“No way!” I thought to myself. “I’ve never run 10 miles in my life!”

I found myself agonizing over the website, watching video after video of people scaling 10 foot walls, jumping into lakes, running through fire, and yes, sprinting towards live electrical wires. I felt intimidated, out of shape, and scared. Because of this, I knew I had to sign up.

My general approach towards fear: You don’t run away from what scares you. You run to it, face it head on, and conquer the crap out of it.

So yes world, I am officially signed up for ToughMudder New England. The race is taking place on July 14 and will be the ultimate test of my strength, stamina, and sheer will power. I’m confident I’ll be in good company (I have some of my best pals doing it with me) and I know that crossing that finish line will be one of the most rewarding feelings ever.

I have 115 days to train, which means hitting the gym or park 4x/week, healthier eating, and a much earlier bed time.  If you’re looking for a crazy excuse to get into shape, you want to run up a ski slope and get electrocuted, and you want to hang in Vermont this July, join the team! I can email you the registration link or just go to the New England page and join “Down In My Plums”.

Check out this video for a peek of what I’ve signed up for:

I think we all make excuses about why we should or shouldn’t blog as professionals. For me, I blamed it on time and insecurity.  I replaced long-form blogging with tweets, tumblr posts, flickr, and good old fashioned journal writing. Rather than worry about carving out a personal brand and a chock full of zeitgeist commentary, I focused on chronicling my personal and professional growth offline.

In the past two years that I haven’t been blogging, I’ve been experiencing what some may call joie de vivre. I still work my ass off, but because I love what I do, it barely feels like work at all. This coming May will be my two year “2torversary”, a significant milestone marking the longest I’ve stayed at any job. I also just hit the two year anniversary living in the same apartment on the Upper Best Side of Manhattan (yes, Best, not west). It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere besides the house I grew up in. There’s a hearty dose of joy and a wonderful balance of work and play that I’ve been looking to find and sustain almost my entire life.

The other day watching the Grammy’s, I was so inspired by this Chipotle ad. I believe it came out a few months ago, but it’s the company’s attempt at telling the world that they’re all about healthier, more sustainable food (I’m guessing there are still people who associate Chipotle with McDonald’s even they parted ways back in ’06).  The ad uses a great cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” sung by Willie Nelson.

I love the video because it’s brilliant marketing, but it’s also a great reminder that you can’t move forward if you don’t remember who you are. In a lot of ways, blogging again is my attempt at falling back in love with the basics. When I was 12, I started a blog because I loved the idea of chronicling stories of my life, daily musings, ideas, and people that were important to me. I joined Facebook because I liked the idea of connecting with my friends. Twitter in ’06 was simply a way for me to document what I was doing and working on. These activities served no professional purpose, but instead, celebrated one of my favorite lessons of all time, “Happiness is only real when shared.”

In future posts, you’ll find me blogging about being social both at work and play. I’ll write about social media marketing and how I think social learning will fundamentally change education. I’ll share adventures with friends and all the wonderful things I love about living in New York City.

In the words of Coldplay, “We’re going back to the start.” Thanks, Chipotle.

Here’s the email I wrote:

“[Company X], along with any other consulting firm, is going to give you great experience. I think it will expose you to a level of professionalism that you can only experience when you’re inside of a large company. You might travel a lot and live out of a suitcase, which I actually think you’ll appreciate. You’ll be exposed to detail-oriented, strategic thinkers and work on projects that impact large systems. That’s the good stuff.

Here’s the bad. You’re going to deal with OCD managers, people who demand that you bend over backwards for a client or senior person and they’ll work you to a pulp. There’s no touchy feely “Oh you messed up” in the equation. It’s results, performance, discipline, and execution all the time. Second chances are rare, first impressions mean everything, and the extent to which you’ll feel like you’re actually making the world a better place will constantly be in question.

In the end, you could never go wrong by working there. Will you have the time of your life and climb up the corporate ranks? Probably not.  Most likely you’ll work there for a year or two and then leave to join a smaller firm or leave the entire consulting/analyst industry completely.

As you think about your career path, ask yourself what you value more:

• Discipline vs. Fun
• Organization vs. Creativity
• Micro vs. Macro
• Security vs. Risk
• Stability vs. Growth
• Balance vs. Speed

All of these values stack up to culture. The people you work with and who you work for will mean everything in the end. Google prides itself on having a great culture, but if you have a project manager who treats you like dirt, you’ll wake up every day hating work. So after assessing what you value, ask yourself what you want to learn and who you want to learn it from.  Think about whether you gravitate more towards:

• What was vs. What could be: Do you want to understand how the world works or do you want to be part of something changing it

• Rules vs. Anarchy: Do you want to learn how to break the rules or do you want to make the rules?  There’s something to be said about someone who knows how to navigate complex, large internal structure.  There’s also something to be said about someone who knows how to build out process and teams.

• Getting vs. Giving: Do you want to work in a capacity where you’re constantly taking in or constantly putting out.  Examples of taking in: customer support or data analysis. Examples of putting out: web development or sales.

This whole “figure my life out” thing and get a job is much more abstract than they told us it would be growing up. Stop thinking in terms of job function and use this criteria as a framework instead. Good luck!”

In my new role, I’ll be the Community Manager for USC’s Master’s of Arts in Teaching program, helping connect students and alumni in both online and offline channels. This new position has me working alongside a team of visionary leaders in the higher education field and immersed in a diverse community of more than 1,000 educators and students across the country.

As I start this new chapter, I’m forever grateful to the team at Porter Novelli for the lessons they imparted on me. Their unique approach to strategic thinking, unwavering commitment to their clients, and unbelievable attention to detail gave me newfound respect for PR professionals and brand marketers. If you ever get the chance to work alongside Stephanie Agresta (friend, mentor, and geek girl extraordinaire), John Havens (actor, all things augmented reality, mr. congeniality), Joel Johnson (strategic planning guru, swagger king, powerpoint wiz), Israel Mirsky (lover of emerging tech and small puppies), Karen Hartline (queen of karaoke and events, my left coast lover), Heather D’Amico (the skinniest fat girl with the best laugh you’ll ever meet), Greg Tedesco (my #strongisland counterpart), Nicole D’Alonzo (the sweetest gal on the web) and Christina Petroni (my separated sister at birth) – take it!  There are so many agencies out there, but I truly believe that PN’s integrated approach, their heart and rockstar talent sets it apart from many.

And so, here I am once again, joining another all-star marketing team led by Jeremy Johnson (too cool for school, but one of the smartest, kindest, and most driven individuals I know) and Marcus Cohn. I’ll be going back to my higher ed roots (I used to work in Admissions at Barnard College), revisiting platform technologies (shout out to Mzinga!), and putting all of that Porter Novelli strategic thinking into practice.

In the word of my new Trojan friends, FIGHT ON!

For years, I’ve always felt that Facebook gave lazy marketers an ego boost by providing a metric that said marketers were doing their jobs better than they actually were.  As consumers, “becoming a fan” never really meant much beyond the word “like”.  There were no real relationships there, no real types of meaningful engagement.

Facebook’s decision to switch from “fan” to “like” feels logical, natural, and really very necessary.  The ecosystem today is one giant meatmarket of brands and products vying for our attention.  At the end of the day, we as consumers have no desire to commit to contrived relationships.  Luckily for us, Facebook just gave us an easy out.

Well world, I am officially here!  This week I’ll be joined by about fifty of my colleagues from Porter Novelli (disclosure: we’re SXSW’s Agency of Record), helping Stephanie Agresta and Brian Solis rock out the blogger lounge and TechSet, recording an episode of Capitalize for Dartboston, and connecting with some of my favorite people in the industry.

I’m slightly worried that VIP lists and secret dinners will create a separation between the “haves” and “have nots” or the “influencers” and the “wannabes”. I do not have VC funding or a hot startup to call my own. I am not an online personality nor do I have an upcoming book deal. I do not have a million Twitter followers or a personal fan page. But what I do have is a purpose.

This year at SXSW, I want to celebrate the following:

1. Friends – There are people who I’ll be meeting this week who I’ve known for years and some just a few days. There are people who I haven’t met in person yet, but have written emails and tweets to for months. I want to celebrate friendships that I’ve been fortunate enough to have thanks to this wonderful community. I’m a better person because of them.
2. My job – Do you know how awesome it feels to get to be here because of work?  I take a lot of pride in being able to say that I’ve hustled hard over the past four years to get to this point and to know that I’m making a living doing what I love means everything to me.
3. Serendipity – I ran into @heyamberrae on my flight earlier and we bonded at the airport and over lunch about our similarities, passions, and shared connections. Prior to this run-in, we were just twitter acquaintances who had met briefly at an event in NY. I can now say that Amber is officially on my “watch out world” list and someone who I’m looking forward learning from and collaborating with in the future. This is just one of many serendipitous moments that I hope to have in the days to come. It’s the unexpected, anything can happen, spontaneous nature of this space that keeps me coming back for more every time.

In this vast landscape of social media practitioners, ideators, innovators, entrepreneurs, and technology titans, to know that I somehow have a piece of the puzzle is something words can’t describe.  And even though I officially haven’t slept for two nights straight, I am so alive, alert, and ready to have SXSW kick off my best year yet.

It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything on this blog… go figure something like this finally inspired me to get something up here.   I spent some time hanging out in Garageband and iMovie to make the video below.  Let’s just say I had way too much fun geeking out and fulfilling my inner pop-star fantasies.

How to create the autotune effect in Garageband:

1.  Pick a song that you like.  Find a karaoke version (lots to be found on Youtube or you can try MySpace).

2.  Open Garageband. If you’re on a Mac running Tiger, click “Music Project” and set the key of the song you’ll be recording. If you’re running Mac OS 10.5+, just click voice.

3.  Make sure your key is set properly.  Look at the bottom panel near the play and record buttons and select the project icon.  This will pull up a mini screen that indicates the key you’re recording in.

4.  Record your track and then locate the little scissor icon in the lower left of panel.  Click it and you’ll see a set of preferences come up.  Move the second slider “Enhance tuning” to the right to create the autotune effect.  Make sure you select the “Limit to key” check box.

That’s it!  It’s as easy as that.  Now if you don’t have a Mac or this is just too much work for you, highly recommend the T-Pain iPhone app, which is pure genius.  It costs $3 at the iTunes store (link), but it’s ridiculously fun.  Check out the kiddies testing it out below:

Alright, that’s all I got for now!  Let me know what you think and happy auto-tuning!

UPDATE: Best autotune video ever:

My short interlude covered a concept that I call “reverse-mentorship.”  While I would love to take credit for the origin of the phrase, it’s something that I believe Barry coined while we were piloting out the idea.

In a nutshell I make the argument that reverse-mentorship, the pairing of digital natives with senior level executives, is the fastest way towards bridging the digital or generational divide.  Here’s a summary highlighting my main points:

Meet the Millennials. There is no shortage of words to describe who were are in the eyes of our elders.  Some say we’re spoiled, some say we’re naive.  We’re most definitely inexperienced and yes, we care about ourselves a lot.  To label us the “ME” generation is fairly accurate, however self preservation and pursuit of individual happiness has always been part of America’s cultural DNA.

Who’s in charge? A climate crisis, a broken health care system, a need for education reform, and a recession.  For all the negative labels surrounding Millennials today, at least we can say we didn’t create these problems.  Previous generations have demonstrated flawed leadership-styles that can no longer be counted on to produce the results we need.  It’s time for change.

Reverse-mentorship isn’t about sparking a youth revolution. It’s not about asserting that one generation is better over the other.  Rather, this is about expressing an opportunity for us to isolate our  flaws, and work together to compensate for them. What Millennials lack in experience, we make up for in our digital aptitude, eagerness to learn, and desire for speed.  We can help tenured professionals overcome their lack of technical finesse, in exchange for their knowledge and expertise.  Together, we can create partnerships that reinforce organizational systems that are faster, smarter, social, and change-oriented.

I’ve met and worked with enough executives and professionals by now to know that this partnership of generations can work.  How it actually plays out in practice…. that’s a completely separate post.

More on this topic to come.

UPDATE 8/14: Here’s the video of the talk!

I concluded that I was a hybrid blogger, someone who had yet to establish a clear sense of purpose in my writing.  What I’ll admit to is the challenge that I face every single day – the struggle to answer, “Who am I?” and “Who do I want to be?”

It’s so much easier for us to answer the latter question because we can all fantasize about the best version of ourselves.  However, what most of us lack is the self-actualization it takes to admit to who we really are.

In the world of personal branding, those that do it best are consistent, confident, and concise.  They manage to fine-tune the complexities of their character and simplify.  We are all multi-faceted creatures, yet self-marketing pros can usually get themselves down to 2-3 key words.  It’s all about keeping it simple.

The Online Dilemma of Gen-Y
What the world needs to realize is that for young professionals like myself, many of us are still grappling with self-identity issues.  I’ve had this talk with other peers and pals like Maria Thurrell, Amanda Gravel, and Sandy Kalik before and we constantly ask, “How the heck can we market ourselves when we barely even know who we are?”

Ask yourself what you were like when you just graduated college.  Did you have any clue as to what you wanted in life and what you were doing in your career that would lead to where you are today?

I envy a lot of adults who managed to make the transition from student to professional without having someone Google them.  I miss the days when I could log into my blogs and write randomly about my life and what I was feeling on a particular day.  The internet used to be a place of self exploration for me and now it’s evolved into a place of self-assertion.

Creating a Fluid Online Identity

We live in an unforgiving world of web histories and share this links.  The concept of context is virtualy shattered when we exist online and as a result, our personal brands must stay with us from one web property to the next.

It is my hope that the professional world understands that we are the first generation to have what I’d like to call a fluid identity.  We have a legacy of High School MySpace profiles, college Facebook accounts, and post-college LinkedIn resumes.  We can attempt to sell ourselves under the guise of a personal brand, but at the end of the day, that brand will shift and evolve with every new experience we have as people.

As the Graduating Class of 2009 descends upon the working world, I encourage them to embrace the uncertainty of their identities, revel in the technologies they grew up with, and dismiss this notion of conformity.

I challenge them to answer,”Who am I?” and “Who do I want to be?”, but more importantly, to repeat this process time and time again.

Photo credit: Obensen