I was reading an article at http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/6151606/Secret-Santas-stun-shoppers-with-layby-payoffs which reminded me of an incident in my life that made me appreciate peoples generosity.

Many moons ago, i was young and stupid. I had my first child at 18, i married an unemployed bum at 20 and had another 3 children. We lived in a poor area, with a lot of similar minded people, and lived on government handouts, most of which were spent on rent, food, and smokes.
More often than once we begged neighbours or food banks for food, and once we even resorted to slaughtering our pet chicken because we were so hungry.

Eventually i realized i wanted more in life, started to train on courses, and try and get jobs. Hindered by a bum husband who never wanted to work, never wanted to look after the children, and in fact do anything other than rack up more debt on loans.
Eventually i realized i needed to leave husband, and so did. I moved into a better area, and started sorting out my life, in the mean time i was still broke, and had a lot of debts to pay. It was two days before Xmas, i had nothing for the children, i had some expired food in my cupboard i planned to eat for xmas, when i heard a knock at the door.

It was a Repo guy, came to take the TV. I was upset, gutted, and to top it all off, that was one of the payments i was not behind on (there was a mixup). I packed the kids into strollers, and bikes to get out, and walked 4km to a mall. I just needed to walk it off, cool down, and get out of the house.

As i got near the mall. i found a single $1 coin, I went into the mall, and went to the lottery shop, bought a $1 ticket. I scratched it off, and it was nothing at all. I think at this point i had accepted things, so just walked out dejected. As i left, the women in the shop at the counter came up to me and asked me if i was ok, at which point i just explained things had been a bit rough (without going into detail).
Another lady overheard and came up and said “hey, are you looking for some gifts for your children for xmas? We have way to many toys and i was just going to throw them out”

This amazingly wonderful women, turned up on Xmas eve at my house, with a HUGE carload of amazing toys, several grocery bags of food, then left as if it was nothing. I’m still not sure even now how much that meant to me. From then onwards i just move onwards and upwards, got a job, got re-married to a wonderful guy, and life has never been better. But i never forget that women, and i always make a point to try and make somebodys xmas better.

Please, if you see somebody who is in need this season, it does not hurt to give them your cast offs, or a few dollars, some food, or similar.

As most people may (or may not) know. I’m doing the Oxfam 100km walk. We need to raise $2,500 to donate to Oxfam to take part, plus our entry fees.

Thanks to a lot of people we have $870 at this time, which is fantastic, but only 35% of the way there! Since I have a few cool toys I no longer need, I’ve decided to sell a few things here on my blog. I’m using my blog because other sites like trademe will a) take a cut of the proceeds and b) you can deposit the money right onto our Oxfam account and i post it to you, and I have a fairly high technical/Linux following who will be more inclined to want it.

So to start it off, Im selling this AS NEW Linux Keyboard. Its a standard decent keyboard with low profile keys. The standard Windows key is non-existant and has been replaced with a Tux Key. Other than that its fairly average.

I was given this by a visiting person from Zareason who make and sell these along with other Linux specific hardware. I opened it, tried it, then never actually used it. If i can find the mouse I will throw that in as well (though its just a normal mouse). You can view the keyboard specs and more pics here http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16206&cat=251&page=1

So please place your best bid in the comments. You can make as many as you want and fight it out. Bidding stops when the  nobody has bid for more than 2 days or when the trailwalker starts early April (in which case i hope like heck you pay!).

This xmas i planned, i wasnt gonna be caught out, i had my budget setup so i had PLENTY of money spare to cover xmas.

I was frugal with funds and only spent $50 on each kid (i have 4) and an extra $50 on the oldest whos birthday falls on Xmas day. Plans were a shared lunch with family in Rotorua, just an hours drive from where we live, not too expensive.

Then husbands car all of a sudden wouldn’t go into drive. No major deal that I can see, we have my car still and we can sort that out next year. On the weekend I drove up to auckland and just as I got there an engine light came on. I spent a fair portion of spare money on finding somebody with a computer connector to check it was going to get me home (it was still running fine) without blowing up.

So now I spent my ‘spare money’ that was set aside for emergancies. I still had the rest planned, and budgetted for.  I did my shopping 2 days ago, it was the last thing i did before i parked up my car because of the engine light. I made sure i had plenty of food to get us through till Xmas, i weedled the budget out and got only the cheapest food knowing that I wouldnt be able to get back to the shops without a car for some time.

Today i went into the garage to get meat out for dinner, i smelt a horrid stench, and realized that one of the kids helping take the food from the car 2 days ago, had left the entire bag on the floor next to the freezer and not put it in.

Great, so now we have no food, no way of getting any more, and no money to buy it if we did. As it is we’ve had to extend loans $2k just to get a single car going so we can see family at Xmas, at this point im really fucken just pissed off and gutted.

What a fucken crap week!

Update: Managed to extend one of our loans, which puts us back a year financially which really sucks, but at least we can get a car fixed . I sold my $100 Super liquor voucher to a friend to cover food.  I’m in awe of the great friends who offered help, i cant thank you enough.

to Ness: For the record, i wasn’t crying! i just had allergies! honest!

Most of you probably remember things like walking to and from school, rain, sun, barefoot in the freezing snow, uphill both ways etc. One of my memories of these times came back to me when my first born was about 18 months old and we were walking past one of these

Fire Hydrant

My first memory of these things was a swift dead arm as somebody yelled ‘FREE HIT!’. Because that’s what the FH stood for, everyone knew that. I only figured out that it was a fire hydrant when i was in my teens I think. But having Free Hits wasn’t too much of a problem, because it came with rules. You could only hit people when you were standing on it!
So if i remembered to avoid going within a couple of mtrs of them I was ok … of course if i was reading a book or talking to somebody and didn’t noticed then i got punched, and again my arm was unusable for a good 30 minutes.

So walking along with my 18month old son i decided that i was going to keep him innocent and nice for as long as possible, i pointed the FH label out and said ‘oh look! Free Hug!’ and gave him a hug.
This became a game and every time we would race for them to get the Free Hug.
When he was 5 and went to school he eventually found out others said it was a ‘Free Hit’, so i explained ‘Its only a Free Hit if they are standing on it, a Free Hug can be taken away and you can get it as many times as you want!’. So he went back and educated all his class mates.
16 years later, and i have now 4 children (11,12,13 and 18), and they all do the ‘Free Hug’ thing, very rarely anyone hits unless its gentle. Even when cycling the kids will swerve wildly (which i go mad at!) to get the FH so they have lots of ‘Hugs’ available to redeem (yep they all hug each other and me!).

So now in the present day, i was cycling to work today, and past a group of 12-13 year old kids going to school. They clearly went to a different school to my kids, so i was most surprised when they suddenly stopped, called ‘FREE HUG!!!!’ and started hugging each other!
I was flabbergasted that my kids & i have started our own trend now which has moved onto other schools, based on the fact that i disliked the random mean punch.

So next time you walk past a Fire Hydrant (FH), make sure you grab your Free Hug, you never know when you may need one!

Much like SEO marketing, most of its pretty much abiding by a few simple rules, however there seem to be those who really get on the band wagon, enjoy doing things, and raking in big money for it.

Whilst some Social Media Marketing does work, and does bring in business, you cant forget core values of marketing. things like having a target market rather than just going viral (does anyone recall #moonfruit? ok what did their company actually do? don’t remember? don’t worry, nobody else does either!) .

A few days back the #sy tag started showing up on twitter, people just appended it randomly to any old sentence it seems. Unsure about other people but i dont live my entire life on twitter so somewhere along the line i missed what the heck it was all about.
It seems i wasn’t the only one! I asked a couple of times what it was about with no answer, as it seems did quiet a few others. The most we got told was ‘all will be revealed Friday night!’ etc and similar.

Once a few people started doing it everyone jumped on the bandwagon, in fact i saw a couple of tweets saying ‘no idea why i changed my avatar to have #sy, i have no idea what it is, everyone else was doing it!’. Others thought something big and cool was coming also but didnt know what it was.
I got an invite to something on facebook which, again, failed to say anything about what it was other than ‘Race to Carista’ which meant nothing to me at all, and to watch the #sy hashtag on twitter.

About 24-48 hours out from the ‘main event’ i saw more and more people getting pissed off with all the mentions of #sy and no idea what it was, one went as far as unfollowing anyone using the hashtag, and others were getting rather annoyed at the whole thing.
I noticed that generally people aged 12-30 were on the #sy bandwagon (students, etc) and that people from 30ish upwards were the ones generally more annoyed at the spammyness.

Finally Friday rolles around, and we get told its just a Media Company http://www.ijump.co.nz renaming their company, oh yeah and the Carista thing was some house for sale. They wanted to prove how effective Social Media was by having people in the house and doing live stuff online whilst showing off an expensive house which was for sale (re-worded in my own words).

Now, heres what went wrong (in my opinion). Only a select few seemed to know or get an invite into this house and were told ahead of time, how can you advertise something without letting people know WHAT you are advertising? if people ask, at least give them a teaser of something to look forward too.
Secondly, its a house worth at least $1,000,000 – Target market would be either business people with a bit of money, of family etc. majority of the people on twitter i saw whom went, did not have that kind of money, and were not in the market for a house. Whilst there may have been people at the house who were interested, how did they relate to twitter? How did it relate to all those who had been using the #sy tag and were waiting for something exciting to happen?
There were about 3 or 4 people tweeting with the #sy tag, the entire thing was pretty disjointed cut down versions of what i’m sure were riveting speeches. With 140 Chars the message just didn’t make it.
I had a few people dm me asking me what it was about, what was going on, and were very disappointed that they had changed avatar, somehow got roped into something that never happened.
The problem here was they advertised it as something twitter based, when in fact there was very little twitter interaction at all, and no socializing at all to do with twitter, anyone who asked questions were ignored pretty much.
As one person said to me “I was curious about what they were up to – but after being all mysterious, just turns out to be some navel gazing for the selected few”

Now this there is a lot of harping on about how Social Media is going to be the new magic on your business, and with a few golden rules which are pretty much common sense. I don’t believe you need a course to learn it, though having one person working for a company who knows what they are doing and has the right personality is definitely advised (if you have an employee who already does so, by all means use them!)
Be friendly.
Don’t do generic auto tweets or bots.
Don’t argue with people or put them down (what you say reflects on your company).
Try and keep the same person/people on deck and make them helpful, friendly, and let them interact and personalize it .
Its called social networking for a reason, its socializing, not an advertising platform like a newspaper, tv, or magazine, hence why the different rules.

I must stress, these are very much my own opinions and impressions, and i do not dislike or have any grudges or mean any insult to those involved at all, it was more a deconstruction and interpretation of what i saw happen. A lot of the people involved were people i consider friends, and i mean no disrespect at all to them, or anyone else.
Because i realize there may be some personal fallout for me because of the blog post, i have respected those who i talked to privately and left their names off, feel free to voice your own opinion here.
ps. Still unsure what the ‘Race’ was in the ‘Race to Carista’