Jeff Roney from RoneyZone Radio asked me to sit down and discuss our current employment situation and the ways new media can be used to communicate and connect.

“This series started as an attempt to help people who;
are worried about losing their jobs,
have lost their jobs,
or are struggling in general during this economic crisis.” – www.roneyzone.com

Jeff is setting a good example. He saw people around him losing jobs right and left. He asked himself; what can I do to help? Since he is a podcaster and an interviewer, the answer was to do a series on the economy and job loss.

I’ve been saying that the first rule of New Media is to BE HELPFUL!

Jeff is being a good member of the new media community by using his skills to be helpful and provide an additional avenue for discussion.

You can find my interview with Jeff here and the begining of the series here.

According to Libsyn, the company that holds my audio files so you can download them, I have been podcasting since 1969. That’s longer than Scott Sigler’s claim of podcasting for 18 years, and what proof does he have? 

Well I finally dusted the cob webs off my microphone and put out another PodcastJunky episode. You can find it at PodcastJunky.com.

I highlighted CC Chapman’s Managing the Gray podcast. CC helped me though a tuff time recently when Hubby was laid off from his job. We’ve never actually met and he has no idea he helped me, but he did.

CC’s contagious energy and pure love of life just runs through my ear buds and fills my gas tank with the stuff I need to keep going in difficult times.

I was in Costco the other day and witnessed a rather different form of marketing.

These big box stores have their own people giving out samples but they also bring in outside vendors for limited periods of time to promote their own products. The clothing and jewelry vendors don’t really capture my attention. But being a foodie, I always enjoy the chance to try a new and tasty product. After all, who hasn’t eaten lunch at Costco by way of grazing on the samples.

“Three for the price of one” and “Today & today only” the carnival barker yelled. OK, this guy was a bit more annoying than most of the outside vendors Costco brings in but, whatever. I’m willing to give the product a taste.

This time the product was cheese. A well known national brand of cheese. The first sample was a cheese dip, not bad, Warm and yummy. As I reached for the second item to be sampled, cheese on a cracker, the man handing out samples said:

“Don’t just grab and run, listen to the man” Then he proceeded to point to the annoying carnival barker. Both of them were looking right at me.

Are you serious? Do you actually think you can humiliate me into purchasing your product?

I flirted with the idea of telling them off then and there but decided I didn’t want to bring any attention to them or their cheesy product.  I just walked away, carrying with me a negative feeling about their brand.

For years a sweet older gentleman has been going through our condominiums trash dumpsters looking for recyclables. I used to see him there about once a week. We exchange polite pleasantries but I never learned a second language so the conversation stopped there. He is a sweet old man just trying to get by in this world. Whenever I saw him I would run back to the house and grab whatever cans and bottles we had saved since the last time I saw him.

A few months ago I noticed more, usually older gentlemen, going through the trash. They also started stopping by with much more frequency. Now days it seems like every time I take the trash out or walk the dog past the trash dumpster there is someone going though it for recyclables of every kind. A sign the quicksand our economy is in I suppose.

The other day I saw something that really got my attention. It was a couple, about my age. They were putting the items they found into the back of their truck, a really nice truck. Much nicer than either of the cars my husband and I drive.

Clearly they were making a good living before whatever happened, happened. Right now our only income is an unemployment check. We haven’t actually received the first check yet so our income is only theoretical.

Thankfully, we are still in the category of people putting things in the dumpster and not the group having to take things out to survive. We have lots of options before reaching that point of desperation. But seeing this couple certainly made me stop to think.

As I sit here with only a theoretical income, there is a lot to think about.

A few months ago I started an online tutoring business. I have to use the term business lightly since it really never took off.

My idea was that students often don’t need an entire hour with a tutor, they just need help with that one problem to get them over the hump. So instead of purchasing a sit down with a face to face tutor, they would purchase 30 or 60 minute blocks and the unused minutes would role over until they needed me next.

So let’s start with what went right. I purchased a domain name and got a site up. MeganTheMathTutor.com. OK, not the most exciting domain name but hey, it’s self explanatory. Besides, if you are desperately trying to get through your math homework do you want a fancy name or do you simply want someone who can get you through the homework and help you pass the test?

I’m no web-page designer but I liked the page. It looked nice but here is the first thing I did wrong, it’s stagnant.  I didn’t blog on it. I didn’t give people a reason to come back to  it and search engines only saw an informational page that was old.

Now on to Social Media.I’ve been playing in the social media space for a long time. I have accounts with the usual’s, MySpace, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. but I am most active on twitter.

Twitter is a microblogging platform that asked the question “What are you doing?” and users answer in 140 characters or less. But they also do a lot of celebrating fun things that are happening or venting about their frustrations.

I have an active twitter account @PodcastJunky. I didn’t want to muck it up with a bunch of math tutoring stuff so I started a new account @MeganTheTutor. And that’s where I really started to go wrong, way wrong.

Nothing wrong with having two accounts. For example, Paul J. Barrie, Jr.has @pauljbarriejr for his personal day to day tweets and WTTM for his wildly popular Disney fan podcast Window to the Magic. People follow one or both of his accounts depending on their interest.

The problem was the way I treated these two accounts. My PodcastJunky account was started just for fun and I followed podcasters to start with and then started following the interesting people they were having conversations with. I took a different approach with my second account.

On @MeganTheTutor I set up a twitter search looking for students struggling with math, It worked like a charm. During afternoon and early evening I was seeing a new tweet at least every few minutes.

All those students, all frustrated with math and here I am, a math tutor with no students. So I started offering to help. Each time I saw a tweet of frustration over math homework I would offer free help, a free sample of my services.

All that was good but my approach was bad. All I did was to offer help so my twitter stream looked like this:

• @kimmiebear Let me know if you run into any trouble studying for that math test, And Good Luck on it.4:37 PM Jan 29th from web

• @LovesBrooklyn2 Let me know if I can be of any help on that math homework.4:36 PM Jan 29th from web

• @hayleylynnk Need any help on that math homework? I can help.4:21 PM Jan 29th from web

• @aalexich If you run into any trouble studying for the math quiz let me know, I can help.9:01 AM Jan 29th from web

• @davidciani Let me know if I can help out with the Math9:00 AM Jan 29th from web

• @trixieisme When you get to the math homework look me up, maybe I can help.8:22 AM Jan 29th from web

• @almightyblinka Anything I can do to make it go faster?7:45 AM Jan 29th from web

• @darkjz Let me know if I can help with the math homework7:34 AM Jan 29th from web

• @juicyanne What level math are you working on?6:46 AM Jan 29th from web

Even worse, I started getting lazy and cutting and pasting the same message offering to help. This was the ultimate in STUPID and I knew better. Fortunately I only did that for about 10 tweets before snapping out of my cranial-rectal inversion.

I had taken the  Social out of Social Media.

When I started talking with people, commenting on their non math tweets, I finally got discussions going. But it was a slow road. It takes time to build a community, and it should take time. Just because we live in an instant world doesn’t mean that relationships can be built instantly.

The tutoring account has been put on hold for a while. My husband being laid off meant that a trickle of tutoring money wasn’t going to cut it. Time needed to go towards finding regular income. But when I return, here are some things I promise to do differently:

• I promise to stop being a jerk and start having REAL conversations on twitter.
• I promise to blog about interesting math stuff. (yes, there are too interesting things about math)
• I promise I will make useful and appropriate comments on other peoples blogs.
• I promise to put the social back into that part of my social media world.

I have all these ideas. Stuff floating around in my brain. I keep thinking I should blog about this or that but it doesn’t fit into any of my many projects.

So here it is. A place for all the random stuff passing through my mind and to serve as grand central for all my other projects. Thanks for stopping by.