This morning, as I was getting the kids ready for school, my eight year old son Ewan couldn’t find his gloves (we think he left them in mom’s car, and she had left for work).
So, he dug into the hat and gloves pile and found his mom’s winter gloves. “I’ll wear these pink ones,” he declared.
“What if your friends make fun of you?” I asked him, remembering how his friends had ridiculed him earlier this year for wearing a raincoat that ‘wasn’t a boy’s colour’.
READ MOREThis is a part of a special series looking at how social media has impacted the lives of its users. This week, the story comes from Graham Todd.
Social media means many things to many people and for some it can mean terrible things. Bullying, politics and wars and probably the next recession will be blamed on it.
But I won at social media.
I got something amazing from it and I spend my life using it and showing people how great it can be.
I run an online marketing agency – but I?m not going to tell you about that.
I?m going to tell you a story about me, a humble van driver with a smartphone.
Years ago I didn?t really amount to anything.
I left school half way through my A-Level English course and I bummed around in dead-end jobs and lived with my parents until I was 23. Nothing really remarkable there.
I then scored a job as a van driver that would propel me into the world I now live in and help me escape from the life I thought I was trapped in.
I was a van driver. I delivered wine for 11 years, and I guess I thought that I was going to do that forever.
But one day I went to a stuffy wine dinner and heard from an equally stuffy wine merchant that he was in fact smashing it on YouTube.
?YouTube? Him? But this business isn?t even on Facebook!? I thought.
I decided, right there, that I needed to do something about this.
The wine merchant I worked for were very traditional, so online marketing was not on their radar. Their digital output was? well about as up-to-date as their overused fax machine!
So I put them on Twitter. I signed them up and I tweeted as them for three months before admitting they were indeed ?online?. ?At that point they asked me how much each tweet cost.
At first I failed because I tried to sell wine. But when I finally got that idea, I shared the wine merchant?s story and journey. People really liked it.
[clickToTweet tweet=”People want you, not a fabricated version of you. Truth from @SocialMediaTodd #socialmediastories” quote=”People want you, not a fabricated version of you. #socialmediastories”]
I became a local person to tweet. As a van driver, I knew what was going on and I was able to give people guidance for the town of Warwick and also for Twitter.
Thanks to this pedestal I was first in line to help organise the first ever Warwick Tweetup (a real life meeting of people on Twitter). It was the first of its kind in the area and sparked a trend for many more.
And then something happened.
I still remember to this day when I laid eyes on Jo.
She had a very attractive profile image (she was wearing a tight fitting dress with a pink top and every red-blooded man wanted to know who she was).
She signed up to come to my first Tweetup and I was excited to meet her. I was, actually, besotted with that digital image.
But she didn?t show.
She bottled it and didn?t come. (I later found out that she did that a lot.)
The first Tweetup was a great success and the radio and local paper were interested in what we?d achieved. But I had a day job. So I went back to that and carried on.
Months later we held another Tweetup. It was also a great success and we raised money for charity.
Jo didn?t make that one either.
So to meet Jo I had to make the excuse of delivering wine to the advertising agency where she worked. And, I can say this now, I stole a bottle of wine from the back of the van and delivered it as a ?sample? for her business.
They did then buy wine from us after that, far outweighing the ?stolen? bottle of wine, but I didn?t really care about that.
I just wanted to meet the elusive Jo.
It was an awkward meeting, and a quick one, but I met her? the lady from my phone.
After that we exchanged tweets (as we had done before) and although we were both spoken for (married) we continued to chat and work on local projects and community stuff.
We became close friends but we both knew it was only for business, community and stuff like that. Nothing would come of it.
? I didn?t know it yet? but I?d met the woman of my dreams on Twitter.
On the eve of 2013 I found out that my now ex-partner had been less than faithful for a number of years. I suddenly realised that actually? I wasn?t stuck in this life that I had.
I left. Right there and then.
The first person I called was Jo. She always knew what to do and the first person to tell me everything would be ok was Jo. She still is.
Fast forward a few very tricky months. I?ll keep that part off the internet! Suffice to say that after that time, we were both single.
In July 2013 I won an award for my community work on social media and I went to the awards night with Jo.
On stage in front of 300 local businesses I thanked her and told everyone, without spelling it out, that we were now ?Todd and Jo?. In my haste I forgot to mention much else.
The Monday after that Friday night ceremony we started our business together. At first I joined Jo?s business but then we set up our own company as a new venture.
Two years on we?re running a very successful agency and loving every minute of it.
Jo followed me on Twitter back in 2011. Now in 2015 we run over 20 social media accounts and spend all day (and night) together.
They say that relationships are being ruined by social media and they?re right ? sometimes.
But social media also makes great things happen.
Jo is ?the one?. She?s the person I?m meant to be with and we just work so well together. She gets me. I get her (most of the time) and we both love what we do.
I love writing – funny for someone who quit A-Level English, but because of my writing, or more importantly my bad spelling and grammar, Jo found me. She?s a proofreader and when I consistently made the your/you?re error she noticed me (for all the wrong reasons).
But she noticed me.
Social media has changed my life. It got me the girl. The girl in the hot pink and grey dress in the photo?
Social media is a very important part of my life? because it gave me the most important person in my life.
Thank you, social media.
About the author: Graham?Todd (known as Todd) is a social media trainer, speaker and co-owner at Spaghetti Agency. Spaghetti are a social media and online marketing agency based in Warwickshire, UK, helping business and brands to get found online.
Todd is a passionate, vocal and unstoppable fan of Twitter, Facebook and blogging and can be found mostly tweeting as @SocialMediaTodd (may contain selfies)
This is a Shared Inspiration from Ken Peters.
People from all walks of life go to work each day, do the best they can, then go to sleep and start over again in the morning – all the while hoping that what they’re doing has meaning.
Finding that meaning isn’t always easy.
Through the years, the American dream has been recast in the die of celebrity.
Contrary to what television teaches, life isn?t a talent competition, and Warhol?s proverbial 15 minutes aren?t an entitlement.
Merit isn?t measured in notoriety or fame. Value comes from hard work, and integrity. Life takes effort ? effort that sometimes goes unnoticed.
On my bookshelf rests a relic that reminds me of this every day ? a battered and beaten carbide headlamp that once lit my grandfather?s way in the coal mines of Ohio. It represents a work ethic you don?t find much anymore.
For me, it?s a reminder that a life of meaning doesn?t require celebrity.
My grandfather never achieved fame. He never cured a disease or created a stirring work of art. His name never appeared in lights. He never solved great mysteries or made amazing discoveries. You won?t find his pithy quips quoted for posterity on Twitter.
In fact, his was one of those anonymous faces you might ponder in faded old photographs and wonder, ?Who was that guy??
My grandfather was born in 1913, to an Ohio family of modest means. He came of age during the Great Depression and the Dustbowl, in what author Timothy Egan dubbed ?the worst hard times.?
Not much is known about his early life. Part of his young adulthood was spent tramping the Midwest, working in the circus, and doing the kinds of odd jobs available to someone with only an eighth grade education. By 1937 he?d made his way back to Ohio, and into coal mining.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor he enlisted and shipped to the pacific with the U.S. Army 37TH Infantry Division.
There he saw action during campaigns at Bougainville, in the Solomon Islands, and Luzon, in the Philippines ? enduring brutal jungle warfare where the malaria and conditions were as deadly as the enemy. He participated in two amphibious assaults, was awarded the Bronze Star, and attained the rank of Staff Sergeant.
Upon his honorable discharge in 1945 he returned to mining, where he would spend the next 15 years working for the Hanna Coal Company of Ohio.
Why he resigned himself to a life of labor in the mines rather than seek greater opportunity through government programs for returning veterans can only be speculated. Perhaps the lingering pall of the Depression, and a limited education made the familiar seem secure for a man with a growing family.
Through those years he and my grandmother raised three children, including my mother. Eventually, the family moved to Michigan in 1960, where he worked in a machine shop until retirement in the early 1970?s.
By the time I was born they tell me he?d become an ornery old man. Downright mean, in fact.
Understandably, early poverty, war, and years of arduous labor could cause a man to develop emotional armor, but I never saw that side of him.
As a child, I was his ?little buddy,? and toward me his manner was always gentle and kind. Heaven knows he often had reason to be angry with me, but he never was.
Decades of inhaling coal dust eventually took a toll in 1994. Pneumoconiosis, or Black Lung, rendered him weak and emaciated, while emphysema tethered him to an oxygen tank. That once strong soldier who stormed beaches under a barrage of enemy fire had become a thin, pale shadow of a man.
Nearing the end, he wanted to see me. He was in Michigan, and I was at college in Arizona, immersed in finals. I planned to visit after the semester, but his condition unexpectedly deteriorated and he died.
Not being there is the biggest regret of my life.
Whatever my grandfather?s aspirations might have been, he was an utterly common man whose life and accomplishments are barely a footnote in history. Yet, that ordinary life had extraordinary meaning that proffers an enduring legacy to all.
Through the years there was purpose without prestige, and fortitude without fame. In such quality of character is found the most authentic measure of a meaningful life.
Fittingly, perhaps, in a metaphorical sense, records from the Hanna Coal Co. cataloging his employment note that, ?All work was underground.?
This post is dedicated to my grandfather ? and everyone toiling in their own mine to make a life of meaning.
This is for people from all walks of life, doing their best each day, hoping that what they?re doing matters and that they?re creating a legacy.
It does, and they are, even if to the world they merely end up as nameless faces in faded old photos…
About Ken: Ken Peters is the co-founding partner and creative director at Nocturnal Designs, a brand amplification consultancy. You can follow Ken on Twitter @brand_BIG.
I’m a romantic. I think that love is the one constant that we all want to be in.
We want to love and be loved; being in love is infinitely more preferable than being alone and unloved.
You, as a business, want me to love you. Or you should. You should be wooing me big time. Singing me sonnets, delivering me flowers, buying me dinner, taking me to a movie. I’m a pretty straightforward guy – I know when I’m in love. And I’ve already told you I believe in love, so it makes your advances easier, no?
I’m not a material guy, either. You don’t have to spend millions on me to make me love you. In fact, as long as you just take the time to let me know you care once in a while, I’m pretty much good to go.
Customers are great because every single one of us wants to love your business. It’s pretty easy for you to love us, too. We can even seal it with a KISS.
Keep us at the top of your mind all the time.
Initiate contact with us before we have to contact you.
Sell us just the good stuff. Don’t fake it with us.
Save the technobabble for your internal meetings. Just give us the simple version of what you have and why we need it.
Falling in love is easy. Staying in love takes work and commitment. Thing is, if you work on loving us, you can be sure we’ll share our love for you with others that we love.
Love really does make the world go round. So, are you ready to love the world and go round with us?
