Socially Damaged?

For a while now I've been trying to be more aware of my personal brand and working on improving and strengthening it. One thing that keeps coming up in a lot of what I've read on the subject is the use of social media. Social media is something I've loved for years now and I still don't think anyone is truly an expert in it. A lot of the advice I'm reading on how to be social without damaging your personal brand, I actually disagree with and decided to make my own position known.

Have a Plan

I'm a big nerd for having plans, setting goals, and defining things. As part of creating my own personal brand, I felt it was important for me to lay out what exactly I would be using certain social media sites for. Twitter and Facebook are the two main ones I'll be discussing. I decided to make my Twitter account more of a mouthpiece for my work and try to stay on the professional side there. Facebook is strictly social. There's a keyword for how you connect with people there. You friend them.
I try to keep my Tweets relevant to work I'm doing or articles, blog posts, videos, etc related to my work or projects. I think I get some leeway considering I'm trying to build a career in the entertainment field but sometimes I'll stray from strictly career related topics and share links to things involving fashion, interior design, and current events. All things I'm inspired by and often tie back into projects I'm working on. It also gives me an opportunity to frame my influences.
On Facebook, I try not to share so many career related things. I'm usually funnier on Facebook and make status updates about my dog, my musings on celebrity news, song or movie quotes going through my mind, food I've just eaten, etc. I find those updates, as mundane or trite as they may be, more entertaining especially when they come from friends. It's the sort of conversation we rarely have time for these days, especially considering the average person's circle of friends has expanded greatly.
I think it's a terrible mistake for employers to judge prospective employees off of their Facebook account. It's also a terrible mistake for people to restrain themselves and behave completely professionally on Facebook. That defeats the entire purpose of the site.

Monitor Your Accounts

This is actually great advice I've read in multiple places. Be aware of what you're sharing on social media sites. With Facebook, I think it's extremely important to make use of Friend Lists. Everyone you meet in person will more than likely want to be your friend, but not everyone should see everything you post. I have several friend lists with varying amounts of access to my information. There's one group of people I barely know or haven't talked to in years, they can really only see my main profile information. This goes for my Co-Workers as well. I have a list for family members that gives them access to everything I share, but nothing that others share with me, photos I get tagged in, or really anything involving me that I don't have control over. Then there are my actual friends who have access to all my information, posts, etc. These varying levels of control help me stay social and interact with everyone in an appropriate way.
It's still important to make good choices on what you share. Honestly, I see no problem with posting photos from a night out at a bar with your friends. Holding a bottle of beer? Why be ashamed? I'm 26 years old and I live in one of the most happening cities in the country. Let's be real. On the other hand, I definitely would not post photos of my drunken cab ride home from the bars. Make good choices.

Own Your Content

You really shouldn't be afraid to have a personality online. For instance, I share a lot of my personal projects online, some of which would probably make for awkward water cooler chat. One of my recent projects, The 25 Year Old Divorcée probably wouldn't be considered a good example of information to make public. I blogged about my "divorce" and shared stories that were similar to those on Sex and the City. But I honestly have no problem with sharing that content. I would not have gone through the trouble of putting that blog together if I did. In fact, I would argue the work involved in bringing that project to life is a perfect example of my skills. It shows writing samples, videos featuring my speaking and presentation skills, my graphic/web design work, some motion graphics, video editing, and branding skills. All the type of work I do on a daily basis.
Make sure the content you create shows your personality but also speaks to your skills and abilities.

Go Forth and Socialize

I hope this has added some value to the discussion. I would love to hear how you manage social media and what you think about this topic. How do you manage to stay social online without damaging your personal brand?

Script Frenzy!

For the month of April, I put away the Create365 challenge to work on the Script Frenzy challenge. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's just like Nanowrimo, which challenges you to write a novel in 30 days. In script frenzy, you write a 100 page screenplay in 30 days. That's about 3 pages a day. Fairly simple, right?
There's a feature I've been dying to write and this was a good reason to do it. The feature is titled Plastic Saints and it's a religious satire about a guy who fakes religious apparitions and holds fake church ceremonies to raise money for his mother's cancer treatment.
I had a very basic outline and I just needed to flesh it out some more. I got really busy with God knows what at the end of March and didn't get a chance to complete my outline. That set me off to a bad start. With only the first act outlined, I set into the challenge. I figured I'd finish writing my outline the first weekend. April started off as a busy social month and I fell behind quickly. That first weekend was spent catching up and not completing the outline. My new plan was to outline in chunks as I caught up with writing.
Someone really needed to tell me this was a terrible idea. I'm also very much a structured outliner. I pretty much write treatments as outlines. Since I didn't devote enough time to it, I was working from a step outline, which sent me all sorts of crazy directions.
Aside from social obligations, I have to admit that part of the problem with writing became the state of my personal life. My relationship of almost 5 years began to fall apart, not because of my screenwriting, and the stress often made it difficult to focus on this world I was creating. All that ended the last week of April, where I had finally caught up and only needed to write 4 pages per day to complete the script on time. Unfortunately, I was in no emotional or mental state to continue.
It's terrible and I hate feeling like I'm blaming it on the break up, but it's definitely a factor. I was very sad to not be able to say I finished and "won" Script Frenzy. I'm definitely going to be trying again next year. And just because I didn't finish on time, doesn't mean the script won't get finished. I'm going to take some time and complete the outline. The good thing is, in writing the screenplay I began to notice things that needed to be fleshed out more and rewritten. If you were wondering, I got to page 75 so I'm not far off at all.
I'm really excited about continuing the screenplay and I hope I can set an end of August deadline. Be sure to watch this blog and follow me on Twitter to hear how that goes!

Daily 365 - Second Month

My first month of daily 15 minute designs was certainly interesting. Unfortunately, the second month was just as difficult to keep up with! The first and second month kind of blended together with Heaven For Betsy posters, which we saw an example of in my last post.

A conversation with my friend Josh about my dog Tripp having his own reality show inspired me to design a poster ad. I think it's extremely cute and I had every intention of taking some daily365 time to shoot a pilot. That failed to materialize but I'm still determined to get it done this month! I'll probably have to devote a full week's daily365 time to it. One day to brainstorm and outline (it's reality! who needs a script?), another couple of days to shoot, and another day or two to edit. I promise it will happen!

Maybe it was the pink in the "That Skinny Dog" poster that put me in the mood to design something for Valentine's Day. I really intended to get more comfortable with Illustrator and create some art but I did this in Photoshop and it's pretty similar to some of my previous Mail Art.

In my first month, I had some intentions of creating pieces for a blog Jake and I are supposed to be writing about the "work" we've put into our first home. All I did was design a logo but this month I created a background and then a header. It's looking pretty good. Hopefully I'll get a couple of more things done for it this month and the Wishing For Wisteria blog will finally look unique and hopefully content will soon come.

An afternoon spent listening to a presentation on accessibility in PowerPoint, inspired me to create some artwork. It looks a little cheesy, which I meant for it to be, but I still can't help but feel like if I were more comfortable with Illustrator I could have made something a little more technically impressive. Anyway, the idea was that using 3-D charts and graphs in PowerPoint confuses people and can be difficult to understand. 3-D is bad!

If you're following my posts on Twitter, you'll notice there were some black out dates between designs. Yes, partly because I've been bad about keeping up, but partly because I wrote a few posts for the Austinist. Yes, I would count the time spent writing as my daily365 time since I only have a few hours a day to create anyway. (You can check out all my Austinist articles here.) After writing one article about a gay hate crime committed here in Austin, I decided to design a poster advertising the march that was organized to show support for the victims. The march was mostly being advertised, it seems, through Facebook and there were no real marketing materials to speak of. In retrospect, I probably should have offered the poster rather than only posting it to my twitterfeed. I had originally thought of creating something more socialist looking, but with only 15 minutes and my weak illustrating skills, I decided to go with something a little more modern and powerful. I also opted to stay away from rainbows and peace symbols but rather show strength in the idea of peace and unity through the color scheme and typography and some dove icons. I really wanted to emphasize the idea of marching against hate (as in the title of the march) rather than it being some sort of gay pride march, which I felt would attract a more limited audience. I'm pleased with the poster but at the same time it may look a little too modern and maybe more club scene oriented rather than social justice.

There may not be many designs but February was actually a busy month! And there was quite a bit of writing involved on the days where designs didn't happen. I'll write a post on this soon but be prepared for some film action happening! I hope at least. I have to admit I've fallen behind on the daily365 in March but if you follow me on Twitter, I'll let you know what I'm up to!

Daily 365 - First Month

So after trying Smashing Magazine's suggestion of designing something every day in 15 minutes, I have to admit keeping up is hard. Oh, but it's just 15 minutes! Yes, I know. And finding those 15 minutes can be difficult. To refresh your memory if you can't go back one post, I decided to work on this only on week days. I haven't done great. There was quite a bit of traveling that went on this month that interrupted my work and it would take me a while to get back on track.
I intended to start off with doing Illustrator tutorials since that program is definitely one of my weak spots. The first I did came from Verlee's blog and showed how to use the paste and transform tool to create spirograph artwork. I experimented with the techniques for the next 2 designs.

I finished the week by experimenting with a sketch tutorial. These were extremely easy and definitely showed me some things I didn't even know were possible in Illustrator.

I continued with different tutorials that used similar techniques. One tutorial went horribly wrong. I followed as instructed and somehow came up with something horrendous.

I decided to use the 15 minutes to be productive. Jake and I had plans to blog about our first home experience but it has happened much so far. The current template of the blog is something I found online for free but intended to create a personal one. I created this logo with the intention of completing the rest of the design in steps.

And just like that blog, I completely neglected to continue. Instead I was inspired to create some posters for Ryan and Grace's band Heaven for Betsy. I created a full 5 day series of these. They're not all great but I think a couple are quite nice.

My main goal for this next month is to continue designing pieces for the Wishing for Wisteria blog. Hopefully I won't abandon the project. February has already been so busy and I can't believe the month is nearly half way over! Needless to say, I have missed a few designs but usually with good reason. I'll try to be better at keeping up and blog more completely about the designs more often.
And of course, you can keep up with the designs yourself by following me on Twitter.

Hello 2010

It's New Year's Day and I have to be honest, 2009 went by way too quickly. My life really changed quite a bit. I bought a house and I retired from retail.
2010 is going to be even bigger. That is my resolution if I were to say I'm making one. This year I'm really going to throw myself into various projects. I know I've made that statement before. To finish scripts, to work more, etc. It's happening this year and I believe I've done a good job getting into that trajectory.
Smashing Magazine had a great post about designing something every day in just 15 minutes. This is a great idea and something I plan on doing in 2010. Of course I don't have as much free time as I would like, so I'm going to make some adjustments to my efforts. I'll try to design something only on weekdays and post it to my Twitter account. Ideally, I would like to choose a theme or idea for every week to explore and maybe have a wrap up blog post when that collection is done. I'm extremely excited and I think it'll be great at helping me improve my graphic design skills.
It's also been a long while since I worked on any film projects, which is definitely my true passion, and that's going to change this year. Austin and I have already begun working on a great short film, which I'll share more about as it develops. And as long as I can keep from getting fired, I hope to shoot a couple of music videos for Ryan and Grace's band Heaven for Betsy. There will also be a continuation of my as of yet untitled video blog. Check out the Sea Monkeys video on Facebook. I'll be shooting some more episodes of that soon, which I think I'll premiere first on Facebook and then later dedicate a channel on my YouTube page to.
I'm really pumped about all these projects and I hope I can keep up the momentum. Definitely watch this space.

KINL/KEPS Twitter Account

My good friend Lela (follow her on Twitter!) works at a radio station in my hometown, Eagle Pass, TX and has been breaking new ground tweeting away. Without her news tweets, I would have no idea what is happening in the old hood. I offered to help her out by designing a new Twitter icon and background.

I started with the icon. It needed to identify both radio stations, KINL (the English language station) and KEPS (the Spanish language AM station). She had been using clip art of an eagle as their icon before. Which fit well with the city being Eagle Pass but many followers kept confusing it as being associated with one of the high schools which has an eagle as its mascot. Staying away from using an eagle as the icon was important. I looked around at other radio stations, which mostly have cheesy and loud looking logos that they also use as their Twitter icons. I didn't know if KINL/KEPS has a logo but I wanted to create something new anyway and I'm much more a fan of minimal typographic logos. I wanted something that would look traditional and classic but could bridge into a modern means of communication. NPR's logo seems pretty classic and modern to me plus it's news based and I thought it was something to aspire to. I sketched some icons and sent Lela some samples. The icon we settled on looks pretty modern and glossy but traditional with Georgia as its font.


The original color scheme of their Twitter page was gray and red. Which I decided to continue with, especially after Lela chose the red icon. I didn't want to repeat the use of the icon in the background since it's not their logo but I wanted it to match with the same font and color. I looked at several other news Twitter pages and decided on staying as minimal as possible. I also wanted to incorporate the playfulness of the medium and I thought it would be clever to include an eagle silhouette with a talk bubble as is used on many sites as a Twitter icon. Even though I wanted to stay away from using an eagle as the main icon, I felt it was important to include one since the eagle is heavily identified with Eagle Pass. I also wanted to play with how the background appears on different screen resolutions. The CSS code for Twitter can't be manipulated and the main Twitter feed will always be centered, which can mess up the layout. To address this, I kept the radio station info on the left side of the screen set to be visible on smaller resolutions so everyone knows what they are looking at. Then I added some extras to the right side of the screen for larger resolutions. I wanted to reinforce the nature of this particular Twitter feed and decided to include the phrases "The beat on the block." "The word on the street." "We tweet the deets." It's cute and fun and gives the news a little more personality.


I had a lot of fun working on this project and hopefully I'll find some other opportunities to help shape social marketing for others. Check out KINL/KEPS News on Twitter.

Monster Mash Birthday Bash v3.0

Okay the title is misleading as one won't happen this year. :(
But via Jake on Facebook:

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

I love it!
P.S. I'm 25 today, holy crap!