As my research on social media draws to a close, and I begin thinking about how to explain the gender imbalance in the theatre management field, I started thinking about how far I’ve come as a [...]]]>

As my research on social media draws to a close, and I begin thinking about how to explain the gender imbalance in the theatre management field, I started thinking about how far I’ve come as a blogger. As it turns out:

It’s a good thing I discontinued my @saphicstats feed when I did and instead consciously chose to have a unified online branding presence. It makes it so much easier to point folks towards devonvsmith when it’s my Twitter, Gmail, SlideShare, Tumblr, YouTube, and Del.icio.us username. Annoying as it was to try to rebuild a follower/following list on the new(er) @devonvsmith.

After much failed experimentation, I finally have the order of operations set:

1. Add a Creative Commons license to every page of research
2. Save document as a PDF
3. Upload to SlideShare
4. Create a bit.ly link
5. Post to Tumblr
6. Let Tumblr auto-post to Twitter and Facebook
7. Respond to retweets and FB comments
8. Following day/week/month/etc track pageviews from Google Analytics; clicks and referrers from bit.ly; views, favorites, comments from SlideShare, @mentions from Twitter, comments from Facebook

I’ve got the worst timing. Invariably, it’s close to midnight on a Friday when I finish a particular research report. I’m far too impatient to wait until Monday to post online. BUT! Then I realized I could schedule a Tumblr post to go live at any point in the future. So: now I get the satisfaction of hitting that “create post” button at the end of my day, and the “more likely to catch the attention of people” benefit of posting at a reasonable day and time.

I’m not spending enough time commenting on other folks’ blogs. I follow about 30 RSS feeds, and spend several hours a day reading blogs, but I’ve only ever commented on one. What drove me to finally speak up? I thought I might personally have an insight that other readers didn’t, when a question was asked of us readers. How do I better leverage that knowledge into increased (or any!) commenting on this blog?

The internet kindness of strangers is a strange and fascinating (and ever growing) part of my life. From the great insights from Chris Ashworth to the constant promos from Cory Huff or words of encouragement from Ann Sachs. Shockingly, people I have never met are interested in what I have to say (at least about some stuff). I certainly had no idea that this blog would introduce me to so many interesting folks from around the industry.

And now for my next trick: I attempt to explain what’s going on here, and here, and see if I can pick anything out of here. Only, as it applies to managers instead of artists. Wish me well. Hope you find it as interesting as social media.