It has been a week of the crumbling of icons. Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Billy Mays- all represented different areas of celebrity, and all were larger than life yet not larger than death. There is always that element of surprise when a celebrity gets cancer, or appears looking haggard, fat or tired on the cover of the Enquirer. Airbrushing and surgery can only take you so far- eventually all of us march down that long corridor toward the bright light.

So I have trouble identifying with people who are beyond touched- they are truly hurt- when a celebrity dies, although I suppose it is less that the sadness is because of the end of an individual’s life, and more, really, mourning the severing of a link of identity that ties us together. Or, in other words, we are both losing a social object. using the term that my friend Bill Lublin coined (“I remember dancing to Billy Jean with my first boyfriend”) and finding a stronger, larger one (sharing in mourning the loss of a musical icon). It has less to do with the individual who has died- because, really, do we even know that individual?

Today, I logged in to twitter to find this:

MayaREGuru Please unite in a moment of silence at 2pm Eastern for Megan Porter aka @megapixel http://bit.ly/LPmYz Pls RT#twitterqueens #Megporter

I follow this girl- for a girl is what she was at 24. In her own words, she was a “Social Butterfly. Stand for something, or fall for anything. L♥ver of Tiramisu, Photography, Dirty Martinis, Art, and Rotary Phones.”  Was I that well-defined at 24? She was only a year older than my oldest daughter.

This loss is more than the demise of a social object. It is the silencing of a voice- a snarky, smart voice. She talked about her strep throat, and leprechauns,  and mullets.

megapixel I do believe the combination of Mullet and Large Pink Scrunchie could very possibly tear the fabric of space and time.

Every loss of life is a renting of the fabric of space and time, probably at least on the level of the combination of Mullet and Large Pink Scrunchie. I think the time is coming when twitter replaces the obituary and the birth notice as the chronicler of  life’s ebb and flow.

The death of @megapixel will not “trend” on twitter, but know that her loss will be felt.

Megapixel

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This is a quick run-down of our plans:

Friday night 6/26 TweetUp at Latitude at 6:30- open to general public  . I have added this to community calendars in the area, and we have had more than 200 clicks on the invite looking for more info beyond the fairly extensive amount of info that I placed in these calendars.  I told Latitude that we would be expecting maybe 40 people- we’ll see!

Saturday 6/27

• 6:30 Starting out the day early- we are meeting in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt to head to the CBS Morning Show, where we are F&C and touring backstage after- maybe more, who knows?
• 11:00 Jason Turcotte presents the TwitterQueen website makeover
• 12:00 Presentation/Roundtables session 1
• 1:00 Presentation/Roundtables session 2
• 2:00 Buffet lunch and Michelle Weber with Gyrotonics
• 3:00 Presentation/Roundtables session 3
• 4:00 Bill Lublin

Then, of course, karaoke at night if we can find a spot.

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Dad and me on my wedding day

I am my father’s daughter. He was an engineer at Raytheon, and before that an auto mechanic, and my mind works the way his did, like it or not. I analyze everything to a fault, and, based on my conclusions, am stubborn to that same fault. Just like my father.

It is funny how where you are today is the sum total of your experiences. Your parents, and their parents, built the beginning of the road you are traveling on. You can try to build a better or completely different road if you don’t like the scenery that came before you, but most of the time you end up with a road that runs parallel to the original one- or at best perpendicular. That original road is always the touchpoint.

So here I sit on this gloomy Father’s Day, missing my dad and thinking how his life- more than his words- shaped me. Trust and helpfulness were a huge part of him, and I grew up thinking everyone was like that. It has created in me a blind spot of naivete.

He possessed a wicked sense of humor as well, or was possessed by it, more likely. He and his brother brought my mother out to dinner for her birthday one year, and privately informed the waitress that she was hard of hearing but loathe to admit it, and the waitress would need to speak loudly and clearly to her. By the end of the evening, both the waitress and my mother were shouting at each other- the waitress to be understood, and my mother in vain denial of her deafness. Happy 50th, Mom!

Then there are those days that time is frozen in your mind. I remember when my mother called me up and asked me what multiple myeloma was- the doctor had called her and told her on the phone that a blood test indicated that that my father had that condition. I remember sitting on the stairs in my old house after looking it up and calling her back, in essence opening up the envelope to read to her my father’s death sentence. He was sick from both the chemotherapy and the pain of the cancer the entire last year of his life, and the man who spent his life finding ways to help others finally learned that life is about accepting help when you need it, too. I don’t think the equation came close to being balanced in sum, but that’s the way you want the scales to look at the end of the day, I think.

When he died, I was three months pregnant with my second daughter, now 19. A lot of water has passed under that bridge, but I still remember the feeling that the safety net was gone and here I was- on the tightrope of adulthood, or maybe off the tightrope and learning to be that safety net for my own children as the elder for a new generation.

So, Dad, thank you. Thank you for expecting the best from people. Thank you for exposing me to an unswerving expectation of personal responsibility. Thank you especially for that sense of humor- it comes in pretty handy.  And thank you for the gift of realizing that with great depth of joy in relationships inevitably comes equally deep sorrow unless you are very lucky- and that’s okay and you can live through it.

And thank you to all of the fathers out there who are setting that same example for their children.

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At RE BarCamp Philly Preparty

I was speaking with my friend Alex Wilhelm the other day, and he said to me that it seemed like he had just started seeing the #twitterqueens hashtag yesterday, and when he searched for TwitterQueens, now he sees it all over the place. That made me curious.  I went to Google and quickly took a look at some of the places we popped up.

TwitterQueens sightings:

http://www.truliablog.com/2009/06/01/rebcden-and-rebcphl-the-recap-its-all-about-relationships/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/rtroth/3573818764/ http://twitter.com/crbill/status/2116334106 http://www.powersiteblog.com/?p=2225 http://www.viddler.com/explore/niknik/videos/20/ http://www.eventbrite.com/org/204336412 http://pikchur.com/A2k http://www.braveheartwomen.com/tags.jspa?tag=TwitterQueens,&print=true

http://twitpic.com/613bm http://microblogbuzz.com/redirect/29852001 http://turcottedata.com/blog/?p=150 http://www.twittermoms.com/profile/MarleneMLinke http://localism.com/blog/fl/tallahassee/posts/1034792/Social-Networking-and-How http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBrwYOpJKkI http://www.flickr.com/photos/rtroth/3573818764/ http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20090609/LIFE/906090311/1005/LIFE/Meet-the-Delaware-tweeters http://rebarcampboston.com/sponsors/ http://kristinacusick.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/headed-to-philly-virtually/ http://www.facebook.jp/pages/Dolphin-Marketing-Advisors/57825938649?ref=mf [5th down on this site] http://helpfulhannahs.com/post/1093671/rebar-camp-in-philadephia-rock-stars-of-techno http://www.socialmedian.com/story/3609275/3-twitter-queens

Lots of fun!

Lesley Lambert’s Infamous TrampStamp video

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Gary Vaynerchuk speaks on social media at the #140conf. Kind of a little different perspective- he gives HIS answer to the question, “When do you have time to work if you are on twitter all of the time? “Wish I had been at the conference!

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I have two different ways of looking at life that are always warring in my head. It’s kind of a struggle between the feelings of predestination and destiny. In one sense, it feels like there is this path ahead of me, and as hard as I try to veer from it I keep circling back. It reminds me of those old movies when the children get lost- always by this big honking tree- and walk straight for hours and hours and come out by the damned tree again. Sometimes it feels like that- that you can’t miss the train that’s heading for you- you can only delay its impact.

Other days I am certain that what I choose to do not only leads me away from that tree, it takes other people with me. And I suppose either feeling- complete free will and complete predestination- are equally frightening.

Today I was bringing my daughter to help her get her windshield fixed- a little bit of gravel had apparently bounced up from the road and dinged it. This girl has always been a really hard worker in school and at life- she did really well in the lower grades without any urging, always cheerful and fairly well focused. She has epilepsy but except for a rough two year stint in early high school has found the right combination of medication to control it, and we worked through that time without any fear residing in her soul as a result.

She was one of those high-functioning kids that doesn’t need a whole lot of guidance. I kept her from parties that were potentially rife with drugs and alcohol, as I did the other children. When she went to college she gravitated toward social planning for student government functions and playing basketball on the school team.

Then the February after she graduated from college, this child- who always had a firm grasp on her destiny- had a psychotic break- possibly originating from schizophrenia. She started describing how people had set up cameras all around the college and in her bedroom at home, how people had hurt her, conversations that had never happened, all of which I tried to corroborate with her friends and couldn’t. We brought her to a hospital where she was tested for drugs (negative) and probably should have left her there, but she was so completely distraught I brought her home after she promised to get psychiatric care which, of course, she later evaded.

I found out through this experience that an adult can choose to be psychotic as long as they are of no physical risk to him/herself or others. There was absolutely nothing I could do.

Fast forward a year and a half- sixteen months of learning to accept that I couldn’t lead this child out of the forest unless she were to ask for help. This was sixteen months spent trying to keep her for becoming upset or agitated, because that seemed to exacerbate her delusional thinking. And inevitably sixteen months of feeling of feeling completely, horribly inadequate as a parent, with no way to assuage this child’s pain or help her to reconcile her memories inside her head with the reality that kept nudging in- and this was the most traumatic for her.

So today, really, was a great day. She was paying for the ding in her windshield herself, with a job that she started a couple of months ago and really loves- and is able to do, well. She still gets incredibly agitated when something out of the ordinary happens but she is reteaching herself normalcy by observing the reactions of people around her to her behavior.

Will she ever be easy with herself and her circumstances again? I have no idea. Why do things happen the way they do? I know even less about that. I know that if I was in charge of either predestination or destiny- whatever the actual mechanism is- it would probably be both easier on most people.

But I’m not, and it isn’t. So today I am happy that she was able to call and make that appointment, ask me for the help she needed to get her car fixed, and pay for it herself- which in itself caused her a great amount of pleasure.

Just for today, we have stepped out from under the shadow of that tree.

Trees

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Anyone who knows me even remotely well knows that I am a card-carrying member of the TwitterQueens. This proves it:

So there you have it. What are TwitterQueens? Well, it started out being a group of mainly women who chatted online, forming friendships and helping each other out online. It was mostly women, but not all; they were mostly REALTORS, but not all. Later we added the hashtag #twitterqueens so that we could keep track of the conversation in one stream- if you add the hashtag, you can filter out all of the responses with that tag if you use tweetgrid, tweetdeck, seesmic desktop, or twitzap.

Later as the group grew, we had members that were very new to social media, and decided to create a community where they could go and see posts with information (here’s one on SEO), share leads, ask questions and get answers, and share video and pictures. We now have nearly 250 members, probably about 15% men.

The “Boys Allowed” issue caused a little stir but we made it through. I think that none of us really was aware of how fiercely people identify themselves and define themselves within a group context, but I guess I do too. I would have to say that- male OR female- most of my best friends are members of this group.

That is why I am really REALLY looking forward to our first tweetup/social media boot camp. This is going to be on June 27 at the Grand Hyatt in NYC, and I am going to get to meet the people that I am so excited about online face-to-face (some for the first time, some again). Bill Lublin , Morriss Partee, Jennifer Shaheen and Rebecca Corliss from HubSpot are among those either speaking or leading sessions, and Lesley, Maya and I will likely throw our hats into that ring too.

So here’s the deal: We have decided to offer a free VIP stay with us, which means a hotel room for both nights (6/26-6/27) and free pass to the day’s event. One lucky person (man OR woman) will be chosen from among the people who tweet the following before Saturday June 20 at 4:00-

#twitterqueens- choose ME for VIP event reg because (then give us a great reason).

Yes, you will have to sign up on twitter.com and at least put out one tweet, but it will be worth it if you win!

See you in NYC!

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RE Bar Camp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.- RE BarCamp website

Inside the Loft at RE BarCamp Boston

When I first heard the term REBAR camp (at least that’s what I thought it was) before my trip to NYC in January, I searched the term. At that time, I got post after post about extruded metal used in construction, and it took some hunting to find one site with the not-to-clear explanation posted above.

So a lot has changed in less that 6 months. Search the term now, and you get a ton of information on the correct subjects, and you get a feel for how quickly a movement can develop. You also sense that with the speed of change in real life, Google needs to decide if it is going to be an encyclopedia or a newsfeed for information- because, as I see it, that is a difference in searching that can’t be reconciled without compromise. Maybe a GoogleAll and a GoogleNow?

But anyway. We just had the latest RE BarCamp in Boston, and fast on its heels is Chicago, on June 16- Boston won’t be the baby for long.  And there are at least a half-dozen being planned.

So there are a lot of them. They are “Unconferences.”  Still, what is that?

They are for people who want to learn about the phenomenom of social media: twitter, facebook, blogging, and whetever else is the flavor of the month. In fact, a lot of it is simply describing new ways to use and implement these social media tools to get the most out of their use because the field is not static. They are for people who have never blogged, for people who don’t know what a tweet is- and they are for people immersed in the field to trade ideas about the new things coming.

They are for getting stuck in elevators. They are for hanging out with old and new friends. They are for learning about a new way to connect in a really interactive environment- a place where you can ask questions and even challenge what is being said and brainstorm a solution. It is a place where if you need help, someone there will lead you through the process.

And if you are lucky, maybe someone will hand you the mike.

A special shout-out goes out to James Shiner and Greg Afarian of Zipvo and TweeplePages for organizing RE BarCamp Boston. I think I may owe them a couple of beers.

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A tweet-up is a face-to-face meeting, usually held at an informal place like a bar or restaurant. For a little amount of time and no money this is an invaluable way to meet some of the people that you have chatted with online, and get to know their friends as well.

My friend Maya (@mayaREguru) is helping to organize a Delaware tweet-up. They set up a website (less than $20, including domain name), and Maya has been on a radio show, in an online news report, and has been invited back again for another stint on the radio. The tweet-up is also helping to benefit the local food bank- attendees are encouraged to bring two canned food items with them.

So, in addition to doing a couple of good things, Maya is getting a collateral amount of publicity. She is not in people’s faces about what she does for a living- she is a REALTOR®- but it is mentioned each every time she is involved in the publicity. Maya is also a founding member of the TwitterQueens, and that position, together with her contacts, has helped her put together an appearance for that group on the CBS Morning Show. Do you think that they will ask her what she does and where she comes from?

Okay- and this is all BEFORE setting foot inside the tweetup and meeting people face to face!

How can you go about doing this? First, pick a date! Check and make sure it would be okay to bring a group to the location that you choose- that they do not hae an event already planned for that time. Find some way to benefit your local charity, not for publicity, but because it is the right thing to do. Maya’s group chose the Food Bank of Delaware (found on twitter as @foodbankofde).

Then get the word out! Radio, local newspaper (both the calendar section and possibly a news report), twitter itself. Check out MeetUp.

Even more ideas can be found here on Mashable’s site. You can be as simple or get as complicated as you like. Make sure you bring business cards with your @twitter name on them. I had special ones printed up:

These cards are strictly for social media events. Once you go to twitter, my background lists all of my contact information, so, really, all you have to do is google my name or find me by my twittername.

TweetUps- for networking, for business- for fun!

If you do organize a TweetUp. post it here under comments.

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Wondering how to find out about hashtags? Some are listed in the Hashtag Dictionary, and more are created every day. Start a hashtag  for your area and keep local twitter traffic coming by adding calendar events and items of local interest.

Can you imagine someone in the area constantly watching this stream for traffic alerts and other pertinent news? What a great way to be established as a local expert- not by sending out your listings, but by branding yourself as someone informed who cares about the community.

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