Category Archives: life

My online identity

Posted on by
Reply

I signed up to Twitter in 2008. The now-defunct handle I used was @nadiatweets. I used this account as a personal (not private) chat room and news feed for friends that I had left behind in Singapore (born and bred), and people that I had met while I was travelling. I started out as a fairly passive user, but started gaining momentum as time passed, realising how good Twitter at being a training tool for myself as a writer. I wrote about my life, my friends, and people on the 86 tram. @nadiatweets was personal, engaging, and potentially humorous (debatable).

In late 2009, I signed up for another Twitter account, @ElliotOwl. This account was to be, in contrast, my ‘professional identity’. Alongside this account, I also set up a blog, delicious stacks, Vimeo and so on. I was very careful with what I posted across these different networks, as I wanted to be ‘professional’. I wrote about work, and only about work, and made no effort to inject any hint of my personality at all. I used Twitter to ‘engage’ with thought leaders in the digital communications space. By which, I mean that I did a lot of retweeting. A lot. I wanted future employers to see @ElliotOwl and be impressed by the depth and breadth of knowledge that I hoped I demonstrated in my writing and my research. @ElliotOwl was dry, boring, and robotic.

Fast forward a few months: I reviewed my stats. I had 30 followers on @nadiatweets, and 200 followers on @ElliotOwl. In spite of that, I had dozens of @ replies and DMs on @nadiatweets, but hardly the same could be said for @ElliotOwl. The total number of @s, DMs and RTs that I had collected in those few months could be counted on two, sad, lonely, poorly moisturised hands.

The conclusion? As much as we try to exist and co-exist in the online space and use it increasingly as a communication tool, people still want to know people. People want to interact with people. Employers still want to hire people. Not robots.

It doesn’t matter how much you know, how much you read, and how many Seth Godinand Clay Shirky quotes you’ve retweeted. Learning is easy. Reading is easier. Anyone can do a Google search, read a blog and claim to be an expert/guru/ninja of their chosen discipline. How do you make yourself stand out?

One crucial thing that we sometimes forget, given the incredible speed of which technology grows and develops, is that we are not, in actual fact, an astoundingly complex species. We all crave human interaction, on multiple levels. Even more so, I feel, in this present day where we sometimes prefer to send a text message than speak on the phone, or choose to ‘like’ a status update than meet an old friend for a coffee. We are losing ourselves in a sea of boring, soulless, robots.

The irony is that we try so hard to make ourselves more present by hiding behind a keyboard and a computer screen.

Go back to basics. Talk to somebody. Start a conversation. Make a friend.

I have since deleted @nadiatweets, and made @ElliotOwl my main channel of communication online. I still tweet about my life, my friends, and people on the 86 tram, but I no longer make a distinction between my personal life and my professional life. I connect to many friends, people that I work with, have worked with, and will potentially work with on a far more personal level than I ever have before. I now know their likes, dislikes, whether they are a dog person or cat person, their choice cafes and restaurants, and whether they are looking to hire. I am not ‘networking’ any more. I am making friends.

The result? An uncountable number of connections made with some very clever and interesting people, and a very satisfactory number of work and collaboration opportunities.

I have not written this blog post with the intention of encouraging you to make your personal lives more public. Certainly not. Instead, take a look at the content that you’re putting out there in your name. What does it say about you? What input have you given. Are these your thoughts, and your opinions? Are you putting yourself out there as a person, or a robot?

We’ve gone through the benefits of positioning yourself as a media practitioner in the online space time and time again; opens multiple doors, allows you to connect with anyone and everyone, breaking physical/geographical boundaries etc. Now it’s time to think about how we can put that in practice, in the best way that we can.

Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment, @ me at @ElliotOwl (#im212) or connect with me on LinkedIn.

-

Cross posted HERE

Share

Workaholics r us

Posted on by
Reply

It’s an atrociously busy week for me this week. I’ve got the standard, boring 8-5PM hours to plough through at the office, before I’m off for a slew of meetings and idea-brewing get-togethers with some talented folk. I’ll try to squeeze in some dinner midway, and if I’m lucky, I’ll try to get to sleep before midnight. Alas, things like eating and sleeping tend to get in the way while you’re trying to take over the world. The pesky little things.

But it’s okay. Snow White says, all I gotta do is:

Share

The ElliotOwl story

Posted on by
Reply

Since coming back to Melbourne, I’ve been meeting with some clever people doing very clever things in Melbourne and Sydney, talking LOLs, Old Spice, social, strategy and general nerdy digital stuff. On special occasions, we will bitch and whine about the shite weather.

I met with Matt Houltham of Naked Comms today (ooh, look at me, playing the name-drop game), and he commented that I might need to take a look at what it is that I want to come of my career. Which got me thinking. And reminded me of this dusty old blog.

When I was 14, I was adamant about working in advertising. I wanted to be a Mad Man. Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi, Y&R – I wanted them all. Smoke like a fish, drink like a chimney, sleep with beautiful mermen/merladies, and, oh yeah, create some beautiful ads that talked to people and won prizes. Mmm, prizes. Yeah yeah, I was probably caught up in the glitz and glamour. Shut up. I was 14.

I enrolled in Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s Mass Communication course in 2005, which absolutely destroyed my beautiful, sparkly one-dimensional dream. The course introduced me not only to advertising, but also to public relations, integrated marketing communications, graphic design, film production, radio production, journalism, photojournalism et cetera, et cetera. Mind fuck, or what?

I loved every single minute of it.

My Mad Man dream had dissipated into nothingness. I decided to stop thinking so much about what I did or who I was working for. I just knew that I wanted to create.

In early 2005, I founded my own online store with my sister selling vintage 35mm Russian cameras. I put all that I had learnt into practice, designing an integrated marketing communications plan, writing all the copy, taking the pictures, designing the marketing collateral and hell, even modelling in some of our shoots (all of which have since been banished into Internet hell, so don’t even try, Google nerds). In three years, we had grown our customer base about ten-fold, expanded the brand into three lines and started selling clothing and accessories, some of which we had designed ourselves.

When I got bored of that, I did couple of internships and freelance stints in boutique advertising/marcomms agencies, always preferring to work in a small team rather than in big, sterile offices. Reasonably confident of my skills and experience, I sold myself as both a suit and a creative, exposing myself to all facets of ad-land. I believed that this was the way to go, to fully immerse myself in the industry by understanding every process possible.

I slowly moved away from agency life and found myself working freelance on projects around the world. By then, I was selling scraps of work to clients in Sydney, LA, San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Montreal, and.. uh.. Jamaica. I was managing projects, creating brand strategy, designing collateral, writing copy and editing videos.

In 2007, I decided to move to Melbourne. I did a degree in media production, and then did well enough to secure a place in RMIT’s Labsome honours programme where I dedicated a year to studying social media marketing in depth. I immersed myself in the digital space, and soon started throwing myself into digital strategy-type projects head-on, believing that the only way I could learn was to put it in practice. I learnt as I went – something I wouldn’t recommend for the faint-of-heart, but doing that taught me much more than any book ever could.

Today, in mid-2011, I am sitting at the desk of my first full-time job. For the first time in my life, I’ve got a boss and a lunch hour. The paid leave, superannuation and Friday beers are pretty sweet bonuses, too. I’m not even going to start on the massive tub of Chupa Chups that Nick brought in to work one day.

I work at SportingPulse as a digital strategist/producer; have been for about two months. While I spend most of my days glaring and being angry at spreadsheets and Outlook, I have also been given the opportunity to develop a brand new social strategy for the company. While things are moving very slowly, given the lack of resources and a general understanding of the social space, I am determined to get this off the ground. Soon. SportingPulse controls a very niche portion of the market, and the possibilities are endless. It will be very interesting to see what we can do commercially once we learn to control the raging beast that is social media.

That said, I still (quite expectedly) find myself hankering to do bigger and better things, and wanting to make amazing things happen with like-minded peers who are at the same level of understanding of the digital and social space as I am. So consider this my open call: if you have something big and beautiful that needs some loving, get in touch. Email me or @ me.

Share

Venice Beach

Posted on by
Reply

Like I said, I’m an awful tourist. I barely took any pictures of my travels the last few months (largely due to the fact that my Panasonic LX-3 decided to die on me the day after I landed in LAX). This is one of my favourite photographs from the trip, though. A samba beach party in Venice Beach, where people rocked up with drums and guitars, played music and danced to the setting sun.

Crazy, beautiful.

Share

I’m back

Posted on by
1

Finally back on this space.

I’ve spent the last two to three months travelling quite extensively. My body has had to adjust to about ten different timezones in a span of about nine weeks. Not very fun. On the flipside, I’ve met so many great people and done so many amazing things in such a short time, I really can’t complain.

Some of the things I’ve gotten up to since November:

I seriously considered a career in screenwriting. A very dear friend of mine was/is adamant that I would make a great screenwriter. He is one of the most intelligent and creative people I’ve ever met, and I hold his opinion in high regard – even if he thinks that I don’t, sometimes. I’ve never written for the screen before, so I was a little apprehensive. In spite of that, I took up a refresher screenwriting course and got my nose into some really great books. That opened up a whole new world for me, as I began to discover a new way to look at and create stories. I found a few amazing resources that really helped me out and I consumed voraciously; absorbing and committing to memory every word. I flew up to LA in January 2011 with news that I might get a chance to meet a “hotshot TV guy” to make some beautiful TV babies together. Things didn’t quite work out as I’d expected, but I wasn’t disappointed at all. The fact that I was even offered a chance in the holy grail of film/TV was proof enough that I might actually have a shot at this industry – something I had only considered a “hobby” right up to that point. I like keeping my options open, and adding another potential career path to the mix wasn’t a bad thing at all.

From LA, I made my way to San Francisco, then to New York. I spent most of my time travelling alone, and making friends with some of the most interesting people. I am an awful, awful tourist. I have just about zero interest in visiting your standard tourist spots. I didn’t visit the Empire State Building, I didn’t stand on the Golden Gate Bridge, I barely spent any time on Hollywood Boulevard. Instead, I spent most of my time sitting in cafes and bars, having random conversations, talking about our lives and spilling secrets the way you can with a perfect stranger you’ll probably never meet again in your life. In San Francisco, I met an English girl who was on a six month travel sabbatical after she found her boyfriend in bed with her best friend. She regretted packing six Lonely Planet guidebooks instead of bringing a little WiFi friendly netbook with her. In Harlem, New York, I met a guy who plays bass in a great funk/soul band. He invited me to come watch his band play in a cute little bar, and we got drunk on cheap whiskey and bar nuts. In Los Angeles, I met a South African girl who had just been kicked out of her boyfriend’s house. She was a full-time au pair and loved drinking iced tea. I don’t remember any of their names, but it really doesn’t matter, and that certainly wasn’t the point.

A blizzard in New York delayed my flight to Japan, which in turn made me miss my connecting flight back to Singapore. I ended up spending a completely unplanned 24 hours in Japan, which, in spite of being a fairly frequent traveller, I was completely unprepared for. Let’s just say that anything that could have possibly gone wrong, did go wrong, and I was basically stranded in Narita City in the middle of winter without a coat, hungry and completely penniless. I was surprised by how optimistic and upbeat I was through the entire experience/ordeal though, given how I love a good whinge at the slightest instance (I’m Singaporean, it’s programmed in our DNA). The best part of it was that I got to bring home a great story for friends and family, and anyone else who would care to listen.

Since all that, I’ve moved my arse back to Melbourne-town, and have been slowly trying to settle back down. Getting back to work, and trying to get back into the swing of things. On impulse, I’ve decided that maybe I need a change of pace, and so have been seriously considering moving my life up to Sydney. What’s there for me? Nothing, really. At this point, anyway. I don’t know anyone there, but really, it doesn’t matter. A(nother) fresh start is what I think I need at this point in my life, and this just seems like a great way to get into it. That would all probably explain why I haven’t completely unpacked my suitcase yet, and am only staying at a mate’s place “temporarily”. In the meantime, I’ve been getting in touch with some great minds in Sydney, begging for a job (I may blog about this later – the feedback I’ve gotten for my cover letter has been nothing short of interesting). As some of you might know, I have been freelancing the last few years, but feel that I am ready to step (back) into big agency life. I’m excited to see how things turn out in coming months. Stay tuned.

Share