Are You In The Weeds?

I like talking about my job as a waitress, not necessarily because I like it, but because I’ve learned so much from it.  We have this phrase in the restaurant world to describe really chaotic, stressful situations in which you just can’t handle doing anything else.  The phrase = “in the weeds.”  I liken this phrase to finals week, or the week before finals week, when every day you have a paper or a test and you feel like you are just going to explode.  As an expert college student, i.e. graduating senior, I’d like to offer my advice about being in the weeds via some restaurant symbolism.

So, if you are in the weeds:

1. Get into survival mood.

Stop for a second.  Assess the situation and prioritize.  What absolutely has to get done this second?  Focus on the most urgent of tasks.  Don’t distract yourself from writing the paper that is due tomorrow by stressing out over the final next week.  Focus. Focus. Focus.

2. Get some help from friends.

If you were in a restaurant, you’d have someone bring your fifth table bread or crayons or beer or something.  If you’re in college, you have someone listen to you whine about lazy group project members, proof-read your papers, help you with your research, or grab a beer with you or something.

Happy Finals Week!

This One’s For the Fridge: I Wrote a Paper About Twitter

I can’t begin to tell you how incredibly proud my parents must be.  They spent all that money on a big, fancy college education and the culmination of all this knowledge is a 22 page paper about Twitter.

This “twpaper” is about @CoffeeGroundz, a coffee house in Houston, TX that uses Twitter to connect with customers.  I wrote it for my senior seminar class, which is the capstone communications course at my college.  I went through the class kicking and screaming, but I’m happy to say that I learned a lot from this project and found the research to be fascinating. I would like to thank everyone who helped me with this project, especially @coffeegroundz, @keithwolf, @cwelsh, @toadstar, @mikedaniel, @lfarnsworth, @gdruckman and @jgrassman. I was touched by your generosity.

I did a case study that involved a content analysis (stalking) of the @coffeegroundz Twitter traffic and interviews (the email kind) with several customers/Twitter followers.  I originally wanted to do a paper about social media and ROI, but then I realized that #1 it’s Pandora’s box and #2 qualitative research on the topic is more within my time-frame and skill set.  The paper touches on the topic of ROI, but looks at it more in a cause-effect sense and not straight metrics or anything like that.  The first part of the paper has some more general information about how businesses use Twitter, then there’s some heady discussion about theories and previous research, and then the fun part (pg. 12) with the research findings and interviews is at the end.

So, here’s the paper.  Enjoy all 31,985 delicious characters of social media marketing goodness.

Is this called growing up?

I just hit the “send” button on a message to a client that advised them to delete a picture from their website.  The client, a music group, had some new photos taken for promotion.  As a joke, the one photo had all of them making silly faces and holding cigarettes.  The one kid was holding  a condom and the other was holding a knife.

It was meant to be funny, and at first glance, it was.  But I thought a little further about the messaging behind the photo, and I was terrified.

The group is a proud supporter of To Write Love on Her Arms, a non-profit movement that promotes mental health awareness and support for those who struggle with things like cutting, addiction, etc.  The cigarettes were tongue in check, the condoms were a little innuendo.  But the knife thing got me worried about encouraging or glamorizing cutting.  For a teenage audience, I want to be careful about anything that insinuates a comical image of cutting, especially when the client has worked so hard to raise awareness and support for people troubled by it.

This is the first time I’ve found myself in a position where I am advising someone to pull back the reigns and err on the side of conservative.  I pretty much pride myself on being fun, silly, out there, edgy – and completely willing to be different.  But for the first time I’m the serious one.  I’m the one with all the “let’s just be safe” and the “just in case.”  Despite my good intentions, I feel like the bad guy.  No one is making me feel like the bad guy.  I just feel like the bad guy.  Oh my God, I’m the boring one.

But it feels like the right thing to do.

Am I growing up?