Poetry Friday – Gratitude

I discovered this on a scratch piece of paper tucked in an old journal when I was unpacking. Confession: I am a SERIAL journal-starter. Just something about all the potential of those fresh, clean pages.

If it wasn’t for you,
Grace would still be just a twinkle in the universe.

If it wasn’t for you,
Jack would never have left the peace of the river.

If it wasn’t for you,
I would be a timid voice, continuing to whisper to the darkness.

You give my dreams a terrestrial body.
You give my restless spirit a soft place to land.
You inspire and delight with courage and compassion.

Poetry Friday

On today’s Poetry Friday, I’m featuring a favorite I discovered in the
It’s All Good anthology I picked up at BookPeople a few years ago. Enjoy.

These Streets They Are At Ends
by Kelley Davidson

hide your bad habits
in your parents’ china cabinets
because nothing can be wrong with you
because then something
is wrong with them

Are you ready to get social?

Another handy (and free!) tool I learned about this week is Tweetmeme. (I know … where have I been?)

This is a service that aggregates all the popular links on Twitter. So you can get a good pulse of trending topics. And it’s not weighted like Digg.

Are you ready for the really cool part? They make available a button you can put on your site to enable your readers to easily retweet your posting, article, etc.

Why is that cool? Because even if you aren’t ready to create new content online through a blog or microsite, you can enable your readers to share your existing content.

You can also create a similar button to allow users to share your content on Facebook.

Baby steps, people.

Choose your weapon!

This afternoon, I attended an Austin American Marketing Association luncheon where Guy Kawasaki shared a load of tips on how to use Twitter as a marketing Weapon. That’s right, it’s not just about what’s for dinner! (Actually it never was … not really, but that’s a different post.)

Here are the notes I took, based on Guy’s outline.

• Monitor
  Search topics, your company name, your competition, your name. Find out what people are saying about the topics, products and companies your care about … real time. This is powerful.

  You can also run searches on specific accounts. For instance, you can search “from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares” to see all tweets from or two a specific twitter account. Pretty cool.

• Engage
  Use twitter to engage your customers. This means have a conversation and, remember, a good conversation is not all about you. Virgin America is a great example of how to do this right.

  What it takes: assign some the responsibility of monitoring all tweets about your company or division, or division’s products and let them respond, engage and redirect to the best resources. You get the idea.

• Sell
  Probably a no-brainer, but it’s important to embrace Twitter as a marketing tool. Because it is. And if you aren’t in this to sell products or services and make some money, what are you doing this for? The Dell Outlet can immediately offload 100 computers thanks to their 1 million + followers. A Korean BBQ Taco Truck in California uses Twitter to announce where they will be next and usually arrives to find 50-100 customers waiting for them.

  So start building your followers and taking advantage of their buying power. Individual accounts are great for the human touch but you should probably also have a “corporate” account. That also provides stability for the account name when individuals move on to other assignments.

• Support
  Comcast is a great example of how to provide customer service via Twitter. Check out his account and see how he has personalized it even though his account name is “comcastcares.” All about the human touch.

• Prospect
  You can use Twitter to search for people who are interested in your industry or products. Alltop is a site that aggregates articles and tweets around topics. Great free resource.

  You can even do advanced searches on Twitter. Again … good, free marketing research.

  You can search twitter for people tweeting a specific topic, like photography, near a specific zip code (good tool for sales!). Or search for people using Twitter who use the term “photography” in their title. Or in their bio.

• Getting more followers
  To make Twitter an effective marketing tool, you need to build a following. Building your followers is all about finding and sharing good content. Remember, it’s a conversation. Guy’s notes have more links to content sources, tools to auto tweet, analytics. Please check them out. One of my favorites isTwitHawk which will allow you to keep a Twitter search up and allow you to set up tweets in response. Important to set it to manual not “automatic” as you wouldn’t want to tweet a “thank you” to someone who tweeted “Your company sucks.” But these are very handy tools to automate some searches and responses, enabling marketers to have a human touch with these high-tech tools.

• Additional resources:
  Twitter tips and tools
  Social media tips and tools
  Goomzee
  SXSW Interactive … every year, SXSW brings the experts to us (and by “us,” I mean those of us lucky enough to live and work in Austin). An entire week of panels, workshops and discussions around social media and how to use it. Attend, discuss, engage, share … get on it.

And thank you, Guy Kawasaki, for sharing your expertise, passion and tips!

Grace in Rocks

I have a wonderful collection of heart-shaped rocks. Some are big, some are tiny, some are rough, some are smooth, some are dirty, but all are shaped like a heart … you just have to look closer at some to see it.

Grace started this collection the summer before she began kindergarten. She found the first one on the banks of the Frio River during a family vacation.

Once kindergarten started, she made it a point to look for heart-shaped rocks during recess and tucked them away in a pocket or her backpack until she could present the treasure to me at home. They have a special meaning for me. They represent her love and her thoughtfulness and, for me, they are an earthly representation of God’s grace.

When my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer the following summer, we gave one of the hearts to him. I helped Grace write a note that we tied to the heart. That rock served as a reminder of our love as my father underwent two months of radiation treatments. In our own thanksgiving for God’s grace we see at work in our own lives, we wanted to share that good news and that message of hope and love with Pawpaw.

My daughter’s gift of heart-shaped rocks has been an enduring reminder to me of God’s own grace poured down daily. The good news is that upon receiving that grace we are all transformed. We become whole and holy. God’s grace extends through us and our actions, continuing to transform and heal a broken world.