“She discovered she was the hero she had been waiting for.” - Wyanne

Last Thursday… I don’t even know where to start. I started the evening in a cab going to the SIFF red carpet with Clark Gregg and Nathan Fillion and ended it in a cab to go dancing with Joss Whedon.

What…the…

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“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”
― Erin Morgenstern

In what seems like another life, yet only a few years ago there was a great man I knew. An always jolly and generous man who welcomed me to a community where I was bit of an outsider kid with blue hair and nothing little more than yams in my pocket. A man who inspired me to tell my story to the world and was always there when chapters got rough especially during my father’s illness.

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The rumors are true. I’m excited to announce that i’ll be moving to Seattle in a few weeks right after New Media Expo in Vegas. The lease has been signed on our sitcomesque apartment, addresses have been changed, many boxes have been packed and I can’t wait to become an official Seattleite.  I’ve been at Meshfire in Seattle for the past six months pouring all of my heart into the development of an amazing social media collaboration tool and amongst many visits for work I have fell in love with the city, it’s people and the support for technology… not to mention the food, oh lordy Jesus, the food. I’ve traveled all over the world and never found a city that fit my lifestyle and personality as perfectly as Seattle, I hope to make this place my home for many years.

It’s been quite a journey the last three years in Tampa, i’ve learned many hard lessons about people, relationships and business. Over this time amongst the good and bad, I have truly have grown into a much smarter person and honestly, if I met myself a few years ago I probably would have kicked my own ass. However, life is all about evolving and growth, I am glad to have had the time I have had in Tampa as it has made me who I am today.

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As a pet owner I know how troubling and nervewracking losing a pet can be, luckily today I was able to help out a local pet owner be reunited with their pup all through the use of social media.

Around 4pm today I saw a photo of a well manicured stray dog come across my facebook news feed from the Pasco County Animal Services Facebook Page.

A few hours later, I luckily saw a tweet fly by on twitter that caught my eye.

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At Head Of Lettuce Media, people usually notice right off the bat that we are quite like an episode of Perfect Strangers, as a right brain and a left brain working together. But it is what makes us as a team work so well, we are good at what we do in our own fields of social media.

Antony is more technical, he loves disruptive technologies, building new things to challenge current social media practices. He’s the gadget guy learning new tools to measure social media metrics.

I however am a connector, a collaborator and a fire starter. I know how to grow conversations, keep people entertained with content, how to put out fires, start engagements, connect people with other people, clients, and jobs.

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Brand Advocacy: Why Your Fans Are Important to Your Brand.

How can you turn your biggest fans into your word of mouth marketing army and how will it result in driving sales to your front door? Recently I just presented at I-Strategy in San Francisco on this topic. Which to my surprise “Brand Advocacy” was the buzz in many presentations from Brian Solis to Sandy Carter from IBM. More and more companies are realizing that cultivating the relationship between consumers and their brands is important for not only driving sales but creating a online community powerhouse.

As some of you might know my whole journey into social media began accidentally with becoming a online brand advocate for Bruce’s Yams in 2008, which then turned into a community manager position. Then recently with my twitter chatter for the international car brand Audi, turned into a great brand/consumer relationship and the Audi Roadtrip and a recent VIP invite to The Rolex 24 in Daytona, not to mention the marketing agency for Audi M80 actually stopping by my presentation to answer some further questions… how freakin cool is that?

In my presentation at I-Strategy, I taught about the importance of participating in conversations, interacting with consumers and how to empower your brand’s audience.  If you missed the presentation here is a few key points I touched upon….

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As some of you might already know I just overcame one of the biggest personal roadblocks recently. That’s right folks, I just obtained my driver’s license after a very long struggle with on the road anxiety after being involved in a car accident when I was young. I know, not as exciting as the rumors of my non driving due to Interpol taking away my license after an “incident”. I have ironically always loved cars, my dad being a car collector and I admit I cried during James Bond when he crashed the Aston Martin. Seriously…

In the ten years of not having a car… I took my time, saved a hell of a lot of money and had one heck of a supportive community of friends that would offer rides when needed. It hasn’t been easy at all but I gotta say that if I actually wasn’t stuck in an apartment or a house due to not having a car, I probably wouldn’t have started this blog or be doing what I am doing today.

If there was any automobile that would embody the essence of what “Miss Destructo” is, it would have to be an Audi…. In a week i’ll be going to the social media/blogger mecca Blogworld in Los Angeles. Being it’s my first time to Los Angeles I had to let the city know I was coming in style. I knew it was a long shot to ask, but I couldn’t think of a better way then to cruise in from Las Vegas in an Audi. So I shot a tweet over to @audi and guess what…. they said yes.

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Last week I attended the amazing Radical Planet Unconference in Toronto, Canada…. It was two days of non-stop action packed Human Resources and Recruiting discussions. I loved the “unconference” vibe where we would all gather around in a circle and openly discuss scheduled topics rather than be spoken to. During these two days I not only participated in many of the fast paced discussions but learned tons of juicy info about the recruiting industry and how they are struggling to become more involved with social media for finding talent. As many of you local Tampa folks might of heard Nate Brown from K-Force talk about last week at Tampa’s own Barcamp 2011 on the same topic, of “Recruiting 2.0″ talent searching is becoming symbiotic with the use of social media tools.

Here’s some of my key takeaways from Radical Planet 2011. Huge thanks to Geoff Webb and all that were involved in making this event happen.

Social Recruiting

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Recently I have been immersed in the world of Human Resources and Recruiting while speaking at HR conferences such as Talent Net Live and Radical Planet on the topic of Location Based Services (LBS) after my involvement in Foursquare Day and working for the new LBS mobile app Social Mesh. This was a topic that I didn’t expect would be such an important tool for the recruiting community, in my experience in talking with recruiters and business owners alike I have learned many things on the surprisingly symbiotic relationship between talent hunting and LBS tools such as Foursquare. I use Foursquare almost daily, but never realized the power of finding employees or talented people in my community until I started working with businesses daily with Head of Lettuce Media. In most of our coaching sessions we run into many concerns from employees and company owners on how they can use LBS to boost their employees efforts and make the office more prominent in their community or industry by using these tools.

Introduction to Foursquare/LBS

“Foursquare is a location-based social networking website based on hardware for mobile devices. The service is available to users with GPS-enabled mobile devices such as smartphones. Users “check-in” at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by running the application and selecting from a list of venues that the application locates nearby. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes “badges”.” (From Wikipedia.com)

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I recently came across the tweets and blog of fellow Tampa twitterer @In11Months, and needless to say I saw a lot of myself someone who’s bio read “see how I will successfully use Social Media to achieve some major life goals.”, last year I went through a bit of a quarter life crisis. I still didn’t have a job, my fiancee and I split up, I was trying to run a consulting business by myself, living somewhere I didn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere without a vehicle, taking care of my very ill father and having my family turn against me while I nearly had a breakdown was one of the roughest times in my life. I vouched then I would pick myself up and never look back… well, it’s still been a bit of a rocky road, it’s like running through mud… it’s tough, tries to pull you down but there’s always dry land on the other side. I feel like I am finally at the light at the end of the tunnel.. business is picking up, i’ve got a packed traveling schedule, a possible book on the way, taking better care of my health and I am slowly learning to build up my confidence and trust people again after a rough few months. Most of all, I am learning to love myself and feel inspired… I found some great inspiration in this recent blog post by @In11Months that really hit home, he stated his frustration with his current state, albeit comfortable is wanting much much more out of life.

“A time flexible job, making decent money doing something I love to do! Is it really that hard??? Why is this so seemingly challenging to create for myself.”

Can we really create a different life for ourselves in less than a year through social media? You bet your bippy you can… here’s what I had to respond. Read more