MediaRocket

Today was one of those wonderfully productive days. I walked my friends’ adorable dog, I went to Tabata class at my gym (what my roommates’ boyfriend later told me was just another word for interval training), which kicked my ass. I had high hopes to do my laundry.

Until my phone sh** the bed.

After force-closing my Instagram just about 50 times (goodbye cute pictures of friends’ dog), the screen on my Sprint-provided Android Optimus came up black with the noxious neon green menu below:

Android system recovery <3e>

Android system recovery utility

reboot system now

apply sdcard:update.zip

wipe data/factory reset

wipe cache partition

Having tried all the menu buttons at the base of the device with no luck, I gave up and decided to go to my local Sprint store, where, of course, they told me at 3:02 that their tech department closes at 3 on Sundays. I’m not too embarrassed to say that on a 90-degree day, my disposition began to resemble that of my phone - lifeless and stubborn about it. Though I’d probably be hard-pressed to find a phone on the verge of angry tears. I spent the next hour trudging, and sweating profusely, around downtown Brooklyn in search of other Sprint stores, which - duh - I had no real way of locating. 

Fast-forward to my apartment an hour later: I used Google Voice to call my parents and let them know that I was not, in fact, dead in a ditch somewhere, while my phone rang itself into oblivion (when it comes to Russian parents, it’s understood that this is their immediate assumption when their child, of 26 years, doesn’t answer their phone.) 

Also, way to go Google Voice. Free. Stress-free. And instantly gratifying in a world of phone-less pandemonium. 

Once again, Google comes through though. I search for the “Android system recovery <3e>” message and find several message boards explaining that you have to navigate through the options provided and the one with the best results is the “wipe data/factory” reset. My first thought was, “Sprint, I will f**cking kill you for making me lose ALL my phone numbers, just so I can stretch this phone’s life another 4 months and get an iPhone for $200 instead of $600.” My second, and less homicidal thought was, “oh wait, this post also says you can retrieve all your phone numbers by syncing your gmail accounts again.” 

Relieved, I reset and rebooted my system, synced my gmail, and got this thing back to working order!

And now I’m off to frolic in my air conditioned bedroom, while my Optimus makes the appropriate new system adjustments.

XO

Sometimes, I’m a media maven, a rocket, you might say, coursing through the cosmos with confidence and momentum. Other times, I’m just a frustrated girl, stuck at work until 8p.m., cursing the flawed interface and functionality of Tweetdeck.

The following is less of a wishlist and more of a desperate plea for absolutely necessary usability fixes from Tweetdeck:

1) Ok, not for nothing, but the past is the past. I’d like to keep it that way. For some reason, Tweetdeck is intent on bringing back my old tweets like re-animated zombies avenging the expiration of their relevance. All of a sudden, my scheduled tweets column is clogged with old tweets from last month, dated a month ago. Fru-STRAY-TING.

2) The interface has GOT to quit freezing up. Peep this: I spot a wonderful tweet from one of the fantastic literary minds on my Follow list, and try to reply to or retweet, clicking on the little arrow button over and over .. and over again, yielding NO response. Then, I reload Tweetdeck and the tweet is already gone, washed away by hundreds of new ones, never to be seen again. It’s enough to drive you to the brink of insanity. Please Tweetdeck, help me keep my cool. People are annoying enough to work with. My technology can’t fail me.

3) Another cardinal flaw - scheduled tweets NOT posting. Oh, what’s that you say, that’s the point of Tweetdeck? To miraculously eject your tweets into the Twitter-verse, one by one, according to a scrupulously planned schedule? No way. Yeah. I said it. Come at me Tweet-bro.

4) Answer me this, desktop application: Why won’t you let me post identical tweets?! I swear, sometimes I feel like Big Brother is watching. I understand that my followers’ posting streams should not be clogged with duplicate promotion tweets, but my job is not to do that. My job is to provide nourishing, intriguing conversation, and SOMETIMES, YES SOMETIMES, I will even give away free stuff! And, when I do that, I’d like to be able to schedule to same giveaway tweet several times, OVER A PERIOD OF A FEW WEEKS.

5) The accidental odd shifting of the columns into some negative space in the interface where I can see either half of the column lengthwise, or none of the column at all (with no way to reverse this) has got to stop. It’s worse than a bad acid trip. At least the acid trip is intentional.

6) There’s more, but I’ll just say one additional thing. Can you pleeeeaase pleeaaaase make it so that the scheduled tweet column doesn’t scroll all the way to the top after you schedule a new tweet or delete a scheduled tweet? For branding and promo people like me, the scheduled tweets list is loooooooooong, so to have to scroll through it to get right back to a particular spot if you are deleting a bunch of tweets from that particular moment in time, is frankly a waste of time.

I recently emailed this information to one of my clients. Simple? Maybe. Useful for beginners? I’ll pretend, since this took me the better part of an hour to draft.

TWITTER LISTS

1. Twitter lists are mostly for you to be able to view a stream of tweets from a particular group of people (instead of a firehose of tweets from everyone you follow), rather than being a tool with which to reach out to those people. This can be useful though because it would be easier for you to respond to booksellers/bloggers if you can focus in on their tweets. They will also see that you have added them to your list, titled either Booksellers, Bookstores, etc., whatever descriptive name you want to give it.
2. The way to add someone is by clicking on their username and clicking the down arrow, where the second option in the dashboard will be Add/Remove from lists. It then gives you a choice of lists that you have created or the option to simultaneously create a new list and add them to it.
3. Another great thing about lists is that the link is shareable for the entire list. You can take advantage of that and subscribe to entire lists of booksellers, etc. You can just go to the main page of an account and on the left, under Favorites, you’ll see Lists. You can share lists with people that way, or you can just send them a link.
4. The maximum number of people you can add to any given list is 500.

Recently thrust into the role of a social media guru at an established corporation, I’ve struggled to understand and apply a skill that doesn’t come naturally to me. Sure, there are basic rules and best practices (and believe me, even those, simple as they are, can be arduous to adhere to on a constant basis), but most of the action seems to happen in some kind of cognitive internet space where the correct synapse just happens to fire at a serendipitous moment in time, and suddenly, everyone in the world knows about The Honeybadger. We are forever trying to recreate this. 

I love media, new media, digital media, whatever you want to call it. I can’t get enough of the tech blogs, startups, beta trials. My leisure interests and professional undertakings have been merged. 

Some people write books on the topic. Some people make a seemingly innocent video. Others study the patterns of what makes things social and more importantly, what makes them shareable, noticeable, and worthwhile others’ time.

I’ll try to make sense out of the everyday tasks I’m responsible for, though not without tangent or error.