Brindle Media

With all the talk about Twitter, I decided to sign up several weeks ago. To be honest, I still haven’t found much value in it.

With Facebook, I can read someone’s post, respond to it and see the response. If I write something and post it on Facebook, I get a message in my email box when someone responds. Neither of those things happen with Twitter.

In fact, after several weeks of trying, I still haven’t figured out how to respond to someone’s post on Twitter. It’s just not obvious to me.

If you decide to join Twitter, you can follow me at www.Twitter.com/brindlemedia

I’m creating this blog to help those of us born between 1946 and 1964 to cope with the rapid changes that are happening all around us. Remember at the end of the last century when a big question was what we were going to do with all of our spare time? I don’t know about you but even though I left my last “official” job over two years ago, I don’t find that I have a lot of spare time.

One of the challenges I’ve encountered is that I don’t have a college degree. When I was 13, I decided that I wanted to be in the radio business. During my sophomore year at Northeastern University in Boston, I was offered a job in broadcasting and I was learning so much and having so much fun that I left school and pursued my career. Over the next 40 years, I had a successful communications management career in places like Providence, Albany, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York working for companies like NBC, SFX, AM/FM and MTV Networks.

Despite not having a college degree, I was also invited to teach a communications course at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, served as a faculty advisor at Siena College and was certified by the New York State Education Department as a licensed private school teacher. Nevertheless, I’m finding many organizations refusing to even consider me for employment because I don’t have a college degree. I’ve also noticed that many of the online job application forms that HR departments are using to screen candidates no longer include “Some college” as an option.

Have you encountered this problem? Have you figured out a way to deal with it?

Tell me about it.

Language is a great tool for making people feel either special or stupid.

If you’re feeling intimidated by the words being used to describe various aspects of New Media, try to isolate the definition to something that has meaning for you.

“Populate” basically means to add your database or contact list.

To “mash” means to combine dissimilar elements to create something new and different.

I know that I still start feeling overwhelmed when reading social media blogs and being confronted with a list of terms I’ve never seen before. That’s OK. Just think of the process as learning a new language and find a way to reward yourself for your continuing education.

I’ll be blogging about my experiences and what I’m learning as I adjust to changes in everyday life and business.