DC Interactive Group’s SmartMarketing Blog

I am a working mom. It’s 10:30AM. I just put my son down for his first nap of the day. It’s actually late for a morning nap…rather than the usual 7AM, he decided to sleep in until 8:30 this morning. His daily schedule is flexible like that—he’s in charge. And that’s okay. Because my job allows for that kind of flexibility.

When he naps, I work. I am part of the growing workforce of work-from-home moms, largely made possible by the new popularity of social media. At DC Interactive Group, for many clients we provide a virtual online marketing department. We consider ourselves part of our client’s team—but we happen to be experts at our focus area, and we happen to work off-site.

When I was 4 months pregnant, my husband and I gave our working plan a lot of thought. And from just a cost perspective, when we factored the cost of daycare, reducing my hours to part time and working from home was the perfect scenario. Fortunately, the boss was on board—he’s a family man himself, but he also gets it—because our focus is promoting your business in online circles, we can take care of that from anywhere.

And he’s not the only employer taking advantage of the unique skills moms have to offer the online world—check out MomForce.com , an entire site dedicated to placing moms in just this sort of position. The job placement site offers flexible jobs, some entirely telecommute, some with some hours at home, some with all hours on site, and many jobs in the social media arena, including jobs categorized as blogging and social media jobs. It also gives moms the chance to post their resumes and skills for employers to review.

When I was a kid and people asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?", I never would have answered, "A blogger." (Considering the world wide web wasn’t quite invented until I was around 10, that would have been an odd answer…stranger than my usual answer, "A turtle.") But now, blogging can be a career. In fact, Alecia Keys just announced a job listing she posted on Monster for a "Head Blogger" , and she teamed up with Monster, who will use their 6Sense search technology to find the right candidate.

Blogging for clients is a big part of what I do. A lot of times I enjoy myself so much that I think, I couldn’t possibly be getting a paycheck for this. And it isn’t that bad of a deal for employers, either. When I sit down to work, I work. I hate to admit it, but the hours I record are among the most productive work hours of my life. When Wally Ben is napping, I am approaching each task with a focus unmatched in my days of sitting at the same desk from 9-5.

So hooray to the social media world for opening up a new work alternative for moms. And hooray to the employers out there who see how that alternative can work for both moms and their businesses. It will be interesting to see how social media continues to change the way we work. It’s exciting to be a part of a new, developing arena that plays such a big part in people’s lives.

Now I’m off to change another diap, and while I’m at it, I’ll ask Wally Ben what he wants to be when he grows up. Hopefully he’ll come up with something a little less reptile than his mom’s childhood dream.

Is it nearly impossible for you to go a couple hours without checking Facebook? Do you check Twitter on your phone before you get out of bed? You’re not alone.

In a recent article on SFGate.com, 1,000 were people surveyed by Retrevo, Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA) in order to grasp the hold social media currently has. Some of the numbers:

“18 percent of those under 25, and 11 percent over 25, said they can’t stay away from Facebook for more than a couple of hours without checking.

And 61 percent under 25, and 55 percent over 25, check Facebook at least once daily.

Also, 28 percent of iPhone owners check or update Twitter before they get out of bed in the morning. And 26 percent check or tweet before they turn on their TV. That leads to the 23 percent who rely on Twitter for their morning news.”

Click here for the full SF Gate article.

How often are you using social media? Whether you work in the industry or not, it’s important to remember that it’s good to unplug every once in a while.

The iPhone and the Droid are powerful, app-friendly devices that give users the freedom to browse the web, play games, watch videos, read up on breaking news or even (wait for it) make phone calls!

With all this power at their fingertips, what are people choosing to use most frequently? Well, Mashable recently wrote a piece dissecting January 2010 information from the mobile analytics company, Flurry.

From Mashable: (click for full article)

“For Flurry’s January report, the company decided to dissect application usage based on the following categories: games, entertainment, social networking, and news and lifestyle.

On both iPhone and Android (Android) phones, social networking apps were used most frequently — about 20 times per month — with news coming in a distant second. In fact, in terms of frequency alone, we’re using social networking apps at double the rate we’re using news applications, and four times the rate we’re firing up mobile games. Based on Flurry data, it also appears that the frequency at which we use entertainment, games and lifestyle apps in totality still doesn’t rival how frequently we use social networking apps each month.”

At 4AM last night my husband and I woke up to the room shaking. "What was that?" I asked, like he might know, since he was up 1 second before me. My first thought, which I embarrassingly voiced out loud: "Was it the dogs?"

"Shaking the house?" he asked, and shook his head. "Where should I look to find out what it was?"

"Google it," I replied. How very 2000’s of me. (As a side note, "Google" was added as an official verb in the Oxford English Dictionary June 15, 2006. Doesn’t it seem like we’ve been using that term for decades, though?)

Anyhow, my husband checked the TV, to no avail. He thought only a second about Googling it, but then remembered his best available resource: if anyone knew what was happening, it would be the Twitterverse.

He searched Twitter for "Elgin," and found endless real-time posts of other Twitterers who woke up to what appeared to be an earthquake. Within 10 minutes, "earthquake" was trending on Twitter and he discovered through various posts that the shaking house was indeed an earthquake around 4 magnitude centered near Dekalb, IL, about 15 miles away.

You don’t need me to tell you that citizen journalism is one of the most important ways Twitter has changed the way we experience news. What surprises me, and surely surprises those who aren’t connected to Twitter yet, is the extreme speed with which news is reported on Twitter. The first news of the plane landing in the Hudson last year came from a picture uploaded on Twitter. This immediacy applies to Facebook as well. In fact, I read an article yesterday about unfortunate 20-year-old twins that found out about their 17-year-old brother’s death in a car accident by logging into Facebook and seeing status updates wishing their brother to rest in peace. Epic fail from the police department on that one–no excuses. But for some news it’s quite impossible to keep up with the pace of Twitter and Facebook.

So Twitter news reporting is much faster, and can often be more accurate than the actual news conglomerates. In fact, the earthquake turned out to be centered much closer to Elgin (rather than Dekalb), which my husband may have been able to surmise from the overwhelming number of people from Elgin reporting the quake on Twitter.

Because of the ability to self-report accurate news, it’s no wonder so many celebrities have turned to Twitter; move over tabloids! They are finally able to report their own news. @KimKardashian recently put to rest a rumor that she was participating in a cookie diet, saying "Not true! I would never do this unhealthy diet! I do QuickTrim!" (She was later sued for defamation by the diet doctor over the tweet, which is another story altogether!)

So what does all this mean for the future of how we get our information? Well, for one, more is certain to change. Last spring we assisted in the first ever live-tweeted surgery in Illinois. One unexpected benefit was the family’s ability to follow the process as it happened, rather than waiting for the doctor’s updates. Perhaps this instant reporting will morph into a common offering at hospitals?

At the very least, we certainly can expect to find our news as it happens. And of course, the next time my husband asks me where to look up information about something that just happened, my automatic response will be, "Twitter it." And maybe "Twitter," meaning to search for news, will be the next dictionary addition. (Twitter as a verb meaning "to search on Twitter" has not yet been added to the Collins English Dictionary, but it has been added meaning "to write short messages on the Twitter website." Other Twitter words, like "Twitterati" and "Twitterverse" also made it in 2009.)

Any others out there find out about the quake on Twitter? And any other changes you think we can expect in the future?

The chips and dip are out, the chili’s on the stove, your TV is tuned to CBS, and friends are gathered ’round. The only addition to this year’s game are the laptops, blackberries, and iPhones (and perhaps iPads?), tuned to the hashtags #SB44 for the game-lovers and #brandbowl for those who watch for the ads.

Perhaps you’ve heard about #SB44 …the Twitter and Flickr world certainly has. The NFL announced the official hashtag of Sunday’s game as #SB44. If you visit their site, you can check out their “Tag the Super Bowl” page , where fans who are on Twitter can tag their tweets with #SB44, and those on Flickr can tag images with the same. The NFL then pulls the content into their page for people to watch live. Interesting considering the NFL bans players from tweeting during the games.

You can also tune in to #brandbowl , a site that aggregates all tweets about the ads that are tagged with #brandbowl, and then ranks the brands based on whether tweets are positive or negative, and how much buzz each is getting. You can even click to see a graph that shows how many mentions, and a word cloud that points out what popular words are associated with the brand’s tweets.

As a final note, we found this article on Mashable about how social media is changing the Superbowl . It talks about the typical buzz companies go for creating ads that are banned by CBS and buzz advertisers are creating on social media about their spots, but also about Pepsi’s interesting decision to forgo a Superbowl ad and instead spend $20 million on a social media campaign, the “Pepsi Refresh Project,” which is giving away grants every month to fund popular ideas users have for how to refresh their communities. This project has already garnered more social media buzz than all other Super Bowl advertisers.

Happy Super Bowl weekend!