Live Blog! Leveraging Social Media with Beth Kanter

Earlier today you might have seen some actual live blogging happening on this page, unfortunately that was a little error on my part. I mis posted on my page what was meant for Theatre Bay Area's Chatterbox. But I encourage everyone to go over to that site and take a look at it. Over the next few days it will be honed and made pretty, I've never done the live blogging before so it's going to need some clean up.

What was I blogging? If you are an arts organization, artist, non-profit, or anyone who needs to really understand how social media works and what it can do for community building I recommend you check out Beth Kanter and her Leveraging Social Media workshops and her book:

The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change. Through my intern work with Theatre Bay Area, I landed a job putting together a report on the workshop she is doing through Theatre Bay Area and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Part of doing that report is live blogging the first workshop.

It was an odd position to be in. I've never live blogged before, and have, in fact, started to take a step back from my internet presence. I thought to myself, if the representation of myself that comes up on Google search is a type of mirror, what would I see when I looked into it. Unfocused. I'm all over the place, but not in a good way. It's hard to tell what I do or why. My writing that is up on the web doesn't even feel like a good representation of me. I started to wonder how that would affect my ability to get jobs as a writer. And this was the biggest point in my web presence. I'm a writer and I need to represent myself as such. What does that mean?

The spectrum seems to go from putting everything I write at all up on the web and make it free for everyone to have. "Here I am, this is me...take it all!" Then there is the other side which seems to be the bare minimum. No on line "friends" or followers. Some information, and mostly that's just an email contact.

I think I'm still trying to figure this out. Mean while, I've stopped "Tweeting", and I pulled back on Facebook a lot. I started to write the whole "web thing" off as a fad that I didn't really need to be a part of. This despite the fact that this machine is where I get most of my news, information, correspondence, and entertainment. A dumb fad.

After being at this workshop, I got the feeling that probably the truth is me and the internet were never really introduced properly. As an artist and producer, I think I need to take a step back and re-evaluate my relationship and maybe find a new way in. My first step: Get over the fact that I hate the "word" BLOG. Yuck. I still hate it. It sounds like something to do when your food isn't properly digested. But, it turns out it's not going away and if you call it anything else...no one knows what you are talking about.

Also, when I had to live blog, tweet, and interact with fans on Facebook ALL AT THE SAME TIME, I thought "Sure, why not. It can't be that hard." Turns out...it is. And, I'm at an event to teach me how best to do this and I'm not sure I'm pulling it off. It was a great learning experience. And it felt good to write again.

So, here I go again! Hello internet, it's good to see you!