#also open to constructive criticism. hashtag living and learning

[s0dabeach]

i did a thing. come get y'all juice

[navk]

An Open Letter to the Reader

Hello, lovely human. It’s me, Naveed - also known via the internet as Nav K. Actually, there’s a lot of people in the real world that still refer to me as Nav K. I always find that oddly amusing, it’s something that just stuck with people. I never thought it would, but it did, and that wasn’t even ever the intention. 

This Tumblr blog was born in 2010, about either a month before or into my university career. That would make it about 9 years old now. Almost a decade. There’s so much here that documents these past 9 years. A lot of personal struggle, world events, politics, rants, debates, sadness, joy, 5am existential crises. 

The purpose of this blog was just to write and have a place to put them. I never had any real intentions other than that. But over time, it grew to be so much more than that. It grew to be a part of a larger community of people, worldwide, that somehow became convinced to strap in and come along for the journey. And that - that by far, is incredible. 

I have no idea how my readership and fpollowercount almost reached 8000 or so. I never really kept track, and why would I? I had no idea what I was doing. It was organic. It was fun. It wasn’t work. It was just a kid in university writing his heart out. Things got gritty. Things got tough. I wrote about love. I wrote about sadness. I wrote about family, friends, and all the things that were happening in the world that I felt so passionately about. 

I always wanted to change the world. But somewhere along the way, I thought to myself that maybe the world as a whole is too big for me to change all at once. Maybe it would be a gradual thing. Maybe, just maybe, I could change one person’s life. Maybe I could impact them in such a way that it would inspire them to do the same for someone else, and so on and so forth. 

But I had no real idea as to how I would ever achieve that. And I never thought to myself that writing would be it. But maybe I’ve been along that very path all along without knowing it. 

Disclaimer, I say maybe a lot. Maybe and perhaps and absolutely. Those are my words. They are so powerful to me, and I love them. 

So people often ask me what inspires me to write. It’s such a simple but complicated question with so many variations of answers. But truly, the most honest answer I can ever give you is that I write because it saved my life. I write because it helped me live another day, helped me see through things I otherwise thought I couldn’t. It helped me survive through the mess of this world, and in a large part, shaped the greater part of who I am today. 

One of my personal goals have always been to achieve the best version of myself possible. Writing has enabled me to be introspective enough and vulnerable enough to identify what I need to one day get there. And I’m still working at it. I know I’ll never achieve it, but the best I can do is come close. 

When I started this blog to share my writing, I was nobody. Actually, I’m still nobody. I never considered myself a writer. I still cringe at the thought of calling myself that. Why? Because I simply don’t think I’ve earned it. I’ve just told myself throughout my life that I’m just a guy who writes. But doesn’t that make you a writer? I don’t know. Maybe it does, maybe not. 

I chose to share my writing as a leap of faith. It was my belief all along that I was just sending it off into the void, never to really achieve anything from it at all. Like a vessel launched into the stars, drifting cautiously towards some distant abyss. But what began happening over the years astonished me. When I think back to it now, it still leaves me in disbelief. 

What happened? 

You happened. You, who maybe happens to be reading this. You, who supported me. You, who shared my writing. You, who shared with me how in awe you were by my words. You, who messaged me privately and shared with me the emotions it evoked in you. You, who provided me with feedback. You, who gave me constructive criticism. You, who cheered me on silently. You, who sent me love and kindness and support and prayers. You, who were so kind to purchase my work and encourage me to produce more. 

You, who saw something in me that I failed to see in myself all those years. I was so grateful to you then, but I never quite allowed myself to accept your kindness. To truly believe in it. It was so hard for me. It’s still hard for me. But I’m learning to be gentler with myself. It’s that introspection that my writing has afforded me that has allowed me to realize how amazing this platform has been for me and despite its waning numbers and inevitable maturity, I am still so, so grateful. 

Sharing my work has never been an easy feat. In all honesty, I hardly ever shared everything I wrote. But then I started sharing less, and less, and less, to the point where I didn’t quite feel okay with sharing anymore. 

I actually attributed a lot of reasons to this, such as the bastardization of writing, the rise of the “instapoet” trend, the “hashtag” poetry, the tweet poems, all that and what not. But if I’m truly being honest, I stopped sharing because I didn’t feel good about the writing, and that was more of a reflection of how I felt about myself for some time. I wrote less, and then I wrote nothing at all. I’d be happy to get a meaningful sentence out on some days, but even those days were rare. 

I couldn’t write. I was stuck. I didn’t seek help. I left it. I left it alone in hopes that it would be there for me. When you’ve written for as long as I have, I would tell myself, it must be like driving - it’s muscle memory. It just comes back. 

But it doesn’t just come back. Nothing is ever that simple. It takes work and effort. And the courage to be vulnerable - with myself - which I had lost somewhere along the way. 

What became of Nav K, the writer, the accidental brand of sorts, was somewhat of a miracle in my own eyes. The fact that this platform has shown so much love and support is, to me, rare and incredible, and perhaps in some ways undeserved, but that’s just me being hard on myself. But you showed your love by elevating my work and having it seen, read, shared, loved by the count of “notes” - ranging from a few hundred to over 160,000. I mean, shit. Thank you. 

What’s the point in all this vivid reflection, you ask?

Well, it so happens that I’m falling (hopefully gracefully) into the tail end of my twenties. Soon, I’ll be 30. And sometime before I fade to dust (okay, I’m being dramatic, but maybe I’m not), I want to be able to really be able to leave something behind in this world that I’m proud of. 

That was the purpose of publishing my own work. It all began with Cheap Therapy in May 2012. I don’t love that book. In fact, I kind of hate it. But so many of you loved it for it’s raw honesty. I’ve had messages from people from all over the planet telling me how much it spoke their truth, that it voiced things that they felt but could not say. 

There was this one instance that someone messaged me saying that they had been reading it in one of their university classes at some point, just casually on their own. Their professor caught a glimpse and asked to see it, read a page or two, and told her that it was actually really good! 

DUDE. I was barely 21 when I wrote that. I was still, technically, an adolescent (in terms of psychological development). But I never let that get to my head. I studied English literature in my undergrad in hopes to become an English teacher (I did, but the market for teachers sucks so much!) and I tried so hard to maintain a sense of honesty and compassion and not even let a literary education get to my head. I just wanted to be real. Always. 

But I never quite felt accomplished. So I self published again. And again. And again. And … yeah, you get what I mean. In total, I self-published about 14 books. Yes, 14. And you’ll never really know or find them all anywhere because there’s a bunch under my name and another bunch under pseudonyms and heteronyms. Yes, I did that. Why? Because I wanted to write so badly that I didn’t just want to be a great writer, I wanted to be 5 great writers. Where am I on that counter? Probably still at 0, because I’m still far from great. 

But then I received other messages too, about how my work has inspired others to write. How it inspired you. How it saved you. How it allowed you to survive. How it allowed you to see yourself out of a dark place. How it allowed you to feel. How it gave you hope. How it made you appreciate the world. How it made you want to love again. How it made you see things differently. 

Not too long ago, I received a random private message on social media from someone (who I obviously won’t name) who told me that they were so inspired by my writing that they decided to pursue it as a career, and that they had just completed their master’s degree in journalism. 

I was in awe, and even that is an understatement. I mean, I did that?! I inspired you? HOW? 

So in a way, I suppose I did change the world, or at least small parts of it. I impacted you as individuals, and I pray that you strive to do the same for someone else. That you seek to enrich and inspire and keep doing good. And to keep striving to be a better version of yourself. And no matter what, never stop creating. 

And that’s what made me realize that I should perhaps take my own advice. 

From my self-perceived worst (Cheap Therapy, 2012) to my best (By Bodies of Water, 2014), I feel as though I still have so much to give to you and this world. I feel like I’ve just begun even though it so often feels otherwise. But that’s the struggle, that’s the process, and that in itself is beautiful in its own way. By Bodies of Water was 5 years ago, and today, it just doesn’t hold up in my eyes as the best representation of who I am and the work that I am capable of producing (most of which I have not shared anywhere, period). 

I’ve never really been good at self-promoting or talking about myself. I’m the worst at it and cringe every time I try. But I realize now, more than ever, that I need your support. That I can’t create work without you. Because this work is for you as much as it is for me. 

In the past, whomever I have utilized an illustrator or designer, I have always tried to pay them for their contribution. Admittedly, this has been incredibly difficult for me because I never really put my work out with the intention of making lots of money from it. In fact, using a platform like Amazon, which I currently still use for self-publishing, takes a significant cut from any sales proceeds because it’s hosted and managed by such an established platform. So, I actually have never been able to have a budget for my books and any work I commission from others by way of illustration or design comes out of my own pocket with little to no hopes of ever really making it back in a sensible way. Yeah, I know it sounds awful, like why would anyone do that, but I did it for the love of the craft. In fact, putting work out with illustrations has resulted in net losses every time, and that’s further driven by the fact that I don’t promote my work. 

Ideally, I would love nothing more than for a publishing deal that remedies these aches and pains fo self-publishing. That’s the dream. That’s the ultimate mark for me, but I have no idea if that is ever going to be a reality. Some dreams stay dreams. But I really can’t let that stand in the way of creating my own mark on this world. 

If you still have love for me or my craft (well, hopefully both, it’s kind of a package deal, ya know?), then I ask for your support. I ask for you to help share my work, to help contribute to sharing the love and the joy you feel and have felt. 

My publicly posted work can all be found under a single hashtag and contains all 9 years of works posted. Find them here: https://navk.tumblr.com/tagged/navk

If you would like to support my work and help me produce more and pay other artists that I employ and help cover related costs, please consider some of the options below. I would love for you to have something of mine in return, and there is no better way that I can personally think of than to offer you my actual work! 

If you would like to contribute by purchasing my work, you can find physical/digital versions here: https://www.naveedk.com/books

You don’t have to spend anything if you don’t want to. I still believe that somethings in life should be free. I have PDF copies of some works available online for free, or you can contribute whatever amount you choose. Some have a nominal fee attached, some are up to you. Anything helps. You can find them here: https://payhip.com/navk

Pay what you want digital package (500 pages of work /5 books and 1 sample), here: https://www.naveedk.com/downloads

Personalized Signed copies of By Bodies of Water, here: https://www.naveedk.com/signed/water 

If you are feeling generous and would like to simply donate, you can do so here: https://www.paypal.me/navk

- 

As always I am so eternally grateful. Thank you for joining me on this journey. I hope you choose to stay for the ride, because we’re just getting started. 

Find me on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_navk/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_navk

Web: https://www.naveedk.com

Love, 

- Nav K

[newstfionline]

I Took ‘Adulting Classes’ for Millennials

Andrew Zaleski, CityLab, Oct 29, 2018

On the eve of my wife’s 30th birthday--a milestone I, too, will soon hit--she posed a troubling question: Are we adults yet?

We certainly feel that way: We hold our own jobs, pay our own rent, cover our own bills, drive our own cars. Our credit is in order. But we don’t yet own a house and have no children--two markers commonly associated with fully-fledged adulthood (and two markers that both our sets of parents had reached well before they turned 30). And there are other gaps in our maturity: I don’t buy napkins or know how to golf; up until last year, I didn’t know how to change the oil in my car’s engine. Thankfully, last year we managed to throw a dinner party, our first, without burning the pork roast.

A vague anxiety over these known-unknowns is something of a generational hallmark. A Monday-morning scroll through the social media feed of the average 20-something might turn up a handful of friends sharing memes of dogs--looking bewildered, exasperated, or both--unironically captioned with something like: “Don’t make me adult today.”

Yes, Millennials have killed yet another thing. In this case, it’s something so fundamental that it may have seemed unkillable, but apparently isn’t: knowing how to be an adult.

Younger people need not look far on the internet to find popular condemnation from card-carrying grown-ups about our many shortcomings. We are, we are often told, simpering, self-indulgent, immune-to-difficulty know-nothings, overgrown toddlers who commute on children’s toys and demand cucumber water in our workplaces. But in our own social circles, such constructive criticism can be harder to find. Young urbanites tend to pack themselves into specific neighborhoods, cities, and living situations that have relatively fewer older residents. In such communities, knowledge on how to Seamless a meal to the doorstep is a dime a dozen, but first-hand experience in snaking a drain, cooking a meal for four, or operating a manual transmission comes at more of a premium. (To say nothing of the fact that a third of Americans between 18 and 34 are living with their parents.)

Luckily, the rough road to adulthood can be paved with adulting classes. The Adulting Collective, a startup venture out of Portland, Maine, made a big splash about two years ago after national news outlets reported on its in-person events. In its short lifespan, the Collective has offered up lessons, either guided or via online video, in such varied life skills as bike safety, holiday gift-giving for the cash-strapped, putting together a monthly budget, opening a bottle of wine without a corkscrew, and assembling a weekly nutritional plan. Their target audience: “emerging adults,” the massive 93-million-strong demographic group composed of people in their 20s and early 30s.

There are similarly structured programs across the country. At the Brooklyn Brainery, for example, you can take classes on how to run a good meeting or what Seinfeld teaches us about love. Take an online course with the Society of Grownups, sponsored by the insurance company Mass Mutual, and topics will include budgeting and how to deal with student-loan debt.

The sheer banality of many of these courses is their salient quality. They’re teaching stuff that people neither look forward to nor seem to enjoy, but implicitly recognize as part of being a grown-up: paying bills, setting a budget, calling the car insurance company, looking after your health. The joyless, quotidian chores of post-adolescence.

“Adulting is something nobody prepares you for, but you know it when it happens. It’s the unglorified part of being on your own,” says Rebekah Fitzsimmons, assistant director of the writing and communication program at Georgia Tech who taught a class on adulting in the 21st century in 2016.

In a bygone era, the ordinariness traditionally associated with growing the hell up was something few noticed--in the first half of the 20th century, 20-somethings were too busy trying not to die of the Spanish Flu or fighting Hitler to worry too much about what life skills they were failing to develop. That has now been replaced by public displays of what it means to be a self-sufficient human being, Fitzsimmons says. At the intersection of these two competing truths is the cottage industry of adulting, one nurtured by Instagram hashtags and built around how-to classes for hapless Millennials.

Born in 1989, I am a card-carrying member of the oft-derided demographic. How hapless am I? To find out, I signed up for the two action challenges the Adulting Collective offered last fall: one on nutrition and another focused on monthly budgeting. Via email, I received instructions for each of these week-long courses, which had me tackling a new skill or task each day.

When I hit 30, I intend to complete emerging adulthood fully equipped for whatever comes next.

First lesson: Hydrate! Never would I have thought the amount of water I consumed would be a point of instruction. But it turns out that young adults are notoriously poor judges of this particular basic biological need. The crash course in nutrition from the Adulting Collective that arrived in my inbox last fall was titled “Detox Before You Retox,” and it heavily emphasized hangover avoidance. Billed as a way to prepare yourself “before the next happy hour,” the instructions contained multiple steps broken down over five days. Step one: Get your basics in order, like eating your veggies, exercising, and drinking more water.

So one evening I stood in the harsh glow of my kitchen’s overhead fluorescent lighting--pitcher at the ready, glass on the countertop--applying myself to my first adulting lesson. On my smartphone I made a quick calculation: my weight, divided by 2.2, multiplied by my age, divided by 28.3, divided once more by eight. The answer: eight. More precisely, I needed to drink 7.56 cups of water to hit my proper daily intake.

This was only one of the big takeaways I received. I also learned that a morning drink of lemon water and cayenne pepper mixed with said water can help boost my metabolism, apparently. Like the unnecessarily complex hydration formula above, some of this material had the effect of making a heretofore uncomplicated thing more daunting. It was months later it finally dawned on me that a simple Google search could yield a far simpler answer for the number of glasses of water I ought to drink every day.

How did it come to this? Did previous generations have so much trouble mastering the basics?

“In an ideal world, we would all be followed around by this combination of our grandmother and Merlin who would lovingly teach us how to do each and every thing in the world,” says Kelly Williams Brown, author of the 2013 book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 535 Easy(ish) Steps. “In the absence of that, it can be nice to have resources.”

Brown’s book seems to be largely responsible for the meteoric rise of the gerund form of the word (which was short-listed by Oxford Dictionaries as the word of the year in 2016). A revised edition of Adulting was published in March. The adulting industry itself is newer. Rachel Weinstein co-founded the Adulting School (now Collective) with Katie Brunelle in fall 2016. (Brunelle has since left the business.)

A professional therapist, Weinstein would sometimes encounter younger clients who spoke about the idiosyncrasies of grown-up life with a feeling of self-conscious shame. Being overwhelmed about how to manage money or clean out their kitchen pantry were things they felt they had to hide. “I just saw a lot of my clients struggle with life, trying to be competent in skills that we’re not necessarily taught. People had this sense of internal embarrassment,” she says.

To Weinstein, this seemed like a golden business opportunity. As a group, 26-year-olds are the single biggest age cohort in the U.S., followed by people who are 25, 27, and 24. Yet unlike previous generations, the young people of today are slower to reach the milestones usually associated with adulthood: living independently, forming their own households, having children, and getting married. “Today’s young people,” as the U.S. Census Bureau reported last year, “look different from prior generations in almost every regard.”

Tempting as it might be to identify the price of avocados as the culprit in this stunted generational progress, there may be other reasons to explain the shift. A research report released in the spring by Freddie Mac cited weak wage growth and the rapid rise of both housing costs and average expenditures as some of the principal reasons. “A popular meme, ‘adulting is hard,’ provides a humorous take on the challenges faced by young adults,” the authors wrote. “Like a lot of good comedy, the phrase has a tinge of cruelty.”

The typical adulting student is someone whose childhood was tech-dependent and activity-rich, the sort of high-achiever kid told to get good grades.

Geography plays a role, too: Millennials tend to choose to live in the centers of high-cost cities, and their earning power hasn’t kept pace with housing costs. Since 2000, the median home price in the U.S. has risen by a quarter, from $210,000 to $270,000, while the per capita real income for young adults has risen by only 1 percent during that same period. Throw those myriad factors together, and you have some of the explanation for why 20-somethings are renting for longer periods of time than they once did, as well as why marriage and fertility rates have dropped. Appropriately, Freddie Mac’s report was titled, “Why Is Adulting Getting Harder?”

But if you go further back, delaying the markers of adulthood does have historical precedent, says Holly Swyers, an anthropology professor at Lake Forest College. She recently completed a project examining adulthood in America from the Civil War to the present day. For much of the period Swyers studied, many Americans over 18 followed roughly the same trajectory as modern Millennials do: They spent their 20s figuring out life and establishing themselves financially. The script didn’t flip until the 1950s and 1960s, when the markers that defined crossing over into the world of adulthood came to mean marrying and having children.

“Marrying when you’re 20, having kids by 21, and being established is a little bit freakish in American history,” she says.

So if those Americans of yore managed to (eventually) attain maturity without the aid of online courses, why can’t Millennials?

Maybe we really are uniquely ignorant. That’s the thesis that GOP senator and Gen Xer Ben Sasse presents in his book The Vanishing American Adult. He writes that younger Americans have willfully embraced “perpetual adolescence.” Some of this is our fault, evidently: staring at our smartphones for hours on end has obliterated our attention spans. Yet Sasse also places blame at the feet of his own generation for its “reluctance to expose young people to the demands of real work.”

Weinstein, however, offers another explanation. She attributes the acute modern need for additional grow-up instruction to class and demographics. Her typical adulting student is probably someone whose childhood was tech-dependent and activity-rich, the sort of high-achiever kid who was repeatedly told to bring home good grades in order to get into a good college. “Whatever folks are really being pressured for college prep, they’re just not getting as much time and exposure at home hanging out with their family, learning how to unclog the kitchen sink, or hang a picture on the wall,” she says.

Lots of those over-scheduled and test-prepped teens of the aughts also missed out on erstwhile educational staples like home economics and shop classes, where high-school kids once learned how to darn a sock or hold a hammer; many schools began mothballing these mandatory courses in the 1990s. As a result, legions of American high-school graduates are being unleashed on the world without any basic skills. Some higher-education institutions, such as New Jersey’s Drew University, have stepped in to offer “Adulting 101” classes in things like beginner car care for their undergraduates.

The Adulting Collective doesn’t rely solely on Weinstein’s expertise for its courses, although it appears that designing an adulting curriculum is just as much of a challenge as growing up. Right now, the website contains some short posts and links to videos explaining a few skills, which is a deviation from the original idea to enlist instructors to offer online lessons. According to Weinstein, the new plan heading into 2019 is to build out a membership program that involves action challenges similar to the nutrition course I took part in. “One of the things I’ve learned as a therapist is a lot of times a little bit of accountability to somebody helps us achieve goals and get tasks done,” she says.

To Swyers, what’s extraordinary in Adulting Ed isn’t the curriculum itself, which is a pretty standard mix of self-improvement and personal finance tips. It’s the notion of branding such lessons under the “adulting” rubric. After all, classes geared toward grown-ups and their skills are all over the place. Visit any big-box hardware store and chances are there’s some sort of hands-on workshop taking place, for example. “If somebody is willing to be taught, for instance, basic kitchen skills--which people pay for all the time--they don’t call it an ‘adulting collective.’ They call it a cooking class,” Swyers says.

The difference, says Weinstein, is that the way younger adults are expected to grow older and assume our place in the world has dramatically changed: “I don’t think it’s a ‘hapless Millennial’ kind of thing at all. I just think there are things that are harder about the world today.”

Case in point: The spiraling costs of higher education. Those emerging adults are entering the workforce with massive student loans to pay off; no wonder some days all they can manage to do is Instagram bewildered-dog memes. “I have clients graduating from school with over $100,000 dollars worth of debt,” she says. “When you’re paying a mortgage’s worth of school debt every month, you’re probably going to need a little help stashing some money away in an emergency fund.”

Indeed, the most useful takeaways from my own brush with the adulting industry involved money management. Last fall’s challenge on budgeting included a chart for itemizing monthly breakdowns of expenses: so many dollars toward utilities, housing, food, clothing, and so on. After six months of following the chart I completed during the challenge, I managed to save up a sizable emergency fund of eight months’ worth of expenses--not bad for a freelance writer who graduated college with $250 to his name, and well worth the $5 I paid for the course itself.

The class was theirs. But the experience was all mine. And with my savings in order, I was freed up to stash excess cash in an additional account my wife and I hold to save for a future home down payment. With a house on the horizon, we’ve recently turned our attention to the prospect of having children sooner rather than later.

[lstar1995blr-blog]

A Publishing assignment

Publishing Essay

What advantages and Disadvantages, does social media present to the modern writer?

Social Media is a big part of Modern life. It is used by all people including writers. However, for the modern writer, using social media to write presents them with many advantages and disadvantages.

An advantage of using social media, for the modern writer is critical feedback from others. “Power relationships constitute society.” This conveys that getting feedback from others in society can help to make work better and it gives the modern writer the power to improve their writing and give the reader access to the world they are trying to create.

However, a disadvantage of Social media for the modern writer is copyright. “It is a common misconception that you need to apply for copyright in your work or that it is possible to register it.” This suggests that as an aspiring writer in the modern age, if you don’t properly copyright your plots. Other writers can come along and steal your ideas claiming them as their own.

Another advantage of the modern writer using social media is using different platforms like a blog to publish their writing. “Your online platform is your ability to reach people.” This portrays that it is a good idea to put your writing on a blog so that publishers and potential readers of your work can see the professionalism of your writing and maybe inspired by it or want to publish your work.

On the other hand, using different social media platforms like a blog. Can also be a disadvantage for a writer in the modern age. “You feel alone.” This suggests that as a modern writer, if you blog you will spend most of your time maintaining your blog instead of socialising so you are lonely all the time because you don’t get to go out and socialise with other people because of always being busy.

Although one more advantage of using social media as a modern writer is, getting to connect with other writers like themselves. “digital media and a variety of open source social software, have prompted the development of horizontal networks of interactive communication that connect local and global in chosen time.” This conveys that by connecting with other writers, aspiring writers can share ideas with each other and help to make their writing better and understandable for the audience they are trying to reach out to.

Nevertheless, this can also be another disadvantage for an ambitious writer using social media because, “Social movements are a permanent feature of society. But they adopt values and take up organizational forms that are specific to the kind of society where they take place. So, there is a great deal of cultural and political diversity around the world.” This suggests that writers have to be careful about what they put on social media so that they don’t offend their readers or any other writers.

But, an alternative advantage of using social media for a new writer is, having an audience of readers who want to read and learn from the work of modern day writers. “ Societies evolve and change, by deconstructing their institutions under the pressure of new power relationships and constructing new sets of institutions that allow people to live side by side without self- destroying.” This portrays that having an audience to write for, inspires the writer to make their work good so that publishers will want to publish it and potential readers will want to read it.

Although,

an additional disadvantage of the modern day writer using social media to promote their writing is, even though you may get paid to put your work out in the world on social media. You may not get paid much or at all. “The make money blogging dream is one that rarely works out.” This shows that as a modern writer having a blog can be a good thing but it can also be a bad way of getting your work seen if you are trying to make money from it.

Still, a further advantage of the prevailing writer using social media is, there are many different social media platforms that they can use to promote their writing like Snapchat. “More than 150 million users send 9000 snaps every second on Snapchat. Altogether, the app receives 10 billion video views daily. These numbers show this photo-sharing app has become a high-profile platform for publishing and consuming user-generated content.” This shows that using Snapchat to promote your work as a writer is a good way to go, because other writers, potential readers and publishers can see your work for the maximum of 24hours. They can also see when your holding events such as book launches and reviews.

Except, using a social media platform like Snapchat to promote new writing, can be an extra disadvantage for the modern author because publishers, potential readers and other authors can only see your work for 24hours. “social media can ruin a person’s reputation.”  This portrays that for the modern writer, using social media can be a good way to promote your work. But if you use it too much or make a mistake about something on their it can ruin your reputation and you can lose your audience because of it.

Moreover, an added advantage of using social media for the determined writer is getting to network with other writers like themselves and bounce ideas off of each other and it can help them to improve their work so that potential publishers would want to publish it. “The first and main advantage of social media is connectivity. People from anywhere can connect with anyone. Regardless of the location and religion. The beauty of social media is that you can connect with anyone to learn and share your thoughts.” This displays that by connecting with other writers and potential readers and publishers on social media it can help you to get inspired, gain feedback and get helpful ideas from others. This can also help you to think differently about your writing by reading the writing of others and giving them feedback on their writing.

Conversely, another disadvantage of the contemporary author using social media is, instead of helping to promote or improve your work, other people can just criticise your work badly instead of giving helpful constructive criticism. “It has become quite easy for anyone to bully on the internet. Threats, intimidation messages and rumours can be sent to the masses to create discomfort and chaos in society.” This portrays that by using social media to get their work out into the world the modern writer can become a victim of scrutiny from other writers who are less popular than them and are jealous of their work.

While a distinctive advantage of the current writer using social media is, using a platform like Facebook to advertise their writing to potential publishers, readers and other authors who can become inspired by them and help to make their writing better. “In the marketing point of view, Facebook is valuable to create a brand. Not only for individuals but for businesses at the global level.” This implies that using a social media platform like Facebook to promote your writing is a good way to gain new readers, share ideas with other writers and get the attention of publishers who might want to publish your writing. This is good because it proves that choosing a popular social media platform to post your writing on can get you more publicity than if you post your work on a blog or less well known social media site.

Whilst this is a positive way of the up to date writer using social media to promote their work, using a popular social media platform like Facebook to advertise their work to potential publishers, readers and other writers can be another disadvantage because, “There are many who are addicted to Facebook. People just start living in this virtual world and spend hours and hours on Facebook. Due to this, a new type of disorder has also come into human life known as Facebook addiction disorder.” This conveys that even though using social media platforms like Facebook to promote the work of aspiring writers it can also be a bad thing because if they spend too much time on their writing and promoting it to others they will forget about their reality and get stuck in the virtual world they have created for themselves.

Nonetheless, a final advantage of using social media to get your work out there as a modern writer is, getting to use different forms of social networking sites like twitter to advertise and promote your writing to potential publishers, readers and other authors. This is an advantage because, “Twitter has a large user base, which could include your potential customers. Using hashtags can help you reach an audience interested in a particular topic or location.” This shows that using this kind of social media can help promote your work.

In conclusion, the advantages and disadvantages provided to the modern writer by social media, is that it can be a good way to promote yourself and your writing to potential publishers, readers and other authors. But it can also be a lonely way to advertise your work.

Bibliography

Media and Society by James Curran 2010- pages 3- 10

Pro blog.com

Shout me loud.com

Nibusinessinfo.co.uk

[wonderwoman1984-33658]

Chinese entertainers promote CPC's revolutionary

spirits to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC

The Chinese entertainment industry has leap into action to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Over the weekend, hundreds of Chinese stars, including young actor Jackson Yee and actress Dilraba from Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, posted video messages to promote and introduce revolutionary spirits of the Party to Chinese netizens.

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Combining their own experiences and understanding of the Party, these entertainers promoted a single spirit born in different times during the growth of the CPC in short videos uploaded to Sina Weibo, inspiring millions of young people, many of whom are their fans, to join in the celebrations.

The hashtag about the promotion event has earned more than 220 million views as of Monday afternoon.  

Dilraba, an actress from the Uygur ethnic minority who has more than 70 million followers on Sina Weibo, posted her short video on Sunday. In the video, she introduced the spirit of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a unique state-owned economic and paramilitary organization.

"In my beautiful home, Xinjiang, there is a group of people. They have opened up large areas of oasis and built many factories in the Gobi Desert. They loyally fulfill their duties and devoted their youth to create the spirit of the XPCC," the actress said in the video.

The XPCC has administrative authority as well as settlements and farms in Xinjiang. It has its own administrative structure, fulfilling governmental functions such as managing healthcare, education and the judiciary.

Following her introduction, she performed a song and poetry recital about the corps' contribution to Xinjiang and the country.

The post has been commented on and liked more than 2 million times as of Monday afternoon.

Young Chinese actor Jackson Yee, who starred in the Academy Award nominated-movie Better Days, also joined in the event to introduce the spirit of Hongyan, named after a local village.

Yee introduced that the spirit was born in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality during the War of Liberation (1946-49). Many CPC martyrs were arrested during the war and imprisoned in Chongqing but did not betray the Party or the people even though they were seriously tortured. Their spirit became known as the Hongyan spirit.

"I will study this spirit together with you," one netizen commented under Yee's post, representing the voice of many posters.

Other major spirits like the Spirit of the Long March were introduced by a variety of actors and actresses across generations such as Gong Jun, who was born in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, an important station along the Long March.

A Yee fan surnamed Zhang, 27, told the Global Times that she could feel the influence and appeal of stars through this event.

"Celebrities with a large amount of fans should take part in these types of events more often as they can correctly guide fans and be a positive influence on them," Zhang said.

Several related dramas and movies have been completed and launched such as Faith Makes Great, which brings together more than 30 famous Chinese stars.

Friends: The Reunion, also known as The One Where They Get Back Together, debuted on Chinese streaming platforms iQIYI and Tencent on Thursday afternoon. This exciting news cheered many Chinese fans, causing the hashtag “Friends” to earn 1.13 billion views on Sina Weibo in just a few short hours. Although thousands of TV sitcoms have flooded the internet since the first season of Friends debuted in September 1994, the beloved US sitcom still occupies first place in the hearts of many Chinese TV viewers.

One important reason why Friends holds such an irreplaceable position for Chinese audiences may be because it is the pinnacle of TV sitcoms prior to the internet era. Chinese viewers who were unable to access foreign TV channels in the 1990s came into contact with this classic drama through various channels after entering the 21st century. From the era of DVDs to online downloads and to today’s mobile video apps, generations of TV viewers have become fans of these six attractive characters with unique personalities.

With the emergence of subtitle groups in the early 21st century, the wonderful English dialogue of Friends became a tool for countless young Chinese to learn English and even websites specializing in the study of Friends scripts popped up. Friends made a major contribution to the English-learning wave in China at the time.

Another reason that this drama made such a deep impression on Chinese audiences is that it opened a door that allowed them to learn more about people’s lives in the US and the cultural differences between China and the West.

Although some Chinese sitcoms such as The Story of the Editorial Office and I Love My Family had debuted after 1992, Friends’ focus on six young single urban men and women was still a very fresh take for audiences.

I believe that many Chinese people’s understanding of Western “dating culture” came from Friends. In addition, the various challenges that single young people had to face in the sitcom such as paying off credit cards, finding a roommate to share rent, ordering takeout, changing jobs and later getting married, buying a house, having children and even getting divorced were all very new to audiences who were living in a very different society. The realities reflected in Friends caused people living in cities to cherish their ordinary lives and friendships.

Two decades later, the current most popular TV series in the world is still a US series: Game of Thrones. However, the content of this series has nothing to do with real US society. Many US dramas have grown further away from Chinese audiences because of excessive political correctness and because fewer works truthfully reflect US society. For a decade and more, Friends accompanied people from different generations, and the reunion brought back many cherished memories, but it also means the era of Friends has come to a final end.

Despite the institutional status bestowed by her double Michelin star, Vicky Lau says the battle to improve gender parity in the male-dominated culinary world is a long way from won -- but small victories bring her hope.

In the fiendishly competitive arena of China's Hong Kong's fine-dining scene, few have had as remarkable an ascent as Lau.

In little more than a decade, she has gone from opening a small cafe to running one of the financial hub's most lauded restaurants.

Earlier this year Tate Dining Room was awarded two Michelins, a belated breakthrough first for Asia's all-too-overlooked female chefs.

Many chefs love to insist in interviews that awards don't mean much. Lau, 40, is refreshingly upfront.

"I didn't get in the industry because I want to have all these accolades. But over time, it did become a goal," she told AFP.

Asked whether the gender watershed moment of the double Michelin mattered, she replied: "I think it does make a statement because it encourages a lot of people in our industry to power on."

A former graphic designer who switched mid-career to retrain, Lau said she "really didn't think twice about being a female and a chef" when she entered the trade.

"It's kind of ignorance was bliss at that time," she smiled, recalling how many at her Cordon Bleu training in Bangkok were women.

Once in the business, she saw how men dominated, especially when it came to ascending ranks or owning top establishments.

As she won attention for her dishes, she initially found it exhausting to continually be asked about her gender, the example she was setting, the role model she had become.

But over time she said she came to embrace the reality that her success could encourage others.

"It actually became one of my motivations to go to work," she said.

Different personalities

Alongside contemporaries such as Peggy Chan and May Chow, Lau is part of a new generation of female chefs from China's Hong Kong who have become examples of successful and vocal entrepreneurs.

Global culinary award programs have long been overly fixated on both Western cuisine and male chefs.

It's a charge to which brands are now sensitized. Slowly, winners' lists are starting to look a little more representative of the world itself.

The "Me Too" movement also brought some limited reckoning over the type of alpha-male behavior once lauded by food critics and television shows.

But improvement can feel frustratingly gradual.

"The culinary industry is a male-dominated industry, as everybody knows, but it also expects women to behave like men," said Chan, who carved out a space as one of Hong Kong's first fine-dining vegetarian chefs.

"You either fit in or you get out."

The slow growth of women both in professional kitchens and in?owning restaurants, she said, is starting to make an impact.?

"There's a lot more room for different types of personalities," Chan said.

Lau says her kitchen is now more than 50 percent female. Chefs with children are an asset, not a headache. Those with egos can leave them at the kitchen door.?

"We don't just celebrate Gordon Ramsay-style screaming in your face," she said.

Chinese techniques

Lau's dishes combine French and Chinese cuisine and are achingly beautiful -- each presentation painstakingly plated in a vivid display of her design background.

And she's determined to get wider recognition for often under-appreciated Chinese cooking techniques.

One example she cites is "double steamed" or "superior" broths -- the time-consuming stocks of Chinese cooking that could give any consommé a run for its money.

Her business has stayed afloat during the coronavirus disease pandemic with catering, a take-away service, and a patisserie shop.

It also opened for lunch for the first time, offering a less pricey tasting menu set around one single ingredient.

"We've done rice, tofu, tea, soy sauce," Lau explained.

Each course of her latest menu is built from different parts of a plant -- seeds, leaves, bulbs, stems, fruit, roots, and flowers.

Lau says the pandemic forced her into a more creative and self-reflective space.

"I think COVID-19 will put globalization on a bit of a pause," she predicts, saying fine-dining restaurants are being forced to source more locally, something consumers were already pushing for.

Why fly in French turbot, she posits, when there are perfectly good alternatives at the local wet markets??

She describes fine dining as "ego cooking" --?"because you are kind of expressing yourself on a plate".

"And a lot of times you can be lost a little bit," she added.

"That's why it's time to make more humble ingredients like soy sauce or rice the star of a dish."?

[womenofcolor15]

French Cinema Organization Defends ‘Cuties’ Director During Backlash As Viewers Slam The Movie For ‘Sexualizing Children’

Netflix and filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré have come under fire for the controversial coming-of-age film, Cuties. Now, UniFrance – a French cinema organization – is defending Maïmouna and her drama. More inside…

When the Cuties poster was first released, it was met with TONS of criticism. Mainly, people were outraged at how the poster sexualized young girls, which resulted in a trending #CancelNetflix hashtag.

The film is a coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old named Amy navigating life in modern society.

The synopsis reads:

Eleven-year-old Amy, her mother Mariam, and her younger siblings have newly relocated to a home in an impoverished suburb of Paris, awaiting Amy’s father to rejoin the family from Senegal. But as Mariam becomes increasingly distracted by challenges within her marriage, Amy begins to feel the weight of family responsibilities. Eager to seek refuge from her life at home, she becomes fascinated with a free-spirited and rebellious group of girls at her school. Hoping for a taste of freedom and the chance to become popular, she convinces them to let her join their dance crew, which the girls have dubbed “Cuties”. But as they rehearse for a local dance contest, Amy finds herself increasingly torn between her traditional Muslim upbringing and the diverse cultures and attitudes of her new friends in her adopted city.

Here's what the Senegalese-French film director said about her directorial debut:

“The main character of Amy is my alter ego,” director Maïmouna Doucouré told Shadow & Act. “She's based on my story. Just like Amy, I had questions about my femininity because I was growing up in two cultures, my parents' Senegalese culture, and then the French culture. So I had all of these questions also about how to become a woman."

“All of the stories that you see in the film are based on the stories that [were] told [to] me and I realized that these girls were learning to construct themselves and their version of femininity based on what they saw in social media. I realized that these girls were growing up with a vision that was objectifying women and that they were growing up with this idea of a woman being an object and a woman's worth and value being based on the number of likes that they received."

However, everyone didn’t see it that way.

Below are a few controversial scenes from the movie, which we are posting strictly as the reference point for a proper discussion to take place, as opposed to second hand descriptions:

Are we sure that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t direct this movie? #cutiesnetflix pic.twitter.com/Nc9kVT6E6V

— Lolly Holes (@LollyHoles) September 11, 2020

And here are the outraged reactions:

#Netflix aka #Pedoflix has lost over $9 billion in market value since the #CancelNetflix hashtag went viral over the show "Cuties" which depicts young girls, age 11 being sexualized among other things. Good. #SaveOurChildren pic.twitter.com/5ASFhjPcWC

— Alex Poucher (@alexpoucher) September 13, 2020

Cancelled my membership due to the movie “Cuties”. I will not support pedophilia #cancelnetflix pic.twitter.com/py9MrAxjEj

— Griff (@griff8864) September 14, 2020

#CancelNetflix It is everyone’s responsibility to safeguard children and protect their innocence. So the Netflix censorship board all sat down and agreed that this was okay??! Pathetic!! pic.twitter.com/05s7Z7GHo4

— Tsitsi (@exceptional_tsi) September 14, 2020

There's two posters for cuties. Netflix used the worst one imaginable and described the movie horribly. pic.twitter.com/rIek28Zxff

— lyle abner (@lyleabner) September 10, 2020

Director Maïmouna Doucouré won a Directing Award for Cuties when the film debuted at Sundance in January. Months later, she found herself in the middle a online sh*tstorm of controversy after the release of the film’s poster. She said

The outrage got out of control where folks began to send to her death threats.

“I received numerous attacks on my character from people who had not seen the film, who thought I was actually making a film that was apologetic about hypersexualiation of children,” she told Deadline in her first interview since the incident. “I also received numerous death threats.”

“We had several discussions back and forth after this happened,” she continued. “Netflix apologized publicly, and also personally to me,” she shared.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos called her up to apologize.  Some right wingers have also used this debate to further their unfounded Qanon theories that people like Oprah, Ellen, the Obamas and Susan Rice (the latter two who became directly affiliated with Netflix AFTER this film was made) are on a mission to promote sex trafficking in everyone's faces.  They believe Trump is the designated person who will protect chldren from child predators.  Yes, the man who is accused of visiting Pedophile Island with Jeffrey Epstein and accused by almost 100 women of sexual assault.

Again, the conspiracy theories hold no water and have no credibility, but in a climate where conspiracy theories are being passed off as fact and believed by those looking to simply believe in something simplistic, it's all quite dangerous rhetoric. Many believe Cuties is simply being used as a vehicle to futher push these conspiracy theories.

Although the backlash has been tremendous, Maïmouna said she has received “extraordinary support” from the French government, and that the film will be used as an educational tool in her home country.

Most recently, French cinema organization UniFrance, which is backed by the French government and represents hundreds of local producers, sales agents, directors and talent agents, sent out a memo to the industry to “offer its full support” to the director and its French producers.

In part, the organization wrote:

Cuties offers a subtle and sophisticated denunciation of the hyper-sexualization of a young generation who translate and reproduce the images that inundate them in their daily lives, particularly via social media. Whether we are spectators, parents, teenagers, producers, or distributors, this film invites us to reflect on the power of these images and the complexity of the constant dialogue between young people and the generation of their parents. This film appeals to our sense of discernment, be that on an individual or a collective level, and calls on us to assume our responsibilities.

Over the past several weeks, we have been closely following the exceptionally violent reaction to the film in the United States, during a presidential election campaign in full swing. In this context, UniFrance and all of its members wish to pledge their full support to Maïmouna Doucouré and to reaffirm their commitment to supporting the freedom of artistic creation and expression. This is because one of the great strengths of cinema is its capacity to reach beyond borders and boundaries, and to offer a critical and constructive viewpoint on the world and the excesses of today’s societies.

Furthermore, we consider that the call to boycott the film and to have it removed from the Netflix catalogue, in addition to the hate messages, insults, and unfounded speculations about the intent of the director and her producers, pose a serious threat to the very space that cinema seeks to open up: a space of discussion, reflection, and of helping us to see beyond our own preconceived ideas.

You can read the full message here.

Avengers: Endgame star Tessa Thompson also came to the film’s defense:

Disappointed to see how it was positioned in terms of marketing. I understand the response of everybody. But it doesn’t speak to the film I saw. https://t.co/L6kmAcJFU1

— Tessa Thompson (@TessaThompson_x) August 20, 2020

”#CUTIES is a beautiful film. It gutted me at @sundancefest. It introduces a fresh voice at the helm. She’s a French Senegalese Black woman mining her experiences. The film comments on the hyper-sexualization of preadolescent girls. Disappointed to see the current discourse,” she tweeted. “Disappointed to see how it was positioned in terms of marketing. I understand the response of everybody. But it doesn’t speak to the film I saw,” she continued.

Netflix didn’t make this film y’all.

— Tessa Thompson (@TessaThompson_x) August 20, 2020

Writer Caz Armstrong wrote an essay for In Their Own League, about Cuties and she said Netflix “betrayed” Maïmouna by originally marketing the film with a sexualized image of the young characters.

  Original CUTIES movie poster, before Netflix tried to sexualize 11 year olds. pic.twitter.com/dHETTjS6FT

— Al Steel (@KnightofResist) September 12, 2020

  “When Netflix’s marketing puts out a sexually provocative poster, they are deliberately leveraging the most controversial aspect of the film in an inappropriate way,” Armstrong writes. “They’re doing exactly what the film itself puts under the microscope, sexually exploiting girls without the mature discussion required. It’s clickbait.”

While we get what the director was trying to do with the coming-of-age film, there’s a fine line that’s should be balanced when it comes to displaying children in a sexual manner, even when it is attempting to prove a point about the problem of sexualizing children.

While we’re all aware of how children these days are being exposed to explicit content at an earlier age, one must be super mindful with storytelling in order to properly get the point across.

Photo: Netflix via AP

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/09/18/french-cinema-organization-defends-%E2%80%98cuties%E2%80%99-director-after-backlash-as-viewers-slam-the-m

[angeltriestoblog]

The state of the world has once again taken a turn for the worse, and like all other similar instances, I turn to the comfort of the written word. With that being said, I wanted to put it out there that I have no intention of speaking over the narratives of those who need to be heard the most during this time. (I guess it pays that I don’t really have much of an audience here.) It’s just that I’ve always said that writing helps me compartmentalize my feelings and figure out my next course of action, and I guess this time is no different. I need to get my thoughts down somewhere I can see them instead of having them flit around aimlessly in the deep recesses of my brain.

—

These past few days, I have been made more and more aware of my smallness. Following the (first degree) murder of George Floyd, I’ve had access to all the information surrounding his death: who did it, how they did it and why, the implications of the act, and the several ways black people of color and their allies are standing in solidarity to counteract this brutal display of injustice. I’ve come across several petitions that hope to hold certain individuals accountable or raise issues to the national level, funding sites that aim to provide financial assistance to those most in need, and resources with the intent to educate that demand to be circulated on a wide scale. While these have technically showed me how I’m not entirely powerless, that I do in fact have the ability to enact some sort of change, it’s still difficult to stomach that the change I am capable of making is not as substantial as I want it to be.

I understand that what I’m feeling is a hassle, at worst—nothing compared to those on the streets, to the black people of color who have to fight for rights that are supposedly inherent to all human beings, who demand justice for all those who have fallen because of police brutality only to have these cries fall on deaf ears. I do not have to face various forms of oppression and microaggressions not just when this topic is trending, but throughout the course of my entire life. I do not carry this lingering fear that every step I take outside of my front door could be my last. What happens to their community is absolutely sickening but the thing is, we haven’t even seen all of it. Keeping tabs on social media, checking up with actual victims of structural racism often deludes us into thinking we know exactly what’s going on and how hard it must be, but access to all of this information doesn’t erase the fact that I am watching everything from afar.

So instead of sulking so much that my reaction could be misconstrued as an attempt to make the conversation about me, I tried to channel all this frustration in a more productive manner. I’ve reduced my Twitter time because my timeline has magically morphed into a raging cesspool spewing hatred and anger and is thus getting in the way of my journey towards being an effective ally and concerned citizen. I’m definitely not saying this because the people I follow only ever tweet about the resurfacing of the #BlackLivesMatter movement—hopefully, at this point of the post, I’ve already made it clear that I am far from apolitical. It’s just that my following can easily be classified into two groups: those who wear their ignorance on their sleeve and actively resist any form of education, and those who are so ruthlessly divisive that they scare away anyone who wishes to be educated. The world is already unforgiving enough as it is and I refuse to take part in that kind of culture. I have been trying to ease my way back in though by looking at tweets almost exclusively in the likes of some of my most politically aware friends (hi Pat, Ryen, and Alyanna—I hope you never have to see this) and checking the trends sporadically for any live updates.

Not only have I realized just how many hours in a day going on that stupid bird app actually eats up, but I’ve also had a lot of time to educate myself and reflect on my previous actions. I figured that if I’m so upset about how my impact on a global scale is terribly lacking, I can always start on a more personal level, which is probably just as revolutionary. I’ve watched movies, gone through articles, and even started on this book called White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which debunks why exactly it’s so hard to talk about racism with white people. In this process, I’ve learned that everything I knew about the concept was surprisingly shallow and surface-level. Having first claimed my badge of wokeness when I was 15 (and engaged in some pretty performative activism at the time, if I do say so myself), I was shocked to find out that everything I collected from viral hot takes and recommended YouTube videos that claim to be an extensive guide to fundamental social movements possessed an unforgivable degree of inaccuracy.

For instance, all this time, I was under the impression that I could only be a racist if I called someone ugly because of their dark skin or curly hair, or said the n-word whenever I sang along to Caroline by Amine. As long as I didn’t do those things, or any other form of discrimination towards a marginalized group, I was in the clear and had nothing to worry about—I could get a star on the Good Noodle board. In reality, to quote Scott Woods, racism is “a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people’s expense, whether whites know/like it or not”. It is not something we actively choose to participate in, but something that we are born into—literally who would have thought!

Because racism has been demonized by everyone with working mental faculties (as it should be), it’s hard to own up to the fact that at some point, we have subconsciously picked up racist behaviors or exhibited racist tendencies at some point in our lives. Every time someone tries to point out where we went wrong in the hopes of giving constructive criticism, we have our defenses up, a list of receipts of all the times we tweeted the #BLM hashtag prepared to show that we are, in fact, not the villain that we were made out to be. This is a counterproductive exercise that helps nobody. If we truly want to step up and show our support for the movement and those working to make it happen, we must first be open to the possibility that we have done wrong and we have so much more to learn.

As a kid, my beauty standards were very Eurocentric, like most Filipinos: according to a study conducted by me based on years of personal observations and experience, we are the country most obsessed with whitening soap and hair rebonding treatments. I called my friends the n-word as a term of endearment and previously used AAVE (African American Vernacular English) in my tweets to give them a little bit of personality. I chose not to watch chick flicks that revolved around interracial couples because I felt that the difference in their skin color got in the way of their chemistry. One time, when my mom and I were walking to WalMart during a vacation to the States, we came across a stocky black man and my initial reaction was to hold my purse closer to my body. I remain deeply ashamed of these beliefs I held, which were admittedly born out of ignorance, and I acknowledge my responsibility to continue to eradicate any traces of these I may still have.

I am also doing my best to extend the same compassion I have for black people of color during these trying times towards my own countrymen. We’ve struggled enough during this pandemic thanks to the sorry state of our healthcare system, and now the government seems hell-bent on speeding up the passage of the anti-terrorism bill. This threatens to impede our freedom of speech and help government officials get away with incompetence and even abuse of authority. If anyone gets a hold of this blog post and chooses to interpret this paragraph as an open threat to the President, this could be the last time you could ever hear from me, and this frightens me beyond words.

I know this isn’t a new contribution to the discussion but here are some links to helpful masterposts containing a variety of resources should you wish to donate, learn, or sign. This goes for both issues in our motherland and what is supposedly the land of the free. Let’s stay vigilant, let’s stay compassionate. Wishing you all the love and light the world still has left to offer.

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/fb-workplace-co-founder-launches-downtime-fire-alarm-kintaba/

Fb Workplace co-founder launches downtime fire alarm Kintaba

“It’s an open secret that every company is on fire” says Kintaba co-founder John Egan. “At any given moment something is going horribly wrong in a way that it has never gone wrong before.” Code failure downtimes, server outages, and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling a team to fix the problem, and doing a post-mortem to assess how to prevent it from happening again can be as chaotic as the crisis itself.

Text messages, Slack channels, task managers, and Google Docs aren’t sufficient for actually learning from mistakes. Alerting systems like PagerDuty focus on the rapid response, but not the educational process in the aftermath. Finally there’s a more holistic solution to incident response with today’s launch of Kintaba.

The Kintaba team experienced these pains first hand while working at Facebook after Egan and Zac Morris’ Y Combinator-backed data transfer startup Caffeinated Mind was acqui-hired in 2012. Years later when they tried to build a blockchain startup and the whole stack was constantly in flames, they longed for a better incident alert tool. So they built one themselves and named it after the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where gold is used to fill in cracked pottery “which teaches us to embrace the imperfect and to value the repaired” Egan says.

With today’s launch, Kintaba offers a clear dashboard where everyone in the company can see what major problems have cropped up, plus who’s responding and how. Kintaba’s live activity log  and collaboration space for responders let them debate and analyze their mitigation moves. It integrates with Slack, and lets team members subscribe to different levels of alerts or search through issues with categorized hashtags.

“The ability to turn catastrophes into opportunities is one of the biggest differentiating factors between successful and unsuccessful teams and companies” says Egan. That’s why Kintaba doesn’t stop when your outage does.

Kintaba Founders (from left): John Egan Zac Morris Cole Potrocky

As the fire gets contained, Kintaba provides a rich text editor connected to its dashboard for quickly constructing a post-mortem of what went wrong, why, what fixes were tried, what worked, and how to safeguard systems for the future. Its automated scheduling assistant helps teams plan meetings to internalize the post-mortem.

Kintaba’s well-pedigreed team and their approach to an unsexy but critical software-as-a-service attracted $2.25 million in funding led by New York’s FirstMark Capital.

“All these features add up to Kintaba taking away all the annoying administrative overhead and organization that comes with running a successful modern incident management practice” says Egan, “so you can focus on fixing the big issues and learning from the experience.”

Egan, Morris and Cole Potrocky met while working at Facebook, which is known for spawning other enterprise productivity startups based on its top-notch internal tools. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz built a task management system to reduce how many meetings he had to hold, then left to turn that into Asana which filed to go public this week.

The trio had been working on internal communication and engineering tools as well as the procedures for employing them. “We saw first hand working at companies like Facebook how powerful those practices can be and wanted to make them easier for anyone to implement without having to stitch a bunch of tools together” Egan tells me. He stuck around to co-found Facebook’ enterprise collaboration suite Workplace while Potrocky built engineering architecture there and Morris became a mobile security lead at Uber.

Like many blockchain projects, Kintaba’s predecessor, crypto collectibles wallet Vault, proved an engineering nightmare without clear product market fit. So the team ditched it, pivoted to build out the internal alerting tool they’d been tinkering with. That origin story sounds a lot like Slack’s, which began as a gaming company that pivoted to turn its internal chat tool into a business.

So what’s the difference between Kintaba and just using Slack and email or a monitoring tool like PagerDuty, Splunk’s VictorOps, or Atlassian’s OpsGenie? Here’s how Egan breaks a sit downtime situation handled with Kintaba:

“You’re on call and your pager is blowing up because all your servers have stopped serving data. You’re overwhelmed and the root cause could be any of the multitude of systems sending you alerts. With Kintaba, you aren’t left to fend for yourself. You declare an incident with high severity and the system creates a collaborative space that automatically adds an experienced IMOC (incident manager on call) along with other relevant on calls. Kintaba also posts in a company-wide incident Slack channel. Now you can work together to solve the problem right inside the incident’s collaborative space or in Slack while simultaneously keeping stakeholders updated by directing them to the Kintaba incident page instead of sending out update emails. Interested parties can get quick info from the stickied comments and #tags. Once the incident is resolved, Kintaba helps you write a postmortem of what went wrong, how it was fixed, and what will be done to prevent it from happening. Kintaba then automatically distributes the postmortem and sets up an incident review on your calendar.”

Essentially, instead of having one employee panicking about what to do until the team struggles to coordinate across a bunch of fragmented messaging threads, a smoother incident reporting process and all the discussion happens in Kintaba. And if there’s a security breach that a non-engineer notices, they can launch a Kintaba alert and assemble the legal and PR team to help too.

Alternatively, Egan describes the downtime  fiascos he’d experience without Kintaba like this:

The on call has to start waking up their management chain to try and figure out who needs to be involved. The team maybe throws a Slack channel together but since there’s no common high severity incident management system and so many teams are affected by the downtime, other teams are also throwing slack channels together, email threads are happening all over the place, and multiple groups of people are trying to solve the problem at once. Engineers begin stepping all over each other and sales teams start emailing managers demanding to know what’s happening. Once the problem is solved, no one thinks to write up a postmortem and even if they do it only gets distributed to a few people and isn’t saved outside that email chain. Managers blame each other and point fingers at people instead of taking a level headed approach to reviewing the process that led to the failure. In short: panic, thrash, and poor communication.

While monitoring apps like PagerDuty can do a good job of indicating there’s a problem, they’re weaker at the collaborative resolution and post-mortem process, and designed just for engineers rather than everyone like Kintaba. Egan says “It’s kind of like comparing the difference between the warning lights on a piece of machinery and the big red emergency button on a factory floor.  We’re the big red button . . . That also means you don’t have to rip out PagerDuty to use Kintaba” since it can be the trigger that starts the Kintaba flow.

Still, Kintaba will have to prove that it’s so much better than a shared Google Doc, an adequate replacement for monitoring solutions, or a necessary add-on that companies should pay $12 per user per month. PagerDuty’s deeper technical focus helped it go public a year ago, though it’s fallen about 60% since to a market cap of $1.75 billion. Still, customers like Dropbox, Zoom, and Vodafone rely on its SMS incident alerts, while Kintaba’s integration with Slack might not be enough to rouse coders from their slumber when something catches fire.

If Kintaba can succeed in incident resolution with today’s launch, the four-person team sees adjacent markets in task prioritization, knowledge sharing, observability, and team collaboration, though those would pit it against some massive rivals. If it can’t, perhaps Slack or Microsoft Teams could be suitable soft landings for Kintaba, bringing more structured systems for dealing with major screwups to their communication platforms.

When asked why he wanted to build a legacy atop software that might seem a bit boring on the surface, Egan concluded that “Companies using Kintaba should be learning faster than their competitors . . . Everyone deserves to work within a culture that grows stronger through failure.”

[cryptodictation]

Secondary Education. Educational innovation. Climate Summit: #LebrijaSustenible | Blog Schools online

It happened in the courtyard of the Public Institute of Secondary Education ‘Virgin of the Castle’De Lebrija (Seville). It was 10 hours and 15 minutes in the morning of Friday, March 15, 2019. A group of Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) students and teachers gathered in the schoolyard in a symbolic act of ‘burial’ of the planet.

The students they read a statement denouncing the current deterioration of the Earth and demanding ‘take action’,anticipating, in some way, what the motto expresses (#TimeToAct) adopted at the 2019 Climate Summit.

This staging showed the solidarity of a school community with the student mobilizations and protests, demanding effective actions against global warming and climate change promoted by Youth for the climate (Fridays for future).

The public dramatization of this commitment was not an isolated act; was part of the curriculum planning of Manuel Jesús Fernández Orange tree. This professor of Geography and History considered very relevant, from his subject and in the third year of ESO, to promote a learning scenario around possible actions to fight climate change that could be adopted in the vital environment of their students.

During the event, one of the students from Manuel Jesus, approached him and said: “teacher we should do more things do something more“; but it was not only her, another of the professors of the Department of Social Sciences conversing back to class declared … “Manuel, is obligated; we should do something else, we would have to contribute much more, from educational centers, to raising awareness of the risks of climate change”.

These considerations found in Manuel Jesus the land paid. Months before, he had manifested himself on his blog, coinciding with these concerns.

“… I've been posing for a long time that the classrooms see and talk about today, however hard it may be: sexist killings, migrant deaths, storms, hurricanes, social conflicts, environmental problems, elections, nationalisms … and trying to develop projects that address these issues. ” (Manuel Jesús Fernández, #ODS: School and commitment)

Transforming some of these concerns into curricular decisions already depended only on the acceptance and support of your students.

The time had come to translate this plan into ESO's curriculum and third-class work. It was suggested to make a parenthesis in the general planning of the course, structured around a broad project called ‘Act‘, And arbitrate a time (from mid-March to the end of April) for the reflection, research and learning around the 17 sustainable development goals (ODS). But let's listen better to this approach in the words of Manuel Jesus.

They were working on the project ‘My business', in which each group had to create a sustainable productive organization. It was easy to relate it to this topic and propose to stop, focusing the work specifically on the SDG.

The students welcomed this initiative with interest. It opened a magnificent opportunity to develop a collective pedagogical process of research, knowledge, commitment and action, applied to their immediate living environment. They named the pedagogical proposal #SustainableLebrija and it was strongly linked to the official curriculum of the Geography and History course, especially to the contents of sustainable economy and care for the environment.

“… we have to do something, that school is involved in making society more aware and be more prepared to achieve a sustainable, cleaner and fairer planet, and we believe that the curriculum of the 3rd year of ESO in Geography and History comes as a ring to our fingers. ” (Manuel Jesús Fernández, Explanation of the project. SDG)

A proof of its viability is the curricular planning elaborated by Manuel Jesus, in a much more ambitious development of this project, in the 2019-20 academic year, and which we encourage you to consult.

Integration of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Geography programming in the 3rd. ESO course | Manuel Jesús Fernández

The task culminated in the elaboration of a series of proposals, according to each of the SDG, built from inquiry, consultation, foundation and with the condition that they were feasible.

@SILVIAKMPOS'); “> enlarge photo

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) approved in 2015 @SILVIAKMPOS

Stamp: “Lebrija_sostenible”

The commitment of Lebrija companies and businesses to the sustainability of the planet It could be demonstrated by obtaining a badge that appears on their establishments and websites, identifying themselves according to the degree of commitment, of 1 to 5 stars:

1. Commitment to reduce, reuse and recycle waste. 2. Commitment to the lowest possible use of plastics until plastics free. 3. Commitment to pay decent and equal wages for male and female employees. 4. Commitment to donate products discarded to associations and NGOs. 5. Commitment to actively collaborate with institutions, associations and NGOs in the sustainability from Lebrija.

Once each of the proposals has been collectively analyzed and valued, they were better defined and justified in order to be presented at a plenary session of the Town Hall and defended before the Mayor of Lebrija.

In this scenario, the students looked for solutions to the deterioration observed in their closest environment. They used web sites such as: ‘UNICEF's greatest lesson in the world’, ‘Sustainable development goals’, of the UN…; in this case, they focused on the study of the document ‘170 Actions to Transform Our World’, available on the United Nations website.

Manuel Jesus He also added his own resource: creating label #ODS, in Twitter and, with it, the possibility of 'on-line' interaction. It was the way to articulate actuality, collaboration, training and educational commitment. The systematic consultation of hashtag He provided them with information and proposals from the citizens and the most interested organizations, from the press … The information obtained helped them to understand the meaning and the relevance of each objective, in the argumentation of its defense and the formulation of possible actions.

Some of the proposals made by third-year ESO students were …

“Domestic uses. Turn off lights and electrical devices when they are not needed and plug the devices into power strips so that they can be turned off when they are not needed. Shower instead of bathing and that the showers are short. Make sure that the load of the washing machine and the dishwasher are complete. … Shopping Buy products that are minimally packaged. Buy from companies and establishments that apply sustainable practices. Buy local products. Use less polluting appliances. Take your own bag to the shopping … … Mobility Avoid using the car. Walk or bike to sites. Keep the car in good condition … “

With these proposals the students prepared an argument that they defended before the Mayor of the city and the provincial Delegates for Education and Consumption. Judging by the comments made in the chronicle of the act, collected in the Web of the Lebrija City Council (Students of the IES Virgen del Castillo present their proposals for a “more sustainable Lebrija“), the initiative had a splendid reception: “Pepe Barroso (Mayor of Nebrija) He wanted to express a special thanks to all the boys and girls who have gathered there ‘for being a committed and responsible youth with the city’, a source of pride because ‘the future of our town is assured’.

Lebrija Town Hall'); “> enlarge photo

The Mayor of Lebrija, Manuel Jesús Fernández, the girls and the boys of third of ESO of the IES ‘Virgen del Castillo’ pose together once the act of presentation of the proposals for a ‘sustainable Lebrija’ is finished Lebrija Town Hall

The school ─it states Manuel Jesus─ you can do much more for many things; above all, as the UN pronounces, for raising awareness among the new generations about the need to “eradicate poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all ”.

The complicity and involvement of the youngest in this desideratum It's fundamental and it needs democratic institutions and inexcusably educational ones. School life and learning are basic elements for creating complicity and forming attitudes.

Change the curriculum organization it is a decisive step and contributes to this Manuel Jesus providing the following infographic, in which schematically shows the thematic and procedural involvement of a wide range of areas, subjects and subjects (Biology, Geology, Geography, History …) when working on the SDGs. Although, its development demands a Project Work methodology and a planning of integrated didactic units.

With the learning projects “… you know how it starts, but you don't know how it will end; they are enriched with proposals and learning as they develop. So perhaps it was not so perplexing to focus more than was anticipated in the specific study of the SDGs, “ comments Manuel Jesus.

This conception and this practice allow us to affirm that it is possible to have, build, plan and develop another curriculum with which “… young people learn to be 'critical interpreters' of their society. They are encouraged to ask questions such as these when faced with any knowledge or point of view: Who said that? Why did they say so? Why should we believe it? Y Who benefits from being created and guided by it?”(Appel and Beane, Democratic schools)

MANUEL JESÚS FERNÁNDEZ'); “> enlarge photo

‘Sustainable Lebrija’ project MANUEL JESÚS FERNÁNDEZ

We have related only a moment, a decision, a process and the bases of the collective construction of a reflection, as well as a set of actions around the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). We still have to share a way of proceeding in the classroom, using an investigative didactic sequence, the deployment of active methodologies, the didactic use of the resources of the environment, collective dialogue, technologies … and, also, point out achievements and difficulties found; but we will deal with all this in the next post.

To be continue…

(*) Professional version in ResearchGate (Download in PDF). (**) Manuel Jesús Fernández Naranjo He is a professor at the Institute of Secondary Education ‘Virgin of the Castle’From Lebrija (Seville), interested in active methodologies and a trainer in Flipped Classroom (Inverted class) and Problem Based Learning (ABP). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the virtual publication ‘The Flipped Classroom’. It has wide recognition among teachers and education professionals. His teaching materials, always available online, are considered reference and are widely used by other teachers. (***) We thank the rest of the teaching staff and the educational community of the Institute of Secondary Education ‘Virgin of the CastleFrom Lebrija (Seville) for hosting and supporting this type of innovative educational initiatives. (****) We appreciate the collaboration from the illustrator Silvia Campos in the composition of this post.

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[thestoryteller76-blog]

What advantages and disadvantages does social media present to the modern writer?

Social media is defined by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) as ‘a group of Internet-based applications’ ‘that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content’, as stated in theatre & social media (Lonergan, 2016). Furthermore, user generated content is defined as ‘content made publicly available over the Internet which reflects a certain amount of creative effort and which is created outside of professional routines and practices’ and can also ‘include email, chatrooms, text and multimedia messages’ (Lonergan, 2016). Social media is a tool that is available to modern writers for both publishing and marketing purposes as well as a new field for creative opportunities. However, while social media has many advantages, there are also disadvantages and potential pitfalls relating to its use, both in terms of creative constrictions and mental health issues.  

 On the one hand, there are many advantages presented to the modern writer by social media, such as the ability to interact directly with, and market yourself to, a wide audience relatively easily and cheaply. A modern writer can use their website, blog and social media presence as ‘a business card’ that allows for their audience to easily find their work name (Wolff, 2007). The writer can also use their website to sell their work through self-publishing or affiliate links with companies such as Amazon. In addition, they can write work that can be used to advertise other brands. This latter option is especially the case for bloggers who can use their own personal stories as marketing opportunities for brands, who will pay them either through a lump sum or through pay-by-clicks on advertisements placed on their website. Another advantage of social media for the modern writer is the ability to create an alternate persona. This persona can act as both a liberating tool for the writer, enabling them to more freely write what they want to without fear of being judged personally, and as a brand. For example, Jamie Oliver firstly presented himself as ‘The Naked Chef’ which gained him a much greater following than if he had just kept his own name (Wolff, 2007). Now, with social media it is even easier to create a fictional version of yourself which you can brand and sell, for example with gaming YouTuber turned author OfficialNerdCubed (real name, Daniel Hardcastle). In fact, OfficialNerdCubed has recently employed the self-publishing website ‘Unbound’, which allows for people to pledge money in order to crowdfund his book, as well as to receive a personal reward such as a signed copy or their name in the back cover. He utilised his YouTube channel, through specific videos to advertise the crowdfunding, and smaller adverts at the beginning of his regular videos, to fund his book. This lead to him reaching 1837% of the funding or, approximately, £252,178. This shows the tremendous power of social media branding for the modern writer (OfficialNerdCubed, 2018) (Hardcastle and Maughan, 2018).

 Blogs can also be used to create personal narratives, as well as for marketing of other brands. A blog is traditionally in the form of a public and online diary entry and, as such, can fulfil the format of an ‘episodic narrative’ that is usually found in soap operas and comic books, albeit without the cliff-hangers that usually occur at the end of every episode but not at the end of every life event (Rettberg, 2014). These personal blogs can be a great way for the writer to be creative, both in writing and in observing their lives, and can also be a bridge between the writer and their audience, thereby increasing their own brand further.  

 There are also particular advantages with regards the social media platform, Twitter. Twitter offers the opportunity for a modern writer to alter the format of their creative writing, namely to create very small pieces of micro-fiction of 280 characters or less. This presents its own opportunities for the writer to hone a more concise version of their craft. In addition, these micro-stories can be threaded to create longer narratives that the writer’s readers can follow hourly, daily etc. thereby encouraging the readers to return to the site regularly. This, in turn, offers the chance for the writer to utilise these daily viewings with advertisements for and links to other, longer, writings or branded products. Furthermore, due to Twitter’s retweet system, the writer can reach a much wider audience by allowing their readers to advertise for them. This audience can be increased further by utilising hashtags which ‘tag’ the tweet into a particular theme such as #flashfiction or #journal, which allows people to read tweets specifically under these hashtags. Furthermore, hashtags can be used to target the tweet to a particular audience, thereby increasing the likelihood of engagement. Twitter can also be used as a way of breaking down the perceived notion that writing is a completely private practice, and that writers are such private people that the reader cannot hope to interact and engage with them. This is because tweets can offer a window into the writer’s life, such as by telling the world that they are “just cooking dinner” or “are about to go to the cinema”, which offers a way for the reader to see the writer as a more ordinary, and less mysterious person. This, in turn, can open the way for the writer to achieve a level of celebrity and fame that is usually confined to popstars and actors, or just engage on a more personal level with their audience. (Myers, 2016: 476-492)

 As well as offering ways for the modern writer to write and advertise, Twitter can also be a great place to access information that would otherwise be too difficult to find on the Internet or in a book. For example, by searching the hashtag ‘amresearching’, the writer can ask a wide variety of experts for information or browse to see if their question had already been answered. Additionally, the writer can utilise the hashtags ‘askagent’, ‘tenqueries’ and ‘pitmad’ to find and question agents, find out what agents like and don’t like about rejected stories and pitch their novel to prospective agents, respectively. Many publishers also have unsolicited submission opportunities that they advertise on Twitter. (Fuller, 2018) Finally, the modern writer can use Twitter to follow popular writers and see how they advertise, what creative stories they tweet and, possibly, have the opportunity to ask them questions. This can be either by creating a rapport with said writer or by utilising an ‘ask me anything’ that many writers participate in either on Twitter or other social media platforms such as Reddit.

 On the other hand, there are disadvantages presented to the modern writer by social media. These include an increased pressure to create and publish more and more work, while maintaining a quality that your audience expects. This can lead to overworking, burnout and mental health issues such as depression or over-anxiety as the writer feels the need to meet the demands of their audience. These issues can be increased by the fact that the audience is able to interact more directly with the writer and because they feel that they have a more personal relationship with the writer, while remaining anonymous themselves. This can lead to negative comments or even trolling regarding the writer’s work output and quality. It can also be increased by the fact that the writer has to keep up a certain work output so as to maintain their placing in the social media’s algorithmic search engines. These algorithms can also cause difficulties because they are different for each social media platform and each require different types of work output, templates and effort on the writer’s part to advertise. Furthermore, they are not always the best explained and can require a lot of time to master, time that could previously have been spent writing. In addition, it is often not enough to use just one social media platform and so the writer will have to learn how to use the various templates and styles of the different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram, all of which have their own rules and audiences.

 There are also disadvantages specifically regarding Twitter. For example, it, and other social media platforms are tremendous time-sinks, be it whether the writer is using them productively to advertise and network, or to converse and argue with fans, or even just as a procrastination tool. This can be useful at times but can also lead to the writer neglecting their actual craft of writing. Furthermore, Twitter’s 280-character limit can also present unwanted challenges for the writer by constraining their creative output. This can lead to a huge threaded tweet posted at once, thereby ignoring the value of Twitter’s concise template, or the writer posting a screenshot of a longer piece or even not attempting to write a tweet at all. Finally, there is the ability to receive instant feedback on Twitter, be it positive or negative, or even ‘outright abuse’ (Myers, 2016: 476-492), which can be a detriment to the writer’s writing and mental health. Namely, the writer might receive too much un-constructive criticism and give up, or they might receive too much weak but positive feedback, such as in the form of ‘likes’ which could cause the writer to chase these ‘likes’ rather than writing what they want to.

 In conclusion, social media presents both many advantages and disadvantages to the modern writer. The advantages include creative opportunities, such as Twitter micro-fiction, and alter-egos, as well as researching, publishing, advertising and branding tools, that can allow the writer to research and advertise independently, and with relative ease. The disadvantages, however, include the issues of mental health problems that arise from both increased pressure and the more direct connection to fans, and creative constrictions from the various social media templates. Therefore, it is ultimately up to the modern writer to find a balance between using social media and actually writing, in addition to participating in other aspects of life.

 Bibliography:

Books:

Lonergan, P. (2016) theatre & social media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pg 23-24.

Rettberg, J. (2014) Blogging: Digital Media and Society Series. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press, pg 115-117

Wolff, Jurgen. (2007) Your Writing Coach: From Concept to Character, from Pitch to Publication: Everything you need to know about writing novels, non-fiction, new media, scripts and short stories. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, pg 208, 231-232

Journals:

Kaplan, Andreas and Haenlein. (2010) Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53 59-68.

��Myers, G. (2016) Everyday oracles: authors on Twitter. Celebrity Studies, 7 (4) 476-492. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2016.1233708 [Accessed 18 November 2018].

Websites:

Hardcastle, D and Maughan, R (2018) FUCK YEAH, VIDEO GAMES: THE LIFE AND EXTRA LIVES OF A PROFESSIONAL NERD. Available at: https://unbound.com/books/nerdcubed/. [Accessed 18 November 2018]

OfficialNerdCubed (2018) THE NERD3 BOOK IS HERE! FUCK YEAH, VIDEO GAMES!. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWhWg4bksRk.  [Accessed 18 November 2018]

Lectures:

Fuller, C. (2018) Novelist Claire Fuller. [Talk], Available at: University of Winchester. [Accessed 6 November 2018].

Jefferey, S. (2018) Blogging, Branding and Briefs: An Introduction to Professional Blogging. [PowerPoint Presentation], Available at: University of Winchester. [Accessed 2 November 2018]

P.S. Yet another form of writing to be placed in the Storybook. Enjoy!

[theconservativebrief]

“I’m a victim of sexual assault,” Kellyanne Conway told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.

But, she said, “I don’t expect Judge Kavanaugh or Jake Tapper or Jeff Flake or anybody to be held responsible for that. You have to be responsible for your own conduct.”

Conway seemed to be arguing that survivors of sexual assault were unjustly taking their anger out on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by calling for senators to vote against his confirmation. Kavanaugh is now under investigation for allegations that he sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

On CNN, Conway mentioned the survivors who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) on Friday after he announced he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh.

“Those women who — who were sexually assaulted, the other day who were confronting Jeff Flake, God bless them,” she said. “But go blame the perpetrator.”

It wasn’t a new argument. Other supporters of Kavanaugh have claimed that women are opposing his confirmation because they’re angry about the way other men have treated them. Looking farther back, others on the right — and the left — have accused advocates of the #MeToo movement of scapegoating innocent men to satisfy their desire for revenge on the men who actually wronged them. Even former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) said, in his resignation speech, that his career was a casualty of the #MeToo era.

It’s certainly true that women in America are angry. But to argue that survivors are turning their rage on Kavanaugh without regard for the truth is to misunderstand their message. Despite fears to the contrary, most women don’t think it’s okay for innocent men to be punished as part of #MeToo. And the women who confronted Flake were very specific in their criticisms of Kavanaugh’s nomination. They weren’t talking about the people who had assaulted them. They were talking about the man who remains steps away from a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court.

Women’s pent-up rage may be fueling the #MeToo movement. “The role of anger, to me, is really undeniable in that movement,” Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Politics of Women’s Anger, told Vox.

But just as women are capable of telling the difference between the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and those against Aziz Ansari, they know the difference between their personal stories and the choice facing the country now. Conway and others are claiming that survivors are blinded by their rage — if anything, it’s opened their eyes.

Sunday wasn’t the first time that Conway had argued that Kavanaugh was being scapegoated by #MeToo.

“I just don’t think one man’s shoulders should bear decades of the #MeToo movement,” she said in an interview last week on CBS This Morning.

Others made similar arguments. Writing at the Federalist, Nathanael Blake argued that opposition to Kavanaugh stemmed from a sexually immoral culture in which men routinely exploited women.

“There is now a reckoning with this immiseration of women, and Kavanaugh’s enemies are presenting him as representative of this wretched culture,” he wrote. “He has been made a scapegoat, a stand-in for every entitled prep boy or frat bro who got away with treating women badly.”

Versions of this thesis — in the #MeToo era, women are out for blood, and they don’t care who it comes from — have been cropping up for months.

“Companies are firing perverts and sexual harassers, which is great, but those who can’t find any bad behavior to punish are casting around angrily, looking for random things to attack,” Kyle Smith wrote at the New York Post in February.

In January, Caitlin Flanagan of the Atlantic criticized the Babe.net story in which a woman said Aziz Ansari had pressured her for sex, calling it “3,000 words of revenge porn.”

“We’re at warp speed now, and the revolution—in many ways so good and so important—is starting to sweep up all sorts of people into its conflagration: the monstrous, the cruel, and the simply unlucky,” she wrote. Young women, she continued, are “angry and temporarily powerful, and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it.”

And when Franken announced his resignation from the Senate in December, after multiple women said he had groped or otherwise harassed them, he seemed to cast himself as an unwitting victim of #MeToo.

“A couple months ago I felt we had entered an important moment in the history of this country,” he began. “We were finally beginning to listen to women about the ways in which men’s actions affect them.”

“Then,” he said, “the conversation turned to me.” In responding to the allegations against him, Franken said he “wanted to be respectful of that broader conversation because all women deserve to be heard and their experiences taken seriously.”

The implication of his words was that women were right to be angry about sexual misconduct by men — but that any anger at Franken himself was misplaced. He, in other words, was a man at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s undoubtedly true that we are at a moment in history in which women’s anger — indeed, the anger of all people who are survivors of sexual harassment and assault — is coming to the fore with incredible power.

When women first began responding to the #MeToo hashtag, Chemaly noted, many of them posted messages like “I have so much rage” or “I’m shaking with anger.”

But it’s not the case that women are simply taking their anger out on all men indiscriminately. In a Vox/Morning Consult poll conducted in March, 69 percent of women said they supported the #MeToo movement. But only 9 percent thought it was acceptable for some men to be falsely accused as part of the movement, and just 17 percent thought it was okay if men lost their jobs over allegations of sexual misconduct that weren’t backed up by concrete evidence.

In focus groups conducted with the polling firm PerryUndem, Vox found that even women who supported #MeToo were concerned about men being falsely accused and about different kinds of sexual misconduct being treated the same way. One 33-year-old woman, for instance, said she believed the movement was “going to really help all the more women to rise at work and to become fully equal with men.” However, she said, “I felt the woman going public about Aziz Ansari was painting an unfair picture of him,” adding, “I feel like he was being lumped in with predators.”

Far from being full of indiscriminate rage, the women we talked to were cautiously optimistic — excited about the potential of the #MeToo movement, but wary of potential pitfalls. Many were angry about what had happened to them, their mothers, their daughters, and their friends, but many were also concerned that false allegations might touch the men in their lives. The stereotype of the woman so enraged by her past trauma that any male sacrifice will do was nowhere to be found.

The women who confronted Flake, meanwhile, weren’t screaming with inarticulate rage. They were making a clear argument on behalf of Americans like them. “You’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them, you’re going to ignore them,” one of the survivors said. “That’s what happened to me, and that’s what you’re telling all women in America — that they don’t matter.”

And in an op-ed in USA Today, Ana María Archila, one of the survivors who confronted Flake, made clear that telling her story was not an uncontrollable outpouring of bloodlust, but a considered political act.

She and others were speaking up, she wrote, “in the hopes that when the senators hear our stories, they will not only believe us but, most important, also will use their power to help heal our country, and not further reinforce the culture that condones sexual violence by ignoring survivors.”

“We still have this tendency to categorize women’s anger as private and personal and emotional,” Chemaly said. But at this moment in history, she argued, women’s anger is political.

Women aren’t thoughtlessly seeking a male victim for their rage, she said. Rather, they’re actually doing something constructive with their anger.

“We think of anger as something overwhelmingly negative, but it’s actually our management or mismanagement of anger that produces negative results,” she said. Some studies show that anger can help us think more clearly and creatively.

Anger isn’t just aggressive, Chemaly explained — it can also be compassionate and empathetic. And it can be powerful if we learn to “make meaning out of it,” she said. The trick is to “decide what I do well, and how am I going to take this energy and do that to make change.”

That’s exactly what the survivors were doing when they confronted Flake, Chemaly said — and what many of the hundreds of women running for office this year were doing when they decided to enter politics after the election of President Donald Trump, who has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual misconduct.

“All of the women who stepped up to run for office, they are substantively fueled by their feelings of rage,” Chemaly said. “You have to push women pretty far for them to work en masse at this scale.”

As for the idea that women were just using Kavanaugh as a scapegoat for their own assaults, Chemaly called it “bullshit.”

Conway, she argued, is “saying women have to control themselves, they don’t really know what they’re talking about.”

The idea that anger makes you confused really only applies to one expression of anger, she said — “the explosive, ‘let me break things’ anger” that our culture tends to associate with “rage-filled men.”

The anger, in other words, of men like Brett Kavanaugh.

Original Source -> What Brett Kavanaugh’s defenders get wrong about women’s anger

via The Conservative Brief

[jessekg]

9 key moments in the Black Panther's 50-year evolution

The Black Panther hits theatres this week, and the hysteria and hype surrounding the movie is very, very real.

Starring Chadwick Boseman as the Black Panther and directed by Ryan Coogler (Creed), it's the first film in the Marvel Universe to feature majority Black actors, be helmed by a Black director and be set in a (fictional) African country. Not since Wesley Snipes' Blade has a Black superhero been given such a red-carpet treatment.

In fact, Snipes recently revealed that he tried, unsuccessfully, to get a Black Panther picture off the ground in the '90s.

"I think Black Panther spoke to me because he was noble, and he was the antithesis of the stereotypes presented and portrayed about Africans, African history and the great kingdoms of Africa," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "It had cultural significance, social significance. It was something that the Black community and the white community hadn't seen before."

WhileBlade, released in 1998, ended up being the first hit film based on a Marvel character. Black Panther is on track to be another runaway success, both financially and in its cultural significance. Just take a look at the hashtag #whatdoesblackpanthermeantome, which shows zealous fans remarking on the significance of seeing positive Blackrepresentation on the big screen (everybody owes it to themselves to watch this particularly joyous reaction).

But it was a long road to get here. Below, we trace the key moments in the history of the Black Panther.

The Coal Tiger

Marvel founder Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby are credited with first coming up with the idea for Black Panther in the mid-'60s, although Kirby's original design and what we see today are drastically different. In fact, even the name was different during the conceptual stage, with Kirby originally calling the hero Coal Tiger.

The Coal Tiger was a regal, albeit old fashioned-looking hero with no mask, complete with a bright yellow jumper and matching boots overtop black tights. Thankfully, this version never made it to print and only exists as a conceptual sketch, seen here.

The original concept for the Black Panther by Jack Kirby. (Marvel)

"I came up with the Black Panther because I realized I had no Blacks in my strip," Kirby said in an interview, highlighting the fact that even during the civil rights era — a time when Black musicians saw unprecedented crossover success — Black representation was still a huge blind spot in comics. "It suddenly dawned on me — believe me, it was for human reasons — I suddenly discovered nobody was doing Blacks. And here I am a leading cartoonist and I wasn't doing a Black."

The Black Panther vs. the Black Panther party

The Black Panther made his official comic book debut in the Fantastic Four, Vol. 1 No. 52 in July 1966, which is the same year the Black Panther party was founded (though some months later). While the comic book and party were not affiliated, they both tapped into the social consciousness of the day, especially in light of recent events such as Malcolm X's assassination and the Watts riots in California. Despite being across the country from each other — Marvel in New York's garment district, the Black Panther founding members in Oakland, Calif. — the comic and the party became intertwined. They both served the need to represent Black Americans, with Marvel choosing to do so by introducing the character of T'Challa, the leader of a fictional country called Wakanda.

"At that point I felt we really needed a Black superhero," Lee told the Huffington Post in 2016. "And I wanted to get away from a common perception. So what I did, I made him almost like [Fantastic Four's] Reed Richards. He's a brilliant scientist and he lives in an area that, under the ground, is very modern and scientific and nobody suspects it because on the surface it's just thatched huts with ordinary 'natives.' And he's not letting the world know what's really going on or how brilliant they really are."

An African utopia

To Lee's point, Wakanda is an African country that was never colonized, due in part to its advanced technology that allowed Wakandans to hide their country from the rest of the world. This idea of an African utopia remained throughout the comic book's history, echoed in the rallying cry "Wakanda forever" from the 2018 film, one that has since been embraced by the film's stars.

From his first appearance, readers were introduced to the Black Panther as both a superhero and the leader of a nation that was technologically superior to the U.S. due to its wealth of vibranium, the fictional metal that is used to construct both Black Panther's suit and Captain America's shield. These are all important factors to the Black Panther's backstory that have remained consistent to this day, even as the Black Panther storylines, over the decades, became more American-focused.

"T'Challa — the Black Panther and mythical ruler of Wakanda — has always struck as the product of the Black nationalist dream, a walking revocation of white supremacist myth," Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Atlantic journalist and author who helmed the 2015 Black Panther comic, wrote at the time.

The first Black superhero

The Black Panther was originally drawn with a cape and open cowl, similar to Batman, which also showed his skin colour. However, Kirby ultimately redesigned his costume, darkening his suit and introducing a full face mask, a look that has remained more or less consistent throughout the character's history. You can see both versions of the cover below.

Even though it was apparent to readers that the character was Black — the Black Panther removes his mask within the pages of his first appearance in Fantastic Four — it wasn't until 1968 that you would see the colour of T'Challa's skin on the cover of a comic book: when the Black Panther appeared in issue No. 52 of The Avengers in a cowl (a partial mask that showed his jaw). This was important because the Black Panther was, in fact, the first Black superhero to appear in a mainstream comic book, predating other mainstream Black heroes, such as the Falcon (1969), Luke Cage (1972) and John Stewart as the Green Lantern (1971). The cowl was short lived, however, and the Black Panther soon returned to his more traditional full-coverage costume.

The Black Leopard

Over time, Marvel got weary about being so closely associated by name with the Black Panther Party, so they changed their superhero's name. It didn't go over well.

Beginning in Fantastic Four No. 119 (February 1972), the Black Panther briefly tried using the name Black Leopard, explaining it with an awkward bit of dialogue within that same issue. While commenting on the name's "political connotations" in the U.S., T'Challa is careful to say, "I neither condemn nor condone those who have taken up the name — but T'Challa is a law unto himself." It's a speech that sounds like it was taken straight from a Marvel press release, written with such hair-splitting caution as to not offend either side while still distancing the character from the political group.

Readers were not fans of the change, and the renaming didn't last long. Neither "the readers nor the creators cared for the new name," Lee told Alter Ego magazine in 2011.

And while Marvel shied away from the politicization of the Black Panther name, many of the superhero's more popular storylines were in fact very political. In the same issue where the Black Leopard name is introduced, T'Challa travels to the fictional country of Rudyarda, a thinly veiled stand in for apartheid-era South Africa. Even the country's name is based on famous British colonial writer Rudyard Kipling, author of, among other things, "the White Man's Burden." In one of the final scenes from this issue, the Thing even smashes through segregated doors before leaving the country in a heavy-handed metaphor for the politics of the day. The Black Panther name may have been too political for Marvel, but the issues of the day certainly weren't.  

'Wakandans stop being refugees from a Tarzan movie'

Fast forward one year to 1973, and the Black Panther officially stars in his own run of solo books as part of the uncomfortably named Jungle Action series.

The Black Panther's run in Jungle Action ran from September 1973 to November 1976 and was critically acclaimed, even pioneering a format that's the norm today: a self-contained, multi-issue story, a.k.a. the graphic novel. Called Panther's Rage and penned by Don McGregor, it was conceived as a complete novel told over 13 issues and introduced the antagonist Killmonger, a key character played by Michael B. Jordan in the film.

McGregor was encouraged by Marvel to include more white characters, so in January 1976, he did just that — though perhaps not in the way his editors had in mind — by facing the Black Panther off against the Ku Klux Klan. Captain America may have famously punched Adolph Hitler, but he never drop kicked a member of the Klan in the face quite like the Black Panther (see image at top)

Over 20-odd years, McGregor would introduce other extended Panther storylines (Panther's Prey; Panther's Quest) that helped develop the backstory of Wakanda and T'Challa's character in much more depth. Readers learned more about T'Challa's strength as a leader of an advanced nation, and how he deals with the constant threat from both imperialist and interior forces.

"These stories are where Wakandans stop being refugees from a Tarzan movie," writer Evan Narcisse so aptly points out.

The Black Panther becomes cool, with some help from Chandler Bing

Following an unsuccessful solo run penned by Kirby, sales and interest in the Black Panther character waned during the '80s. Storylines became more cliché, adding very little to make the character stand out from other Marvel superheroes. Then, in the '90s, Christopher Priest took up the mantle and reinvigorated the character completely.

"[Priest] had the classic run on Black Panther, period, and that's gonna be true for a long time," Coates told New York magazine for a profile on Priest titled, "The Man who Made Black Panther Cool."

As such, Priest's run also introduced some fairly major changes to T'Challa's costume, with gold accents around his neck, wrists and waist, plus the return of his cape, giving the character his most regal look yet. Priest, more than anyone before him, focused on T'Challa as a king, so the superhero was going to look the part.

It's important to note that Priest was the first Black editor/writer to be hired by either of the big two comic brands, Marvel and DC. After some ups and downs, including leaving Marvel for DC, Priest was offered Black Panther in 1998. This was the beginning of a trend that saw many prominent Black artists take the lead on the Black Panther.

"I was a little horrified when the words 'Black' and 'Panther' came out of Joe's mouth," Priest later wrote. "I mean, Black Panther? Who reads Black Panther?"

Needless to say, Black Panther's history did not inspire Priest — "His supporting cast was a bunch of soul brothers in diapers with bones through their noses," Priest wrote — but he was eventually convinced to take the job, provided one detail: he wanted to create a white protagonist. In Priest's own words: "go to the wells of snarkdom, for the snarkiest snark I was capable of. Social politics as interpreted by Richard Belzer, Dennis Leary or Dennis Miller."

Inspired by an episode of Friends (yes, that Friends), Priest created a character based on Chandler Bing. Everett K. Ross was a paranoid, incompetent government employee tasked as a diplomatic escort for T'Challa, who was portrayed as a superlative statesman by day and merciless vigilante by night. The Black Panther series morphed into a mix of political thriller, satire and traditional superhero story, told through the sarcastic point of view of Ross, with an emphasis on T'Challa's cunning wit, strength and sense of justice.

"This was how the book achieved its small cult following," Priest writes.

To Priest, T'Challa wasn't simply a superhero, and the Black Panther was more than just a superhero title.

"People had not put as much thought into who and what Black Panther was before Christopher started writing the book," Coates says in that same New York magazine interview. "He thought that Black Panther was a king."

The formula worked, and Priest's run lasted for 62 issues, becoming the defining interpretation of the character.

Introducing women warriors

In line with his expansion of the Wakandan universe, Priest also introduced another major cast of characters to the Black Panther universe — the Dora Milaje, T'Challa's fierce and all-female personal bodyguards. They are some of the deadliest women in the Marvel universe, but in Priest's initial run, they were also depicted as ceremonial "wives in training," an idea that has not aged well.

Based on Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell, the Dora Milaje were, at least in the early days, often depicted as femme fatales in short skirts and high heels. Thankfully the movie jettisons that aspect of the Dora Milaje background, focusing instead on the women's efficiency as warriors and, even more so, as key characters to the development of the story.

"I think the presentation of women is both fierce and very much feminine," Danai Gurira, who plays the head of the Dora Milaje, Okoye, in the film, tellsq. "I loved the way the women were shown being people that reach their fullest potential and live in it with a fearlessness and don't lose any part of being women. The myth is that's what happens, or women have to disguise their strength and I love that this is a world where that is just not the case."

In the 2000s, Reginald Hudlin, a writer, director and producer (his breakout film was 1990's House Party with rappers Kid 'n Play), focused on Black Panther's "street cred," drawing inspiration from Batman, Spike Lee and P Diddy. One key development from Hudlin was the creation of Shuri, T'Challa's younger sister and a tech genius who is played by Letitia Wright in the film. In the comics, she even replaces T'Challa for a time as the Black Panther and ruler of Wakanda.

This era emphasized, above all, the power and agency of the women in the Panther universe, a theme expanded on even more in the books to follow and film. Hudlin's run was also used as the basis for an excellent animated series, which ran on BET.

The extended Black Panther universe

When Coates picked up the mantle in 2016, he expanded on what Priest and Hudlin had built, but also subverted readers' expectations of the character to that point. In an interview, Coates describes fans needing T'Challa to be like Denzel Washington— "He's supposed to be smooth and effortlessly do x, y, and z." — but for Coates, it was also important to show T'Challa as flawed. "You got Denzel ... [but in] that movie where he's a drunken pilot."

Coates also focused the action back on Wakanda, questioning the very systems that held the otherwise utopian country together. Under Coates, women were made more and more crucial to the overall story, focusing more on their actual lives rather than how their characters relate to T'Challa.

Coates even ventured to develop the Panther universe in more depth with a spin-off, World of Wakanda, written with Roxane Gay (author of Bad Feminist, Hunger) and Yona Harvey, the first two Black women to write a series for Marvel. One storyline focused on the romance between Ayo and Anneka, two women who are also the driving forces to a Dora Milaje-led resistance that results in a civil war.  

World of Wakanda, however, was cancelled after six issues. Even with a best-selling author and National Book Award winner, perhaps even that was too much for the traditional comic book-buying public. The series was cancelled due to poor sales, with Marvel Studios' vice president even commenting at one point that "people didn't want any more diversity."

Although with 2018's Black Panther already breaking box-office records, this theory has been proven wrong. For a character that was, at its core, created in order to the reflect the times and to combat discrimination, it's a fitting next chapter for the Black Panther.

[hub-pub-bub]

Despite encouraging advances in the application of technology in classrooms, we have yet to see a more pervasive model of true Blended Learning, where technology is seamlessly integrated into instruction in order to drive better student learning outcomes.  

Schools worldwide are redefining the traditional classroom model to deliver personalized learning through technology-driven methods, but familiar issues − including lagging student achievement, still-inequitable distribution of resources, and continued segregation – continue to impede progress. How do educators provide equitable distribution of the most promising and effective learning technologies and strategies to all students—most notably the ones in resource-poor districts?

Schools are gamely exploring ways to lay down wireless infrastructure to deliver more consistent Internet access for students. Increasingly, these efforts include creative models for distributing critically needed Wi-Fi into communities, as well as affording students and families access to an unprecedented array of resources, classes, and content.

Click to enlarge

We also now see schools intentionally blending “technology” into teaching and learning objectives. They no longer talk about tech separately, as if it were an awkward appendage that they can’t quite control. Annual Speak Up surveys from nonprofit Project Tomorrow has compellingly shown that stakeholders at every level—from students and families to classroom teachers and district-level administrators—are demonstrating a gradual, behavioral shift, where blended learning is becoming more of the norm.

Speak Up’s most recent survey, which includes responses from more than 500,000 PreK-12 stakeholders, including administrators, teachers, librarians, students, and parents, confirms schools’ progress toward seamless technology coherence and identifies top digital learning trends, such as new classroom models, parents’ expectations for digital communications, as well as how district curriculum and instructional leaders are vetting digital content for classroom use.

But are these trends truly transforming classroom instruction? Further, are they breaking down the barriers for the most at-risk communities?

The Five Elephants present the challenges that are preventing our nation’s schools from achieving a more evolved, personalized, and equitable learning model that benefits all students.

Elephant #1: No mobile distribution platform. As much as some educators cite the use of innovative mobile apps in the classroom, the fact remains that school districts cannot procure apps in bulk in the same way they purchase other content, such as print books or web-based subscriptions. App stores (Apple and Google) are not designed to sell large numbers of apps to school districts. Microsoft just launched its App Store for Education, which will purportedly give districts the ability to bulk-purchase mobile apps, but that will only work if all those schools are committed to a Windows environment.

Moreover, when a native app is sold through an app store via Apple, Google, or Microsoft, customer information is retained by those companies, not the app creator. Many companies are working around this restriction by launching web-based apps via HTML and/or (initially) free download models, presenting customers with the “in-app purchase” opportunity to upgrade to more content and services.

Opening the pipeline of mobile apps into K–12 schools will show iOS and Android developers that American education as a viable market in which to focus their considerable technology talent. We need to convince developers that they can net substantial revenue from institutional education, as K–12 spending on digital is growing to an annual market of $3 billion-plus, according to a number of sources including Simba Information and the Learning Counsel.

Schools have been slow to adopt mobile devices and apps, according to data from Speak Up. At the same time, the majority of administrators, teachers, and parents agree that it’s critical for students to have access to mobile devices, because they believe it helps students develop college and career ready skills, drives engagement, and provides much-needed Internet access.

Elephant #2: Redefining what we mean by equitable access. Access to a diverse and robust collection of quality books—via a 24/7, 360-degree model with family involvement—has been long established as a critical equity issue. According to findings from the Scholastic Teacher & Principal School Report: Equity in Education, 46% of both teachers and principals cite access to fiction and/or nonfiction books as not adequately available for their students.

Districts nationwide have sought to provide wide-scale access, via the ambitious distribution of devices—Chromebooks, tablets, etc.—and most critically, the necessary bandwidth. The reality, however, is that those methods represent only temporary fixes. The real solution requires a more ambitious, large-scale federal policy (ConnectEd notwithstanding) to address the need for “last-mile” access to communities and homes away from school grounds—which the federal E-rate program does notcurrently cover— or the private sector jumping in with a more affordable, scalable model. Equitable access to the Internet is only equitable if all students have the same opportunity to access the same high-quality digital content.

As districts face the challenge of distribution and scale—both for devices and the bandwidth to power them—they are also discovering that negotiating the digital content landscape is just as daunting, especially in our most at-risk schools. They are not only in desperate need of bandwidth but more books in all formats, as documented by New York University professor Susan B. Neuman in a 2016 study. This dire condition will only be exacerbated if we don’t make an effort to ensure access to the best digital content—including ebooks—for all students.

Too often kids’ only exposure to “reading” is via one-dimensional, contrived text on which someone can measure their progress. These tests and assessments often hinder the joy of reading. The Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report: 6th Edition points to the importance of choice, with a majority of kids ages 6–17 (89%) agreeing that their favorite books are the ones they picked out themselves. Finding the best authentic fiction and nonfiction in e-formats must be as high a priority for schools as the connectivity and bandwidth.

There are vexing challenges: Librarians and teachers have not had an easy time obtaining unlimited, 24/7 digital access to trade titles defined by their rich authentic text, riveting characters, and clever plot twists. The challenging landscape of e-book distribution driven by still-knotty royalty issues tied to the best trade titles has continued to slow the evolution of the unlimited use model. Scholastic is continuing to improve its existing digital programs, BookFlix and Storia, while also developing new digital resources for schools.

Elephant #3: Integrating  curation into the digital content ecosystem. With a tsunami of non-vetted content courtesy of the Internet, students, teachers, and parents—and the virtual communities and social networks in which they increasingly live—are suffering the effects of unmitigated intellectual malnourishment. While teachers and students leverage content and tools, dangerous precedents are being set.

The Internet, in all its permutations, has changed our attitudes toward information and our behaviors in the way we access and consume it. Our entire value system around information, about what is factual, about the veracity of things, has been forever altered by a white-noise construct that values the provocative over being precise.

As schools continue to eliminate certified librarian positions, these professionals are needed more than ever for curating digital materials and resources to help design and deliver the next-generation taxonomy of order, logic, and accuracy. We not only need librarians to help our students be more discerning, but to help them think more critically. There is not a school district in America that does not have critical thinking as one of its highest priorities.

Librarians must be at the forefront of adopting and promulgating a prevailing set of evaluation criteria in order to more effectively evaluate and curate content, including social media.

While grassroots projects have addressed quality control, the opportunity to meld an authoritative organization that can sustain with a community-based, crowd-sourced model of evaluation, is long overdue. Common Sense Media has done an admirable job around digital citizenship, helping parents and educators negotiate the overwhelming content terrain of mobile apps and websites.

In another example, Texas has created the Learning List, which aims to deliver qualified reviews  of both publisher offerings and open source materials in a range of content areas. Whether Texas will allocate the critical state funding to sustain and grow Learning List remains to be seen.

Other curating resources are bubbling up, including the Educational Hashtag and Twitter Chat Database. Built by Shake Up Learning’s Kasey Bell, the database is both filterable and searchable, as well as “a work in progress.” The Learning Counsel has also done an admirable job and shown a commitment to driving this conversation, in terms of awareness, with its Digital Curriculum Sustainability Discussions. Still, we have a considerable way to go.

Elephant #4: Understanding the potential and the limitations of OER. The open educational resources(OER) initiative is akin to Wikipedia. The two entities share an early struggle for legitimacy, in addition to well-documented gaps in their content repository. But Wikipedia has shown it can morph and change and get better. While some question the credibility and quality of content derived from an open source framework (vs. content produced and published by a private publishing entity),  Wikipedia has turned into a household search tool, by tapping into the same dynamic that is now driving OER: leveraging the aggregate knowledge of communities.

OER will get bigger, better, richer and more diverse as the learning communities it represents expands its aggregate knowledge base, as the number of avid and committed participants grows, and as this emerging community continues to enhance, grow, and shape the repository of content. But OER is not driving the open source revolution by itself. For example, Knovation, which aims to enhance open source content, and Amazon Inspire, which touts itself as “a free service for the search, discovery, and sharing of digital educational resources” are also emerging models.

According to Speak Up, OER has emerged to compete with other key school initiatives including blended learning, game-based learning, one-to-one learning models, and flipped classrooms. However, there remains a discernible divide between the high-quality, standards-driven core and supplemental materials that school districts need and off-the-shelf, public domain materials that OER currently offers.

Elephant # 5: The Internet of Things (5G). This might be the most profoundly impactful and disruptive elephant of all. The crux of 5G is that it provides the high-capacity bandwidth to allow for a hyper-connected network, referred to as the “Internet of Things” (IoT) and defined as a network of Internet-connected objects able to collect and exchange data using embedded sensors. Florida has taken a major step forward with Governor Rick Scott’s recent signing of a 5G wireless technology bill.

From an education perspective, 5G would transform emerging cutting-edge technologies like augmented reality and artificial intelligence, or machine learning, into legitimate teaching and learning tools for the classroom and beyond. Certainly, we haven’t fully grasped the potential impact of IoT on teaching and learning, but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking differently about what’s possible, given this unprecedented capacity to create and distribute content that will (finally) disrupt the learning landscape as we know it.

Evan St. Lifer is vice president of strategic and digital initiatives for Scholastic.

This article was published in School Library Journal's January 2018 issue. Subscribe today and save up to 35% off the regular subscription rate.

[hotspreadpage]

How 3 Serious Brands Engage Humanly on Social Media

Leaf through a portfolio of social media award winners, and you’re likely to see entrants from the tourism, cooking, and fashion industries. Putting together an Instagram or Snapchat plan for these companies may not be easy, but then again, emerald beaches and platefuls of poké make for great social sharing. 

What about those less-than-obvious brands? I chose three Content Marketing Awards finalists that prove even serious brands can be human and entertaining.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 Gospels to Follow on Social Media That Are Strategic, Systematic, and Smart

Cisco uses Snapchat to woo new employees

Finding great talent is a perennial problem for technology companies, and hiring young technophiles is particularly important to ensure a strong talent pipeline. Cisco highlights the everyday lives and challenges of young employees – a smart way to entice young professionals to apply to work at the IT and networking giant. Cisco’s Talent Brand Team’s mission is to make personal connections with future talent, and they do that by showcasing Cisco employee voices and their work with technology across the @WeAreCisco social media channels. The challenge is: how to stand out?

#Cisco’s @WeAreCisco uses #Snapchat & #Instagram to recruit new talent on #social. @soloportfolio Read how Click To Tweet

To connect with university students, new graduates, and Generation Z, Cisco recruited 20 super-ambassador employees (whom they found through social media listening) from several geographies and invited them into a meeting using Cisco’s Webex platform for a launch brainstorming session. That group was soon dubbed the Kitten Rainbow Unicorns (everything that is awesome about the web), and the social media team launched a pilot Snapchat program that effectively handed over the keys to the #WeAreCisco Snapchat account to these young unicorns.

Each day, one of the employees  (the program has now grown to 70+ Snapchatters around the globe) was responsible for creating a Snapchat Story about what it’s like to work inside Cisco. (To ensure that the project didn’t run off the rails, each member had to sign the Cisco Social Media Policy, promise not to share the password, and go be themselves.) After three weeks, the pilot was transitioned to an ongoing effort. The Kitten Rainbow Unicorns get together to share ideas for future takeovers, and compare notes about what works well and what doesn’t.

Image source

“In just over a year since our pilot program, we’ve doubled our unique views each day, and we average 60-70% completion rate (how many people watch from start to finish on each Snap). Our research indicates that is 20-30% more than the industry standard,” says Carmen Collins, social media lead for  Cisco’s Talent Brand,

The idea of employee-generated content is found throughout the WeAreCisco social media channels, including  Instagram. In the same way the team found ambassadors for Snapchat, they’ve identified employees posting photos of life at Cisco on Instagram, and through listening on the #WeAreCisco hashtag, they request permission to amplify the photos and stories on the @WeAreCisco Instagram account. You’ll find a similar strategy on all of their social channels.

“Through employee-generated content, we’ve got authenticity which builds trust. Our Instagram account, for example, has grown organically (no paid followers) from 0-20K followers and double industry engagement rates,” Collins says. ”While it’s not like our takeovers on Snapchat, it’s the same idea, customized for each social media platform.”

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CalSTRS reaches millennials with quirky financial content

CalSTRS is well known as the largest educator public pension; it provides benefits for more than 914,000 California educators and their families and has an investment portfolio worth over $213 billion. The pension fund conducts annual surveys to ensure that it’s reaching its members and positively influencing their behavior relative to saving and investing – and a more recent survey showed it could improve its outreach to early-career members who might not be as savvy (or motivated) about retirement planning.

The fund decided to put a greater effort into its Facebook page — specifically, ensuring that its educational content has a human face. As CalSTRS explains in its CMA submission, “Our voice is youthful and positive, but never inaccurate or silly.” CalSTRS publishes original videos, humor, and teacher-interest stories, and news about the CalSTRS portfolio. It publishes more than 25 posts per week, many of which are repeating themes such as Pie Day Friday, Investments 101, and Teacher Talk (profiles of California educators). The posts share educational information, but do so with fun and quirky humor. It’s proof that money management need not be such serious business.

.@CalSTRS publishes on #Facebook to ensure that its educational #content has a human face. @soloportfolio Click To Tweet

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HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Humanize Your Brand: 3 Ways to Create a Visual Social Media Calendar

Merrill Lynch wants to stand out on Twitter

Speaking of serious money management … financial advisers Merrill Lynch wanted to ensure that its online content didn’t suffer from serious-subject syndrome. The company’s Twitter handle, @MerrillLynch, is its key content distribution channel to share information about smart money management as well as cast the brand as a sage adviser to customers and prospects. But getting attention for financial news on Twitter is a bit like trying to keep your umbrella right-side out in a hurricane. The social team at Merrill decided to take a different, less staid approach.

Rather than only publishing the serious stuff, Merrill experimented with newer and more-playful formats. For Father’s Day, it published a “GIFographic” that shows the current state of paternity leave around the world.

View full GIFographic

And it published a Twitter Gallery Card that highlighted the benefits to cities “When the Political Convention Comes to Town” (#RNCinCLE; #DemsinPhilly). “It’s all about giving followers experiences that are memorable, timely, and useful,” according to Merrill Lynch in its CMA submission. The company is also becoming more adept at using hashtags and leveraging influencers to get greater visibility for its content online.

Give #Twitter followers memorable, timely, & useful experiences, says @MerrillLynch via @soloportfolio. Click To Tweet

Finally, Merrill uses its internal thought leaders to deliver just-in-time content to media outlets during big news events in the financial industry. (For example, after the Brexit vote.) And it uses interactive polls and questions during these breaking news events to keep the Merrill-made available videos of experts sharing the latest thinking from its BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research conversation open and engaging. The result: With nearly a half-million followers, the @MerrillLynch handle has the second largest following of all wealth management firms – and more than Money magazine’s handle.

What can you learn from these unexpectedly fun examples?

1. Develop a clear plan.

Earlier this year, Melissa Eggleston wrote a great article about finding your brand’s identity – and why that matters. She explains, “Identity is constructed from core values. It’s the foundation that informs both an organization’s culture and its brand(s). When identity is unique – or clear and distinct – an organization will attract an audience that shares its core values … Companies that do not have clear, responsible sets of core values applied effectively come off as inauthentic and inhuman.”

Companies that don’t have clear, responsible sets of core values come off as inhuman. @melissa_egg Click To Tweet

If you’re not sure whether quirky content or a playful voice would work … it’s possible you don’t know what your company stands for or at least haven’t spelled it out clearly. In other words, uncertainty may be a sign you need to work on brand identity, personality, and voice BEFORE you embark on a new content initiative.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Focus Your Marketing: Define Your 3(ish) Critical Words

2. Don’t force it.

Want to know the perils of straying too far from your company’s identity or consistent voice? Who better than to warn us than Jonathan Crossfield? Jonathan chronicles the mishaps of well-meaning but overly artificial brands on social media. (And what happens when brand banter just isn’t funny.)

3. Talent-facing content is a great place to begin.

If you’re shy about using humor across your social channels, you may feel less constrained with employer branding – particularly if you’re trying to attract a younger crowd. Consider starting with employees or future talent prospects to try out a more playful tone and voice. Tim Washer, an SNL writer and creative director at Cisco, has great tips about how to exercise your funny bone.

4. Consult your younger professionals.

Cisco understood that to use Snapchat it needed to consult its younger workers (who else would come up with Kitten Rainbow Unicorns). Always ensure that if you’re trying to reach a certain demographic, you have a planning and strategy team that includes that demographic. That will save you from the perils of trying too hard.

You need to have a planning & strategy team that includes the demographic you want to reach. @soloportfolio Click To Tweet

5. Think in terms of repeating themes.

Rather than attempting a wholesale personality change, why not try it in small doses? Weekly themes give you permission to break from the serious stuff. For example, CalSTRS’ Teacher Talk repeats each week and is expected by its audience. (My all-time favorite version of this is GE’s takeover of the Hey Girl meme — though in that case swapping out Ryan Gosling for Thomas Edison.)

Click to enlarge

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Are Your Customers Unsubscribing? 3 Ways to Deliver Delightful Content Experiences

Get insightful, human perspectives and fresh trends in content marketing through CCO magazine edited by Clare McDermott. Subscribe to the free print version today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How 3 Serious Brands Engage Humanly on Social Media appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

How 3 Serious Brands Engage Humanly on Social Media syndicated from http://ift.tt/2maPRjm

[lucyariablog]

How 3 Serious Brands Engage Humanly on Social Media

Leaf through a portfolio of social media award winners, and you’re likely to see entrants from the tourism, cooking, and fashion industries. Putting together an Instagram or Snapchat plan for these companies may not be easy, but then again, emerald beaches and platefuls of poké make for great social sharing. 

What about those less-than-obvious brands? I chose three Content Marketing Awards finalists that prove even serious brands can be human and entertaining.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 Gospels to Follow on Social Media That Are Strategic, Systematic, and Smart

Cisco uses Snapchat to woo new employees

Finding great talent is a perennial problem for technology companies, and hiring young technophiles is particularly important to ensure a strong talent pipeline. Cisco highlights the everyday lives and challenges of young employees – a smart way to entice young professionals to apply to work at the IT and networking giant. Cisco’s Talent Brand Team’s mission is to make personal connections with future talent, and they do that by showcasing Cisco employee voices and their work with technology across the @WeAreCisco social media channels. The challenge is: how to stand out?

#Cisco’s @WeAreCisco uses #Snapchat & #Instagram to recruit new talent on #social. @soloportfolio Read how Click To Tweet

To connect with university students, new graduates, and Generation Z, Cisco recruited 20 super-ambassador employees (whom they found through social media listening) from several geographies and invited them into a meeting using Cisco’s Webex platform for a launch brainstorming session. That group was soon dubbed the Kitten Rainbow Unicorns (everything that is awesome about the web), and the social media team launched a pilot Snapchat program that effectively handed over the keys to the #WeAreCisco Snapchat account to these young unicorns.

Each day, one of the employees  (the program has now grown to 70+ Snapchatters around the globe) was responsible for creating a Snapchat Story about what it’s like to work inside Cisco. (To ensure that the project didn’t run off the rails, each member had to sign the Cisco Social Media Policy, promise not to share the password, and go be themselves.) After three weeks, the pilot was transitioned to an ongoing effort. The Kitten Rainbow Unicorns get together to share ideas for future takeovers, and compare notes about what works well and what doesn’t.

Image source

“In just over a year since our pilot program, we’ve doubled our unique views each day, and we average 60-70% completion rate (how many people watch from start to finish on each Snap). Our research indicates that is 20-30% more than the industry standard,” says Carmen Collins, social media lead for  Cisco’s Talent Brand,

The idea of employee-generated content is found throughout the WeAreCisco social media channels, including  Instagram. In the same way the team found ambassadors for Snapchat, they’ve identified employees posting photos of life at Cisco on Instagram, and through listening on the #WeAreCisco hashtag, they request permission to amplify the photos and stories on the @WeAreCisco Instagram account. You’ll find a similar strategy on all of their social channels.

“Through employee-generated content, we’ve got authenticity which builds trust. Our Instagram account, for example, has grown organically (no paid followers) from 0-20K followers and double industry engagement rates,” Collins says. ”While it’s not like our takeovers on Snapchat, it’s the same idea, customized for each social media platform.”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

How GE Gives Recruiting Content a Personality Lift

Celebrity Shares How Brands Can Benefit in the Snapchat Scene

CalSTRS reaches millennials with quirky financial content

CalSTRS is well known as the largest educator public pension; it provides benefits for more than 914,000 California educators and their families and has an investment portfolio worth over $213 billion. The pension fund conducts annual surveys to ensure that it’s reaching its members and positively influencing their behavior relative to saving and investing – and a more recent survey showed it could improve its outreach to early-career members who might not be as savvy (or motivated) about retirement planning.

The fund decided to put a greater effort into its Facebook page — specifically, ensuring that its educational content has a human face. As CalSTRS explains in its CMA submission, “Our voice is youthful and positive, but never inaccurate or silly.” CalSTRS publishes original videos, humor, and teacher-interest stories, and news about the CalSTRS portfolio. It publishes more than 25 posts per week, many of which are repeating themes such as Pie Day Friday, Investments 101, and Teacher Talk (profiles of California educators). The posts share educational information, but do so with fun and quirky humor. It’s proof that money management need not be such serious business.

.@CalSTRS publishes on #Facebook to ensure that its educational #content has a human face. @soloportfolio Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Humanize Your Brand: 3 Ways to Create a Visual Social Media Calendar

Merrill Lynch wants to stand out on Twitter

Speaking of serious money management … financial advisers Merrill Lynch wanted to ensure that its online content didn’t suffer from serious-subject syndrome. The company’s Twitter handle, @MerrillLynch, is its key content distribution channel to share information about smart money management as well as cast the brand as a sage adviser to customers and prospects. But getting attention for financial news on Twitter is a bit like trying to keep your umbrella right-side out in a hurricane. The social team at Merrill decided to take a different, less staid approach.

Rather than only publishing the serious stuff, Merrill experimented with newer and more-playful formats. For Father’s Day, it published a “GIFographic” that shows the current state of paternity leave around the world.

View full GIFographic

And it published a Twitter Gallery Card that highlighted the benefits to cities “When the Political Convention Comes to Town” (#RNCinCLE; #DemsinPhilly). “It’s all about giving followers experiences that are memorable, timely, and useful,” according to Merrill Lynch in its CMA submission. The company is also becoming more adept at using hashtags and leveraging influencers to get greater visibility for its content online.

Give #Twitter followers memorable, timely, & useful experiences, says @MerrillLynch via @soloportfolio. Click To Tweet

Finally, Merrill uses its internal thought leaders to deliver just-in-time content to media outlets during big news events in the financial industry. (For example, after the Brexit vote.) And it uses interactive polls and questions during these breaking news events to keep the Merrill-made available videos of experts sharing the latest thinking from its BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research conversation open and engaging. The result: With nearly a half-million followers, the @MerrillLynch handle has the second largest following of all wealth management firms – and more than Money magazine’s handle.

What can you learn from these unexpectedly fun examples?

1. Develop a clear plan.

Earlier this year, Melissa Eggleston wrote a great article about finding your brand’s identity – and why that matters. She explains, “Identity is constructed from core values. It’s the foundation that informs both an organization’s culture and its brand(s). When identity is unique – or clear and distinct – an organization will attract an audience that shares its core values … Companies that do not have clear, responsible sets of core values applied effectively come off as inauthentic and inhuman.”

Companies that don’t have clear, responsible sets of core values come off as inhuman. @melissa_egg Click To Tweet

If you’re not sure whether quirky content or a playful voice would work … it’s possible you don’t know what your company stands for or at least haven’t spelled it out clearly. In other words, uncertainty may be a sign you need to work on brand identity, personality, and voice BEFORE you embark on a new content initiative.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Focus Your Marketing: Define Your 3(ish) Critical Words

2. Don’t force it.

Want to know the perils of straying too far from your company’s identity or consistent voice? Who better than to warn us than Jonathan Crossfield? Jonathan chronicles the mishaps of well-meaning but overly artificial brands on social media. (And what happens when brand banter just isn’t funny.)

3. Talent-facing content is a great place to begin.

If you’re shy about using humor across your social channels, you may feel less constrained with employer branding – particularly if you’re trying to attract a younger crowd. Consider starting with employees or future talent prospects to try out a more playful tone and voice. Tim Washer, an SNL writer and creative director at Cisco, has great tips about how to exercise your funny bone.

4. Consult your younger professionals.

Cisco understood that to use Snapchat it needed to consult its younger workers (who else would come up with Kitten Rainbow Unicorns). Always ensure that if you’re trying to reach a certain demographic, you have a planning and strategy team that includes that demographic. That will save you from the perils of trying too hard.

You need to have a planning & strategy team that includes the demographic you want to reach. @soloportfolio Click To Tweet

5. Think in terms of repeating themes.

Rather than attempting a wholesale personality change, why not try it in small doses? Weekly themes give you permission to break from the serious stuff. For example, CalSTRS’ Teacher Talk repeats each week and is expected by its audience. (My all-time favorite version of this is GE’s takeover of the Hey Girl meme — though in that case swapping out Ryan Gosling for Thomas Edison.)

Click to enlarge

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Are Your Customers Unsubscribing? 3 Ways to Deliver Delightful Content Experiences

Get insightful, human perspectives and fresh trends in content marketing through CCO magazine edited by Clare McDermott. Subscribe to the free print version today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How 3 Serious Brands Engage Humanly on Social Media appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/10/brands-engage-social-media/

[mindthump]

25 Ways to Market Your New Business on Little or No Money http://ift.tt/2s3ZgQ5

If you've been in business before, you understand the challenges of getting customers through the door. In theory, it sounds easy. But in practice, it’s tough.

Luck has nothing to do with your success in marketing a new business or making sales. Incorporating creative ideas into your marketing strategies is the way forward.

Related: How 5 Entrepreneurs Went From Rock Bottom to Rock Star

The internet has broadened the options for new businesses hoping to reach more customers. In addition, it’s made it easier and more affordable. A simple Google search will reveal numerous case studies of successful startups. Many prospered by driving thousands of sales on a shoestring budget. However, the success stories don’t reveal what goes on behind the scenes -- how innovators used their creativity to attract customers.

Whether you run a brick-and-mortar operation or an online business, the following ideas can help you pull in customers. The plan is to entice potential customers to inquire about your new business.

1. Invent a viral hashtag.

Brands today are likely to make more sales via social media than any other channel. Instagram and Facebook are two platforms customers use to discover new brands and products to follow. Those who find a way to go viral have the best chance to be discovered.

A business that invents a trendy hashtag can become the social-media darling everyone wants to patronize. Here are just two types of hashtags:

Controversial. If you think it could work for your brand and customer base, follow in the footsteps of Daniela Bregoli. She now has more than 8 million Instagram followers who key in to her #cashmeoutside catchphrase (still a popular meme).

Sensual. Nusret Gökçe is known for treating his meat affectionately. It earned him the nickname “Salt Bae.” His #saltbae Instagram videos attracted global attention when they went viral and earned him 5.9 million followers.

Related: Marketers Are Searching for Instagram Services 12X More Than Snapchat's

2. Guest-post for free.

You can extend your reach by seeking out and contacting top online publications in your industry. Offer to guest-post in exchange for having your name and business featured in their bio. This will expose your content to a larger audience and direct more attention to your website or preferred platforms.

3. Cold-call potential leads.

Reaching out directly to new customers might sound scary at first, but cold-calling is a proven way to make sales to customers who might not even know they needed your products or services. Just identify your target buyers and hit them up. Practice your sales pitch until you perfect it.

Related: Closing the Deal: 6 Savvy Entrepreneurs Share Their Secrets

4. Meet new customers at events.

Because people are curious about new businesses and what these companies have to offer, attending events can be incredibly beneficial. Moreover, events often offer the opportunity to meet journalists and secure some much-needed press. 

Find out how to set up your own booth or stand. Display your products, hand out business cards, and distribute flyers advertising your services or products. This is your chance to chat with the crowd, network and exchange contact details with potential customers.

Related: Why the Best Brands Are the Best Storytellers

5. Start a blog about your business.

Business blogging is similar to regular blogging. The difference is you're sharing details of your company's products or services with your readers.

Your business blog is an ideal platform to answer customers' questions and give discounts, freebies and special offers as incentives and rewards. Sharing high-quality, compelling content targeted to your ideal customers will drive traffic to your website.

Related: How I Turned Engineers Into Bloggers With 50,000 Views

6. Use Facebook ads to reach customers.

Facebook ads are an effective means to reach new customers. Even better, these ads are cheap. Start with a daily budget of $5 and target a very specific audience to keep your costs down.

To nail this platform, learn how to run a successful Facebook ad campaign.

7. Build email funnels.

Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to get repeat customers. Use your business blog to build a mailing list by encouraging your readers to subscribe. Nurturing your subscribers prepares them to become paying customers in the future.

Ideally, you'll start collecting emails before you launch your product or service. This allows you to start building a relationship with these ground-level potential customer base and move them down the sales funnel as soon as possible. 

8. Speak at events.

New business founders can get exposure by speaking at events. It's easy to get a speaking gig if you're able to demonstrate a great understanding of the event organizer’s goal.

This tactic not only creates value-added exposure for your business but also builds your credibility as a founder and a trusted resource in your industry or market space. 

Related: How This Idea Went From the Founder's Kitchen to a $20 Million Company

9. Rent a festival booth.

Cash in on spring and summer festivals. Start by researching local festivals, and speak with organizers to learn whether your customers are likely to attend the events.

It's rare for a business to get a booth at Comic Con and come back without being swamped with sales and requests for press interviews.

Entice customers by giving out freebies in exchange for their email addresses. Promoting your brand at a booth while employing ingenuity and marketing savvy could produce a significant turnaround for your business.

10. Volunteer under your brand's name.

Doing good for your community also benefits your business. Through a corporate social-responsibility campaign, your new business can open new doors to opportunity.

For example, give something free to your community. Helping people in need will get the attention of local newspapers. They’ll write about you and showcase your brand in the process, attracting even more supporters for your worthy cause (and your leads file). 

11. Give away samples.

Costco knows the power of giving away samples. The retail giant has gained long-term customers from this practice.

You might offer a free trial (e.g., "first month free") or send a free sample in the mail. Bite-size versions of the real thing can prompt people to spread news about your brand, resulting in free publicity and personal testimonials.

Related: The Marketing Power of Rewards Programs

12. Hire affiliate marketers.

When done correctly, affiliate marketing can boost sales considerably. It’s one of the most cost-effective types of marketing because you only commission only after a successful sale. Affiliate marketers do the work for you by linking up with appropriate websites to promote your products or services. You part with your cash only after they’ve managed to convert visitors into paying customers.

13. Give samples to product critics.

Criticism usually is perceived as negative. Instead, try to think of it as constructive input -- a positive element. Criticism can become an effective way to refine or reinvent your product. If all you hear is good reviews, how can you tell if your product is faulty or missing a vital element?

Offering product samples to critics enables them to do a deep dive. Use that feedback to improve your product or fix components that don't work as well as they should.

Related: This Website Uses Customer Feedback to Create Products People Want

14. Offer workshops.

Workshops bring you face-to-face with potential customers. Use these events to share your professional expertise. Surely, there are aspects of your business you can tap into to connect with people on this level.

Providing value, increasing knowledge and sharing good practices raises brand awareness and builds trust. You’ll be viewed as an authority in your industry while developing the skills of potential customers.

15. Post a video review of your product.

A number of platforms feature video or livestreaming content options to help you educate prospective customers about your products. Facebook Live videos are trending. One of this platform's benefits: Viewers can comment and give feedback in real time. While they're seeing you live, they're beginning to develop a relationship with you and your brand. 

You also can create a YouTube channel dedicated to your product. Incorporate these videos in your business blog and create circular references: Drive traffic from YouTube to your website by embedding a link within the video and its YouTube description. 

16. Secure a spot on product-review sites.

Positive reviews can boost your brand's credibility. They highlight your products and pique potential customers' interest. Reviews based on unbiased opinions are the most likely to influence prospective customers.

Investing in review sites such as Yelp typically yields a healthy ROI. According to a BCG study, business owners who paid to advertise received typical yearly profits of $23,000, generating $15,000 more than those who used only the free Yelp Business Page.

Related: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Ecommerce Campaigns

17. Post your services on Craigslist.

Established in 1996, Craigslist has grown to become one of the most popular advertising websites. The average monthly page views in November 2016 were 50 billion, with a turnover of 60 million users.

Capitalize on this free platform to get your brand out there. Post your ad under the Services section to reach customers in your niche. You can list your ad under a specific region, city and type of ad.

Still, be aware you’re up against competition. Study Craigslist to find out how to stand out from the crowd, and position yourself accordingly.

18. Send cold emails.

The beauty of sending cold emails is that your customers can access them wherever they are. No longer are they restricted to a desktop computer. Modern technologies -- mobile phones, laptops and iPads -- make it a breeze to check emails on the go.  

On the other hand, people are bombarded with emails every minute. How do you make yours stand out? Develop a strategy, and carry out A/B split tests to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Research your target audience, then use the right language and the right messages to make sure they click.

Related: This is the Cold Email I Used to Connect With C-Level Execs at 22 of the World's Biggest Companies

19. Hire a human billboard.

Human billboards are a growing craze. Although they certainly won't work for free, part-time help won't cost an arm and a leg. You'll want to target students, retirees or anyone looking to earn extra cash.

A human billboard in colorful, full-body paint can craw attention to your brand -- provided it's an appropriate move for your company's persona. Even wearing a sandwich board instead of the Pantone rainbow, your human billboard will be available to answer questions from potential customers.

20. Wrap your car.

Imagine the number of people who will see your brand as you drive your local streets and high-traffic areas.

Your car becomes a moving billboard, that drums up notice wherever you go. Even when parked, it attracts attention. Vehicle wraps help your brand gain recognition, and that top-of-mind awareness could drive a high percentage of direct sales.

21. Hand out flyers.

Although businesses started using handbills to promote their brands as early as the 18th century, flyers still are having a marketing impact in the 21st century.

Don't limit yourself to handing out flyers to passersby in your neighborhood. You can display these versatile materials in shop windows, mail them to specific contacts or leave them in shops where members of your target audience are sure to show up. Flyers raise awareness of your brand and provide ample "real estate" on the page to give the reader or viewer a picture of who you are. In addition, if people tuck your flyer away in pocket or snap a quick photo with their smartphone, they can refer to this info when they need to contact you.

22. Run viral contests.

Regular contests can ramp up your business quickly and build engagement with your audience. Plan them properly to ensure success.

Qualified winners should get free products as prizes. Contests should involve participants who can highlight your business on their social-media channels, so shares and likes quickly can go viral.

Another option: Invite participants to enter a contest with their email addresses. Follow up by sending sales emails.

Related: How the Rules of Tech Branding Helped Raden Create a Smart Suitcase

23. Build a product-page website.

A product-page website is essentially a landing page. Showcase your product with images that display its best features. Choose a design that complements your brand, and include captivating copy that emphasizes how your product or service solves a problem.

A combination of professional design and appealing images will attract target visitors and can help convert leads into sales. Make sure your product page includes an opt-in offer so potential customers can access your giveaway in return for giving up a few contact details.

24. Create a punchy elevator pitch.

Know how to sell your brand, and entice potential prospects in 30 seconds or less. Create a short, memorable elevator pitch. Then, practice until it’s perfect. Make it punchy, relevant and full of benefits. Use it to impress likely customers when they ask you about your brand. You never know when you’ll have an opportunity to pitch your products or services. Always be prepared.

25. Send out press releases.

What news can you share? What’s interesting? How do you differ from your competitors? Write a compelling story about your business. Submit it to various free public-relations sites to let the world know about your business.

Related: 6 Ways to Build a Billion-Dollar Sales Machine

Marketing your business doesn’t have to cost you a fortune. With creative thinking and a few tips in this article, you can grow your business more quickly. Choose which tactics would be most at-home in your industry. Plan properly, and don't be afraid to step a bit out of your common comfort zone.

  Related: 25 Ways to Market Your New Business on Little or No Money The Most Brilliant Business Ideas 6 Tips for Your Marketing and Sales Reps to Consistently Produce Value-Added Content