TCC Insights

Cutting the Cord

By Sharon Linstedt, Senior Counselor and Media Relations Strategist

836-2858. Those seven digits were the centerpiece of my communications life for nearly four decades.

I first remember them in bold print on the chunky, black rotary phone that sat on my parents kitchen counter. For many years, it was one of four numbers on a ‘party line’ our family shared with three rural Wisconsin neighbors.  We had to count the number of rings to figure out if it was our call – and we also had to wait patiently (or listen in) if our elderly neighbor Elda Reinert had a lot of gossip to tell her friends. Eventually Bell Telephone Co. upgraded service and it was all ours.

I Don’t Have an App for that…and that’s OK

By Sharon Linstedt, Senior Counselor & Media-Relations Strategist

If you’ve got a smart phone - and if you didn’t have one before, you probably got one for Christmas – there are now more than 2,500 ‘apps’ floating around in cyberspace to keep you informed, entertained and otherwise occupied.

I’m fairly sure my nearest and dearest friends have at least 2,000 of them.  I know this because frequently the first words out of their mouths are “You’ve gotta see this cool app I just got.”

Confessions of a Social Media Virgin

By Sharon Linstedt, Media Relations Specialist

I consider myself a social person.  I’m also open to new experiences, including fairly early adaption to things electronic and high-tech. (Hey, I’m on my 5th iPod and can program the DVR.)
 
But - major admission here - until this week I was a Facebook virgin.  While I can e-mail and text with the best of them, I had never waded into the social media waters. This was not due to lack of exposure considering the cumulative hours I have spent waiting to gain access to my home PC while my 15-year-old daughter scrolls through her Facebook page reading messages from her more than 600 “friends.”
 
It’s been a conscious choice to avoid yet another way to eat up time better spent doing something/anything that doesn’t involve a computer screen.

I also bought into my daughter’s view that Facebook-ing isn’t for grown-ups, despite the fact several of my very grown-up friends raved about the connections they’ve reestablished with long-lost pals and relatives around the globe.

But all that changed as of Thursday afternoon.  I tossed aside my social media preconceptions and dove in.