This is such a special story!
Scott Widak and his family recently received the greatest gift anyone in their situation could receive — a viral act of encouragement and kindness from complete strangers.
The 47-year-old Widak has Down syndrome and is terminally ill with liver disease. His nephew, Sean O’Connor, turned to the Reddit community to see if anyone would be willing to send his uncle a letter.
“One of my uncle’s favorite things to do is open mail, and I thought that if he got a lot of mail it would cheer him up,” says O’Connor.
The results are astounding, with letters coming in from all over the globe, containing well wishes, artwork, keepsakes, and other mementos.
Read the full story here.
Me talking about my favorite topic (social media) at my favorite building at my alma mater (Murphy Hall). Great discussion with grad students graduating this spring.
Spyder Trap’s Social Media Manager Liz Tunheim and Project Manager Jamie Jacobsen recently spoke to grad students from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota on social media and mobile.
My kind of valentine (Taken with instagram)
I love love this Chrome commercial. Watching “Make It Happen” makes me happy.
Pinterest Infographic
“God morgen” to my Scandinavian friends!
Interesting data to support the Social Media ROI discussion. Thoughts?
Pinterest Piquing My Interests; Huge Opportunity For Content Creators
Pinterest is getting a lot of attention lately, so naturally I want to comment on my love for the platform. I love that it is easy to share and consume images; I love even more that it pulls in photos from the site you want to share making it easy to save and consume great content.
I was first introduced to Pinterest last summer. Newly engaged, a colleague of mine invited me to Pinterest as she had been using it to pin the things she wanted to share with her wedding planner.
I honestly did not get into it immediately, but in the past few months the site has received a lot of my attention. Between wedding planning and seeking fun holiday decor and food ideas, I found better content through my Pinterest friends (pulled in from Facebook) than in any Google searches I performed.
Pinterest has created a huge opportunity for content creators—if you want to share your content with the Pinterest community, you should:
- Include interesting visuals to go along with your shareable content
- Write a short description that includes what the image links back to as encouragement to visit your website
- Upload and tag to correlating categories to help it spread
The example here is a good one—it has a photo that pulled me in (though not exactly beautiful…) and links to a post offering “35 Pest, Disease and Weed Remedies,” or exactly I would want if my grapefruit looked like this.
If this content was useful to me, I could pin this and later come back to it when I need this content. Because of the visual image, it will not be hard to find this pin in my pinboard.
If you have not joined the Pinterest community yet, I highly suggest you give it a try. I know the site has use for everyone because it is so easy. I imagine it will just take enough people sharing likeminded content to drive users outside the heavy female population that Pinterest enjoys now.
Are you on Pinterest? What is your favorite use for Pinterest?
I have the best aunt! Thanks Julie for the autumn spread! (Taken with instagram)
Last shot at MSP before heading to Oz. Safe travels Sam! (Taken with instagram)
