Hard at work in my onesie

I have to admit that I'm still a little bit in hibernation mode, which is so much easier when you work from home.
Jane BinnionJane Binnion
Jane Binnion

I can sit in my onesie working at my computer and no one knows. That is until my lovely neighbour calls round at 11am bearing gifts of leeks and onions.

I tried to explain that I had actually been working for three hours, but it did sound like I was protesting too much. So I will just say that if you catch me in my onsie in the middle of the day, I’m working!

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The other festive holiday habit I need to shake off is the use of emojis. The little face graphics that show how you feel are so useful to reduce misunderstandings in texts and social media posts that I’ve found myself wanting to add them to emails to clients and prospects.

It’s so nice to send people a smile, but I’m not sure they’re totally acceptable in professional emails yet. Mind you LinkedIn, the professional networking site, has added them as an option for private messages. I was a bit stuffy about it when they appeared late last year, but I did use a Gif, a little animated graphic, to send a response to a lovely woman who told me she got engaged at Christmas.

They are quite fun and if you search Gif Maker on the old interweb you can make your own. I certainly intend to waste some time doing that this year.

My New Year intention was to go alcohol free for January and I’m doing good. I read there’s an app for that, but I seem to be doing okay the old-fashioned way, of just not opening a bottle of wine.

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My first week back to work involved me delivering two lots of team training on social media policy and online reputation management. I really enjoy working with teams to explore the Dos and Don’ts of social media and it’s important as the consequences of a post shared in anger, or dodgy humour, can be very costly all round. But what we fail to notice sometimes is that it can be the organisation’s rules that cause the problem when they are run by people that do not understand social media. So, I would certainly encourage the training to be for everyone, not just staff teams.

The big social media news is that twitter is thinking about changing the 140 character limit to 10,000 characters this year. Those of us that love the quirky nature of twitter are not happy, but it hopes this will bring in more money.

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