But my best customer experience came from the last couple of weeks with Southwest Airlines. I’ve been a fan for a long time. But since I started my new job, I’ve used the airliner a lot in the last six months. I tend to snag a seat near a window and enjoy the views. Every once and a while I get to use one of the free drink tickets they sent in the mail. While I was attending the SXSW Interactive festival this March, I couldn’t get the check in process to work for me since the online process wasn’t working and I had fully lost my voice. (It’s a problem I tend to have near the end of SXSW each year.) I mentioned my problems on Twitter and a customer service person made sure everything was handled for me.

Pretty great, right? Well, that wasn’t even the best moment I’ve had with Southwest this year. It happened after I wrapped up a flight from Washington, DC. I had fallen asleep on the flight, packed up my stuff and headed out to my car and enjoy a two hour drive from St. Louis to Columbia, MO. I was a little groggy but ready to snag my luggage and get home. What I hadn’t realized is I left my iPad in the seat pocket. My iPad! And I didn’t even recall putting it there.

Later that week, I messaged my brother and told him I thought I left my iPad at his place. That’s because I had no memory of putting it in my bag or pulling it out on the plane. (I must have been really tired.) I wasn’t worried and didn’t even think about checking my Find iPhone app that I have attached all of my Apple products.

I assumed wrong. How did I find out? Because someone from Southwest emailed me. And the email was vague:

Dear (my email),

We have obtained your email information from an item found on Southwest Airlines. If you have recently lost an item while flying Southwest, please follow the link to fill out a lost report https://live.lostandfound.aero/client/southwest/landing.do. Once you have completed the report, reply to this email with the lost report number.

Thank you,
Southwest Airlines Lost Article Recovery Team

That was the first moment when I thought that maybe, just maybe, that iPad was left on the plane. But this email was so vague, I thought it might be a scam. So I did a little research on how Southwest handles missing items. I tracked down the Frequently Asket Questions page on Southwest’s website and found a question about leaving something on a plane. It led me to a link that was identical to the one that was included in the email.

I filled out the form and emailed the person who had emailed me initially and shared my lost item report number. She confirmed Southwest had my iPad within EIGHT minutes.

Seriously? That’s amazing.

I sent Southwest my FedEx information and six days later (only because I wasn’t home for the first two deliveries), my iPad is back with me. Southwest even left me a note:

The one resounding theme I taught as I met with groups from all kinds of different portions of the organization was: You need to organize your social media usage or else you will feel completely overwhelmed. I explain it like this:

Tape Down Your Social Media!

Imagine you’re in charge of painting a room. You have two options: Tape down the windows and edges or just try to do your best to not paint on the window frames, ceiling and crown molding. Taping down is tedious but when you finally get to painting, it’s a fast and simple (non-stressful) process. Painting without tape is slow, tedious and stressful.

Social media is no different.

If you tape social media down, you have set up an organizational structure that helps you track information that matters to you to do your job and improve your connection to information that may be personally important. If you don’t set up lists, RSS feeds, search alerts and more, you will feel overwhelmed and stressed.

Setting up lists, feeds, alerts and more can be tedious and annoying. But it is the best way to get your work done without feeling like you’re drowning in a sea of information.

My co-worker, friend and managing editor of the AARP blog, Alejandra Owens (@frijolita) is working on a series on her blog called #GSD (or Get Sh#t Done) and lists a great collection of ways to tape your social media down. She’s also shares how she personally stays up to date and organized. I am actually in the process of re-working my organizational use of social media since I changed jobs. The one thing I can say is no matter what you do in your career, being a part of social media is so much easier when you build a structure to help with how you manage time. Take a look at this presentation I’ve given a handful of times on time management and let me know how you keep social media taped down.

Sometimes a story can seem too good to be true… And if you take a little time to investigate, you’ll probably discover you’re right. It isn’t true.

Imagine if just one sports reporter decided to look into Manti Te’o's story about losing his girlfriend and grandmother in the same week. Fact: His grandma passed away and it’s documented how close he is to his family. Fiction: He never had a girlfriend who was sick, in a car accident or died.

How did that come into the open? Because a couple of guys at a website called Deadspin took a little time to investigate. And once they started that basic investigation, they dug even deeper and found some huge lies.

There was a time when brands focused on getting the likes, the follows… build the numbers. Get eyes on your social messages. But it numbers don’t mean much if those followers don’t actually have a relationship with the brand. One of my favorite comments during one panel came from BlogFrog’s Jennifer Beaupre: You need to improve the experience for current and future users and influence will happen.

Influence. It’s a major theme discussed throughout NMX. There are two sides of influence that seem to most dominant: Helping brands harness the power of influencers and helping individuals build influence so brands will want to work with them. Influence is complicated to gauge. Products like Klout and Kred claim to be able to score each person based on their influence on social media. Other products, like BlogFrog, try to harness influencer strength based on niches.

Brands focusing on influence is not new. But as IAB’s Susan Borst said during one panel, brands have always tried to harness the power of influence. But the difference now is the digital world comes with data. Digital has actual data behind it: followers, likes, tweets, posts… It goes on and on. The challenge for brands is identifying what data is really relevant, what is right. There are so many different tools out there that gather data. The trick for brands is working on learning how to use the right tools or process to reach the influencers that matter to your brand. There is no one overarching answer for every brand.

Social media has never been a one size fits all process. True relationships with brand advocates and brand influencers take time, effort and money. It’s fascinating to watch it constantly evolve.

Fast forward to raising my two kids and it’s fascinating to watch their education bloom in different ways. Both of my children (almost 7 years old and 10.5 years old) are natural consumers and users of technology. My daughter (the almost seven year old) is an early writer and loves using the app, Photogram, to collect photos and send short notes via email. She writes phonetically and I declare it super cute. I can’t wait to watch her grow as a writer.

Her brother, Cameron, the ten and a half-year-old, is a rock star writer (when he wants to write). Years ago, he discovered the Wimpy Kid book series. The books tell the tale of a self-centered boy named Greg Heffley written in Greg’s perspective along with some very fun drawings. The illustrator and author, Jeff Kinney, became Cameron’s writing muse. When writing in first-person, Cam would take the Greg Heffley tone and turn it into this own confident style. It’s been incredible to watch a book series become such an inspiration. For a while, Cameron even learned how to draw the characters and eventually figured out how to use the technique to create family and friends in the same style. He was SO into the Wimpy Kid experience.

Fast forward to last night and my son had a chance of a lifetime: A small private event where he had a chance to meet Jeff Kinney. We couldn’t stay at the event for very long, but Cameron soaked it all in. He got a favorite t-shirt signed along with some books. In Cam’s book one, Kinney drew an iconic Greg Heffley inside the front cover. We had a chance to watch Kinney at work. Today, Kinney’s seventh Wimpy Kid book, The Third Wheel, comes out and I plan to head over to the bookstore to purchase a special copy that has Kinney’s signature written out to Cameron… The boy who was inspired to write thanks to Kinney’s fun book series.

My children are incredible tech-minded kids… So it’s really cool when the simplicity of a book remains something that evokes excitement. I want to send a huge thank you to Jeff Kinney for being a really nice person. I also want to thank the publisher, Abrams Books, for giving us the chance to meet Kinney. Cameron is still floating on air from the experience and is pretty sure most of the kids at school won’t believe this really happened.

—————–
By the way, if you live in Columbia, MO, the University Bookstore is selling signed copies of The Third Wheel today, November 13th!

My career took a fascinating (and some would say geeky) turn when my news director, Stacey Woelfel, allowed me to research and prepare our newsroom’s transition from linear editing and an old newsroom computer system to non-linear editing that communicated with a new newsroom computer system. I analyzed how newsrooms used it, what they did right and wrong. The building and organizing process opened my brain to coding and digital organization. (By the way, that picture is me managing breaking news from the floor of an airport in 2007.)

About a year later, the Missouri School of Journalism’s relationship with Apple gave me an opportunity to help introduce podcasting to the higher education world. I helped lead EDUCAUSE into the concept of podcasting by collecting and sharing a collection of podcasts during the EDUCAUSE Learning Institute conference in January 0f 2005. I had produced an entire conference experience for anyone to hear on demand.

On demand!

In 2005 the only on demand experience I knew came from TiVO. The idea of delivering information that lands into your iPod blew my mind. This was BEFORE the iPhone and podcasts that easily fed into iTunes. It opened my mind and I just didn’t stop from that point forward.

How many work environments would have fostered my desire to continue to learn and teach young journalists along the way? I traveled to China, I taught and spoke across the country, I watched hundreds of former students do AMAZING things with their careers. At the same time I started really understanding the digital world, my daughter was born. My digital knowledge helped me as I started to navigate the special needs parenting world.

What an amazing ride.

As I move away from my 17 years of journalism… I have to recognize the remarkable experience I’ve had at KOMU 8 News, the Missouri School of Journalism and the Reynolds Journalism Institute. I was able to discover the incredible potential of social media long before it really caught on. The @KOMUnews account launched in June 2007. We had a Facebook page LONG before brands had pages. I worked in an environment that fostered and supported my energy to constantly learn and experiment. Sure, not everything worked. But everything we did on air and online taught the industry and students about the changing face of journalism. (That picture is from our J-school centennial in 2008.)

Without this experience, I would have never met members of the social team at AARP during SXSW in 2010. I would have never even known about the opportunity I’m about to take. I’m so excited to take my years of experience as a teacher and as a journalist to help the AARP. What an amazing challenge to take my teaching skills and help build a curriculum for the organization. I have even more to learn and so much to share. It’s really exciting.

Thank you to the many, many students who worked with me these many years. I am so happy to continue working and learning with you. Thank you to the fabulous faculty members at Mizzou – in and out of the journalism school. Thank you to the many J-School and KOMU staff who were so wonderful to work with. Thank you to the incredible social journalists and members of #wjchat for being a part of the journalism community that cares about the industry and good journalism. And most importantly, my husband and the rest of my family deserve a lot of thanks for putting up with my geekiness.

I am not closing my connection to journalism… I’m just going to be working differently. I’m planning to stay in touch thanks to my role as a moderator of #wjchat. My husband will remain in the KOMU newsroom so I won’t be too far away. And best of all, I have the many former students who remain in the journalism and communications industries. We’ll continue to share and learn from each other… Just like I said I always would. Once you’re my student, you’ll always be my student.

I enjoyed the book and blogged about it on Born Just Right back in 2011. After the blog post, Hollee and I became Facebook friends. We would talk there and on Twitter from time to time.

Fast forward to this week. Our local women’s network invited Hollee to speak about her book and research. We finally had a chance to meet! We had breakfast together, I helped shoot video of her speech and I quickly discovered I’m SO glad we had a chance to meet online because we were meant to meet in person. Moving a friendship that starts online and moves into the real world is one of my favorite parts of being in the social media world. I’ve met people from around the world who I would have never known and when we can actually meet in person, the relationship just grows. It is never awkward for me because the person I appear online is exactly who I am in person.

I’m looking forward to my next chance to meet up with Hollee… and many, many more people as I move into my next career.

Well, it’s time to announce another huge change.

In two weeks, I’m stepping down as KOMU’s interactive director and will become AARP’s manager of social communications and strategy. It’s a chance to train social media skills on the national and regional level and remain in Columbia, MO. I’ll have a chance to build curriculum online through documentation, webinars and who knows what I’ll be able to come up with!

My nine and a half years at Mizzou and KOMU was amazing. It feels strange to step away. But this new opportunity is so exciting. I can’t wait to see the potential.

To my students, you still have me as an ear and eye. I will never break my promise to be there for you. Please know I did not take this job because I don’t like teaching you. I LOVE teaching you. Helping you grow as journalists has been an incredible gift. I took this job because my family deserves and needed me in a job that helped push me even further and help fund our needs. You have me forever even if I’m working at the AARP.

Thank you the many people who have supported me as I’ve grown in my career. It’s been a remarkable ride an I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Fast forward to now.

Social media may not reach each and every person who can be a customer or client, but it certainly gives you a direct line to thoughts, opinions and interest groups. For years, I have watched the White House post photos on its Flickr account and other social outlets before releasing them to media outlets in more traditional ways. Social has removed the middle man and allows politicians to speak directly to voters. If you’re ever looking for new ideas on how to share and gather information about potential customers, watch politicians closely.

A presidential election year is a perfect time to study up. Not long ago, Ad Age created an infographic showing the reach for Obama and Romney (and their wives) along with some statistics on how the two candidates use the powerhouse tools: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

With November getting closer, the two candidates have done some interesting things to encourage social media sharing and information collecting on voters.

Romney
The Romney camp has two different apps available for mobile users. One allows you to take your pictures and brand it with different sayings like “I’m with Mitt” and “Romney Ryan 2012.” The other app keeps you up to date with the campaign. The campaign encouraged people to sign up and use it so they could be the first to find out Romney’s vice presidential nominee. The app released Paul Ryan’s name before Romney announced it at a public event.

The campaign also became the first political campaign to purchase a sponsored hashtag on the final night of the Republican National Convention. The price tag to promote #RomneyRyan2012 is said to have been cost around $120,000.

Obama
While the Romney campaign spent a lot of money to engage the Twitter community, the Republican National Convention tweet with the most retweets was this image:

53,877 retweets to a photo responding to Clint Eastwood’s convention speech where he spoke to an empty chair representing President Obama. (Which also launched the #eastwooding meme.) That’s a huge response on Twitter.

That same week, Obama reached out to a social community that has never seen a presidential candidate make a visit: Reddit. The president spent about an hour answering questions that ranged from political to sports and beer. Did you visit that link? It’s had almost 1.9 million views with more than 24,000 comments. That’s remarkable engagement.

It doesn’t matter where you sit on the spectrum of political preference. Both camps can teach you a lot about ways to reach different audiences. Watch what works and doesn’t work for the candidates and consider giving it a try for yourself or your brand. (An interesting study by the Pew Research Center found the candidates are doing a great job talking inside social media, but not really engaging.) Do you have a public Spotify account? Both candidates do. They also have Instagram and Tumblr accounts. Watch and learn. Both camps may teach you how to share and listen in ways you’ve never tried before.

Mind you, my streams are loud. I have 1,786 friends on Facebook and like or subscribe to more than 2,000 brands or people. When I post a public item, my 50,000+ subscribers have a chance to comment. I follow 5,649 brands and people on Twitter from years and years of using the service. (I started in 2007.) Clearly, my most dominant social media tools are “loud” with nonstop chatter.

You don’t need that many people and brands to feel overwhelmed and watch conversations disappear into the social ether.

Enter Facebook Groups. Sure, there are LinkedIn Groups but where are you when you want to build conversations with customers or clients? How can you grow a relationship with your most committed brand supporters? If Facebook comes to mind, you’re probably right. The difference between Groups and Pages? Groups give you a more personal space to talk to a members-only collection of people.

Groups have different settings depending on how private or public you want your conversations. Secret groups are invite-only. Closed groups are request or invite only but the group names are searchable on Facebook. And then there are open groups. Open groups are searchable and anyone can join. Groups become a more directed conversation than the type of posts you add on a fan page. (Pages use the kind of posts that encourage conversation but also likes and shares.)

There’s another secret you may not know about Facebook groups. Not only is it a great way to create an extra relationship with potential brand ambassadors, you can find groups that benefit your career as well. There are groups for every topic you can think of. Many are focused on career-minded topics that help benefit the members. Other groups help people of similar careers share stories of success and failure. Groups can even be created just to help manage a project.

Let’s say you are a photography business and you want to grow a more personal relationship with your customers or potential customers. Using your Facebook page, you can invite your fans to join an open or closed group where you can share special tips and answer photography questions. (A closed group would require you to approve member requests.) From that group, you may find a small number of super fans who want to spread the word about your business. You could invite them to a special secret group where you can offer special deals or tips. You could even brainstorm ways to spread the word about your awesome business.

Facebook groups are one of the few places where I find I’m participating in excellent debates, conversations and updates on parts of my job that matter to me. At times, it may seem like it’s a spot where only the “cool kids” hang out. But the real power behind it is when you can’t find a group you want to join, just make one of your own. Invite friends, colleagues or clients. It just depends on what you want to get out of the group experience. If there’s any piece of advice to make a Facebook group experience really work for you, it’s to just try it and make it your own.