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Thank you for visiting my blog.

As I take my blogging to the next level, I've made the switch to WordPress! You can find my new posts here: www.kateworldwide.com.

I hope you'll follow me to my new blog and continue the conversation.

#FollowFriday - Public Ethnography as Innovative Learning

In the spirit of Twitter’s Follow Friday, but taking a page from Spin Sucks’ more thoughtful approach, I offer to you each week one communications blog, Twitter account, or website that offers great content. 

Term papers.

You remember them—those time-sucking exercises in futility that, once graded, gather dust in your professor’s hard drive or your bookshelf.

A professor at Royal Roads University is turning that model of academia on its head.

Communication / PR graduates, success is simple.

Photo by Flickr user m00by, used under Creative Commons license

Listen, I know. Every blog you read is shouting at you about how to interview, what to say on your resume, and the dos and don'ts of using social media when you're looking for a job.

It's like open season on recent graduates out there.

So I'll keep it simple. There's just one thing I want you to keep in mind as you launch your career in communications, and it's this:

Follow Friday: Spin Sucks

Twitter’s Follow Friday (#FF on Twitter) is a great idea – in concept.

In reality, I’m not going to follow someone unless you give me a compelling reason to, an approach Gini Dietrich also prefers. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see that I usually recommend just one person each #FF and I’ll tell you why I like them.

That way, you can decide if you might like to follow them too.

The “millennial generation” is a red herring

“Generation Y, also referred to as Millennials, and Generation Z represent those individuals born in the late 1970s or the early 1980s to the early 2000s.”

This quote, from a recent blog post by prominent author Brian Solis, stopped me in my tracks.

I’m not quite sure when the “millennial” generation oozed backwards to eat up my demographic, but I am quite certain that I spent most of my life as a Gen X-er. A latch-key kid.

Reading further into Brian’s post, his statements about Millenials reinforce that I don’t belong. I’m certainly not a digital native.

In fact, I distinctly remember going to my friend’s house in Grade 12 so that we could use “e-mail.” They were one of about 10 families in town that had the internet. I remember learning to code HTML before you could use background images. That’s right, kids, once upon a time every website was black text on a grey background.

Share great content, and be authentic: How to build a Twitter following in 6 steps [curating series, part 3]

There’s an entire industry developing around teaching people to use social media effectively. 

But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Just between you and me. It turns out that underneath it all, social media is exactly like the “real world.”

People want to know you like them. And, just like your boss at work, Twitter users will like you if you prove you know what you’re doing and make yourself useful.

Over the past two months, I’ve been tracking my curation activities as part of a research project focused on curating content to build a Twitter following.

Curate, v., to “select, organize, and present (suitable content, typically for online or computational use), using professional or expert knowledge.” Oxford Dictionary

I’ve previously shared why you should curate a collection of RSS feeds related to your profession and how to find those RSS feeds; this post is about the “presenting” part of curating.

It’s simple. Just 6 steps.

Money’s overrated; ducks are where it’s at: What's your definition of success?

Somehow, I have no photos of the ducks, but
our neighbourhood deer also make me happy.

The night my daughter was born, I sat in the hospital bed holding her, crying because she was crying and because I’d run out of ideas on how to soothe her. (And, lets face it, because the exhaustion and hormonal insanity of childbirth didn’t exactly enhance my zen.) The two of us were all alone - Foothills Hospital in Calgary does not allow overnight visitors in the maternity ward – and, looking at her tiny blue eyes, I realised that we were going to be moving back to the Maritimes.