The best occasions to look your best are the December holidays. Although Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa give you an opportunity to assemble beautiful and festive ensembles, New Year’s Eve is the ultimate opportunity for you to dazzle.  I didn’t get to celebrate New Year’s Eve in style until I was a young adult. When I was growing up, my family often attended church or we stayed at home to watch TV.  But once I started to party, it was on.  I can remember some of my favorite New Years dresses and gowns—the two-piece gold lamé tunic over stove pipe pants by Trivilla, the Calvin Klein black tuxedo dress, the Kasper black chiffon gown with sprinkles of tiny gold metallic flowers and the Halston purple flapper dress.  All of the shoes were statuesque Charles Jourdan, Halston or Dano. Evening shoes must always be in stand-out colors like ruby, pewter, gold, silver copper or black.

 This holiday season some designers have gone back to classic forties styles, and I like it.  Victoria Beckham, Zac Posen, Ellie Saab, Alexander McQueen and others returned to arguably the greatest style era of our time to re-create some most unforgettable looks.   They are working with velvet, chiffon, metallic and shimmering jersey.

 Remember, New Year’s Eve is your final act of the season before the curtain comes down at midnight.  Go with glimmer, shimmer and shine on the night that style is everything.

 -Carol Payne

Google recently added real-time search capabilities to its search engine, which means that in addition to traditional search results, Google’s search spider will also reveal real-time search results from Twitter, and public pages on Facebook and MySpace, among others. As soon as content is posted and linked, it will be searchable immediately. The real-time search reveals breaking news the moment it happens, even if it’s not the most popular news of the day. Click on “Latest results” or select “Latest” to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news, and other web content. Search results can also be filtered to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Google Trends has also added “hot topics” to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time.

So what does this mean for companies engaged in social media?

For one thing, this new search component will make active engagement in social media more important to increase visibility on the web. The more content a company is able to create, the more often their content will appear in Google’s search results. This content can take the form of Tweets and Facebook wall posts, comments, notes, and links. It may change the way companies implement search engine optimization to include using hash tags to drive search results. Companies will also want to pay closer attention to content that is being posted about them on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. because that content will now appear in search results. So, if a customer has a negative experience with your product and they publicize it via social media, it will be searchable and may even appear on the first page of a Google search.

Google is making it even easier for people to find information about your company or product outside of news stories and company web sites. Now, the conversations and opinions people have are more readily available for anyone to read. So if you’re a company that is not already engaged in social media, it may be time to extend beyond a static web site and establish a presence on the social web if you want to be seen and heard in the vast and evolving world of cyberspace.

–Mary Nhotsavang

Poinsettias Are Poisonous.

They’re not, but we still wouldn’t advise eating them…

This year for Christmas, I organized a toy drive for my church.  I am a member of the Lay Organization, which is one of the auxiliaries at church.  Our interest is the people of the church and our goal is to ensure members of our congregation understand our faith and how it relates to them in layman’s terms.  During this holiday season, we knew we wanted to give back to our communities and did so through a toy drive which helped make Christmas wishes come true for about 400 families.

The economy has not turned around, people are still unemployed, and there are a lot of homeless families in the Twin Cities. We saw a toy drive as a great opportunity to make a positive impact.  Fliers were distributed throughout the community asking for donations of age appropriate toys and letting families know where they can receive donated toys.  To ensure as many families as possible were impacted by our work, we went around the surrounding neighborhood knocking on doors with toys in hand. Children that possibly would not have Christmas presents under their tree this year received new books, toys and music for Christmas.

Our mission was to make this the best Christmas ever for children we distributed toys to—and we succeeded. The day of the toy distribution, December 19^th, I arrived at 7:30 a.m. with my granddaughter, Kari, to get the toys out of the secured area we locked them in the night before.  We put the toys out, organizing them into three age groups.  Families starting arriving at exactly 9:00 a.m. and continued non-stop until about 2:30 p.m. and more families continued to arrive until 3:15 p.m. Our adult choir was rehearsing upstairs, lending a wonderful holiday spirit to the event. Mrs. Wooley had left her grandchildren with us downstairs—they were so much fun and great company for Kari.  Even though the toy drive just ended, I can’t wait until next year’s toy drive. We are already looking forward to helping make Christmas a little more magical for families in our church congregation and in surrounding Minneapolis communities.

-Carol Payne

After surviving the last two tumultuous holiday seasons, I really wanted to do something different this year to commemorate the turnaround and share my sense of peace with others this year. It seemed especially right given that so many are still struggling from the economic meltdown and mass layoffs of the last year. So this holiday season, I was part of a group of women who adopted a family in need through the Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Greater Twin Cities.  

Our selected family was comprised of six children, a single mom and a grandfather. We divvied up the list of each family members’ wants and needs, and I’m elated to report we were able to fulfill their every Christmas wish and then some. Toys, clothing, blankets were just the beginning. The generosity of the group resulted in hundreds of dollars worth of gift cards to Cub Foods so the family can enjoy a hearty holiday meal—and likely many meals beyond that.

Last Sunday, the group met at The Local in Minneapolis to wrap all the gifts and then five of us (myself included) proceeded from there to the family’s home for delivery. Donning Santa hats and barely able to make it up the apartment stairs with all of the bags, we were greeted by the sobbing mother who was so overwhelmed with tears and gratitude she could hardly speak.  By the time we left, it was us ladies who were too choked up for words.

This is an experience I’ll never forget and I plan to continue this tradition of giving to those in need every year from now on. I hope everyone is giving what they can this year and that all of the families in need have a happy, healthy and peaceful holiday season.

-Steph Haugan

In a recent Marie Claire magazine I learned about Sarah Haskins, whose series of videos called Target Women are burning up the Internet. In them, she takes on (and takes down) the cheesy marketing campaigns aimed at women. Her interview really resonated with me as I am 1) a frequent TV watcher, 2) a female in the coveted 18-34 ad category, and 3) often fed up with how I’m portrayed in ads. Sarah explains it perfectly: girlfriends in commercials travel in a pack. One is shy, one is smart, one is a wild-child and one is the normal one. Our pack, the “go to people” as so eloquently put by Brooke Shields (the new poster child for the female demographic), is basically there to advise us about what to shop for.

 I am a college-educated, thoughtful, career-minded young woman. Newsflash!  It is not my dream to spend my free time in a mall and I have never uttered the phrase, “He went to Jared!” And my friends and I don’t sit around and discuss the length (or lack) of our eyelashes, contrary to Latisse ads. Why can’t advertisers occasionally present an image that is inspirational, not patronizing? I can’t imagine a “woman and her mop waltzing” resonated in a female focus group (Yes, I’m talking about you Swiffer!) At SCG we strive to highly define our audiences not just by demographics, but also what they currently think, who influences them, what problems they need answered, and other criteria. We don’t rely solely on assumptions when reaching a conclusion; we gather as much information (reasoning) as possible.

 OK, so we (I) may still occasionally buy the products whose ads make me cringe—mainly because yes, the Swiffer rocks—but I absolutely seek out products and companies whose ads I relate to and am inspired by (thank you method, Target, Dove and Got Milk?)

In the meantime, I can at least laugh about it with help from people like Sarah. What about you ladies (and men)…what ads inspire you?

-Jenny Silgen

Young people dominate social media and in particular, Facebook.

While Facebook began as a college networking program, Facebook’s older demographic is growing at an exponential pace.

Sometimes it seems like just yesterday we were stocking up on canned goods preparing for the much anticipated Y2K computer meltdown to hit and create mass chaos. We quickly learned that the dreaded computer failures would never come to pass. Despite the sighs of relief everyone breathed, January 1, 2000 still marked the beginning of the downward spiral that defines the past decade for America. I hadn’t realized to what extent the spiral plunged until I read a sobering article in Time magazine that so eloquently coined the past decade, “the Decade of Broken Dreams.”

It began with 9/11 and ends with an economic recession. To me, the first half of the decade greatly defines the dark decade we were about to live through. There were the anthrax letter scares, the Enron scandal, the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the largest natural disaster in our nation’s history Hurricane Katrina, and the tsunami in Asia that killed more than 200,000 people. The second half of the decade dutifully followed suit with the spikes in unemployment, the housing slump, the mass shootings at Virginia Tech and Fort Hood, the I-35W bridge collapse, and the untimely death of the King of Pop.

My point is not to list every unfortunate event that happened since 2000, so let’s reflect on some of the good things this past decade has provided. We can’t forget the growth of the social media landscape such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace that enables us to reconnect and expand our reach in the community. Then Apple launched iPods and iPhones that exemplify how far technology has come and how much further it can, and will, go. We witnessed a turning point in history when our first African-American President was sworn into office. And we continue to have the world’s strongest military.

After I read the article and gave it some thought, I realized that while we can’t deny some of the terrible events that have happened in our nation, we can scale the memories of the past 10 years down to a personal level and think to ourselves, it wasn’t really that bad. In actuality, we’ve had some really good times. For me, it was an overall great decade in my life.

As I head into a new year and a new decade, I resolve to make it a point to remind myself of everything that I do have, not to dwell on what I don’t have, be thankful for the past and lessons learned, and look toward tomorrow with a lighter heart and the promise of new beginnings.

How are you going to start your new year?

-Mary Nhotsavang

When LinkedIn debuted in May of 2003, (a year before the launch of Facebook) not many people took notice, but over the past two years (and especially in the past year), people from across the globe have connected to the growing network of over 50 million professionals from 200 countries.  Despite the popularity and usefulness of the networking site, the blogosphere—the harsh world that it can be—often rains on LinkedIn’s parade.  Critics use the words “boring” and “simple” when describing the site. And to a point, I can agree.  Once you join the site, make your profile, select an appropriate picture and begin making connections and recommendations, it’s hard to know what the next step should be. But does a site like LinkedIn, that offers professionals easy access to background information about other professionals, need the hyper activity of other social media to be a valuable tool? In other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, those next engagements are almost intuitive. Their success is built on enticing multiple interactions with the site per day – or per hour for some! With Facebook, you “friend” someone, tag pictures of them, send a message, join groups and fan pages on which you continually interact.  Twitter is constantly updated as news stories break, interesting articles are uncovered and events in your personal life or professional perspective unfold. 

 Nonetheless, it seems as though LinkedIn has listened to its critics, responding with a redesigned profile.  Users are now greeted by a sleeker, more user-friendly interface that more effectively shows the activity of your connections and groups.  The new look will be available in phases to users, so be on the look out next time you log on. In addition to previously available applications like SlideShare and Word Press for blogs, LinkedIn has recently introduced new partnerships with Twitter and Microsoft Outlook and added new applications like My Travel and Amazon Reading List. This shows just how far LinkedIn has come in such a short amount of time (when LinkedIn first started, there were about 5 applications available.) These new relationships and expanded applications highlight the importance of social media integration and provide users new and exciting ways to utilize LinkedIn to enhance individual and corporation’s relationships with their LinkedIn connections.

 Will LinkedIn’s new functionality make a difference in how you use it?

 -Whitney McIntosh

The best way to pick a charity this year is to look for one with a really low expense ratio. This shows that donations are being put to good use. 

While popular and easy to calculate, the use of overhead rates as a proxy for effectiveness is, well, ineffective. The overhead myth actually discourages charities from investing in tools and expertise that would make them more effective – allowing them to reach more people that they want to serve.