

Remember how annoying it used to be when you lost something on a webform after spending all that time typing it in?

Ha! Typing!

Except the most awesomest thing is that with our post-iPad, post-Facebook, post-typing, post-privacy Internet, we won’t even have to ask our buddies if they remember — because we’ll be able to beam an immersive flashback directly to their in-brain implants.

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Finally, an online dating site that makes Plenty of Fish and Craigslist’s Missed Connections look positively classy. My comments are included in the story that ran on CBC news tonight.

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How can you conceive the social media project that will enrich your production company, broadcast network, film or TV show? That was the core question I spoke to today at Women in Film & Television Toronto, as part of their International Women in Digital Media speaker series.

My talk walked them through the process of finding a great social media opportunity — a process I’ve previously described at some length in our documentation for the Concept Jam, the ideation process we’ve used at Social Signal. Thanks in part to Heidi Yang, who graciously agreed to turn her Rescue Mediums show into our live case study, the women in the room responded to my inspiration deck with a fantastic set of innovative ideas for using social media to extend, complement or provide an alternative to broadcast programming.

One goal of this presentation was to provide a roadmap for running this kind of opportunity identification process with their own teams or companies. For those who’d like to try, or who would simply like to review the examples I shared today, my slide deck is below.

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I’m in Toronto for a lightning trip, speaking tomorrow at a luncheon hosted by Women in Film & Television. Tonight I’m staying at the Sutton Place Hotel, which puts me at the epicentre of memory for my first 25 years of life. From the east-facing window of my suite I look down the barrel of Wellesley Street, which ends in the park that my childhood home adjoined. From the south-facing window I see the Ontario government office block where Rob worked when we first met, long before we got married. If I craned my head out to look west, I’d be looking at the blocks leading to my high school and all the tortured memories that are now locked away within its walls. And if I could look almost due north, I could see the former location of the ice cream cone where Rob and I ate the day we first had lunch together, across from the museum where we were later married.

The geography of memory is powerful and inescapable. There’s no way for me to sit at the corner of Wellesley and Bay Street without feeling utterly overwhelmed by the cumulative personal history that lies within these few square kilometres. At age 40, those memories bring a shocking and somewhat painful awareness of how far distant these memories mostly lie, both in years and in emotional immediacy; the very fact that they no longer hold the same heat or clarity is a reminder of how long ago these events took place. With that tangible connection to the passing of time comes the brutal, blessed awareness of what it means to make each day count, and to use well the years that lie ahead.

If walking down a once-familiar street can discipline us in the art of living fully, what happens when our memories no longer lie in streets to which we can return? Geek though I be, my memories are mostly embedded in the physical spaces that presently surround me: my childhood home (where I used my first computer); the Queen’s Park legislature (where I met my husband on the online chat network); the local pub (where a group of us convened the meeting that established Canada’s first online political network).

As our world and culture move online, it will be the digital experiences that take the foreground, and the geographic locations that fade to the back. Do you remember where you sat when you first logged onto Facebook — and would you be nostalgic to return to that same desk? Do you remember where you were when you wrote you first tweet? Which computer you were using the day you met your digital BFF?

Our digital spaces might themselves hold the same evocative power as the geographic spaces to which we now attach, but unlike physical locations, we are much less likely to revisit them. Have you used the Internet Archive to visit your old Geocities page and enjoy a whiff of nostalgia? Looked for a screen capture of the AOL login screen? Listened to a recording of the sound your 2400-baud modem made as it established its tentative connection to the net?

While our digital lives are much easier to preserve and much harder to erase than the specifics of any given cityscape, we are far less likely to discover emotional resonance through the happenstance of wandering onto the digital terrain of our youth. A website, once razed, no longer has a location to which you can feel attachment; nobody notices that the URL they are visiting represents an I.P. address that used to belong to their favorite blog. Online, what’s gone is gone, and even what remains — technically — may be just as invisible if we never visit, and it never pops up in search results.

What anchors can we create, I wonder, to provide some emotional endurance to our most meaningful digital moments? Perhaps Facebook’s Timeline is a start, giving you a way to wander down your digital memory lane and remember the funny site you once liked or shared.

But the emotional memories that have the power to shock us into recognizing the passage of time — to recognize how brief and precious today really is — are not the memories that we carefully curate. They are the memories we stumble across, or stumble into, someplace as impermanent as a one-night hotel room.

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