©Depositphotos/iqoncept

Ahh good old social media, how it dominates our lives these days. One of the questions I often find myself asking is how do you say no to someone who requests to connect to you with social media when you really have no reason to. This is not so much a problem for platforms like Twitter where everything you say is public, but more a problem for platforms like Facebook where I like to personally restrict my circle to family and close friends.

Anyone who knows me on Facebook will know that around once a year I do a Facebook “Culling” to trim the fat off the list. As a little amusement I post everyone letting them know it is coming then a “YAAY, if you are reading this you survived” before and after the cull. As a quick sidebar for some reason these are ALWAYS the posts that get the most discussion and laughs on my facebook… go figure.

This time I did it however the one person who was the biggest reason for me doing the cull chimed in and said “oh I hope you won’t be getting rid of me”, LOL I had to be frank, “yea I will, sorry”. But this raises the point, should you straight up reject friend requests when they come in, or do you accept them, wait for a while and then silently remove them.

The people who you haven’t seen in years, who barely even knew you at school, or you are no longer friends with due to a falling out, how do you manage this unpleasant area of cutting the Facebook knot?

I am curious to hear other’s thoughts, leave a comment if you have a suggestion

Stuart

©Depositphotos/scanrail

With all the writing and posting we do, we bloggers often find spreading the word can be a significant challenge. When the stars align, our fingers strike the keyboard in juuuuust the right way and we manage to hit that awesome note and write a perfect post, the challenge of sharing that with the world can be the hardest tasks for a blogger.

Often we rely on friends, readers, and people who find our sites via search engines to help us spread the word if they find a post interesting or informative, helpful or hilarious. Most blogs you will see have like buttons (similar to those on the left) or at the bottom of the post to help make it easy for those that appreciate what we have written to spread the word.

The other thing that greatly drives a blogger is when people comment on his or her posts. Be it feedback, constructive criticism or even just someone letting us know that we put a smile on their face, that is what brings us back to keep writing time and time again.

So if you ever find a post that you are reading on any writers blog that particularly tickles your fancy don’t hesitate to let the blogger know with a comment, or like it with Facebook to help spread the word and share the post with your friends.

Stuart

(or if you are really bored I totally understand if you just want to poke, prod and tickle me in comments also… can’t blame you for that)

©Depositphotos/robeo123

The key thing to remember in life is that sometimes you have to just take a leap of faith and ask. Remember that there is never any harm in asking and as the simple saying goes… If you don’t ask the answer WILL be no.

Often people say to me “How on EARTH did you arrange that… no seriously?”, or “How the heck do you manage to do things like that?”. Often as crazy as it sounds, my simple response is that I just asked, I figure when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose (so to speak). Take the case and point of last week. I saw that Samsung had a new vacuum cleaner on the market called the Navibot SR8980. Being the geek that I am I thought that the product looked awesome and I wanted to get my hands dirty with it and see just how well it perfomed. Luckily for me the PR contacts details were on the bottom of the article which made my life significantly easier.

I dropped Alexandria an email and mentioned that I had participated in a blogger product review program previously (by Canon Australia), and while it had been some time I would really like the opportunity to get my hands on a unit to do some real, in home domestic testing of the unit and to do a review of the Navibot on my technical blog.

A few days later I received a lovely email from Alexandria, while all the units are currently out for review, she kindly offered to send me one in two weeks time so that I could get my hands dirty. While not *everyone* would be able to do this, having a tech blog that I am posting on regularly again certainly helped my case, it does re-iterate the point of… you really do just have to ask.

So never be afraid to put your feelers out and simply ask the question, when you are polite, friendly and chirpy it really does work wonders for building rapport and working your way towards a YES!

Stuart

P.S. Keep an eye out on TechnicalNotebook in about a month’s time for the review of the Navibot SR8980.