Welcome to I Contain Multitudes!
Here, we'll explore social media and Adobe Creative Cloud tips, and I'll share the interesting things I've read lately.
Oh hi there.
Welcome to I Contain Multitudes, a new publication from me - Jonathan Gabriel. Each month, I’ll share with you my favorite social media and Adobe tips, as well as commentary on interesting things I’ve been reading.
Let’s get to the good stuff…
Tips & Tricks
Let’s Get Accessible: Alexa Heinrich, social media manager at St. Petersburg College in Florida, has been my go-to this year for learning about social media accessibility. Did you know, for example, that those fancy fonts and ASCII works of art create havoc for screen readers? Learn more from Alexa here and by following her posts here.
New LinkedIn Learning Course: Google Data Studio for Marketers: Google Data Studio is a powerful tool for building beautiful interactive dashboards and data visualization for your reports, and it’s something that I’m looking to have a better handle on in the next few months. LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) has a great new course on how to use this tool. If you’re a student, you may have a free subscription to LinkedIn Learning through your university!
How Do I Get Started in a Social Media Career? - Leah Schoolcraft (side note: isn’t that the coolest last name?), a graduate integrated marketing communications student at West Virginia University, started a great conversation on Twitter about what social media marketers should include in resumes and online portfolios.
Did someone post an insightful tweetstorm? Save it for later! If you’re on Twitter and you see someone post a particularly insightful stream of tweets, you can generate a nicely formatted page to view it later. Just reply to the tweetstorm with @threadreaderapp and use the keyword “unroll” (without quotes).
Slide Into Those DMs: Did you know there are keyboard shortcuts for accessing your private social messages on desktop? For Twitter, you can toggle the DM panel by typing the letter “i” (to start a new DM, type “m”). On Facebook, you can type the letter “q” to bring up a Messenger window (where you can search for the contact you want to message). See more time-saving shortcuts here.
What topics would you be most interested in learning about in future newsletters?
What I’ve Been Reading
Are you on Goodreads? I’d love to see what you’re reading!
1939: A People’s History by Frederick Taylor. I particularly enjoyed this history of the lead-up to World War II, which interleaves the personal accounts of everyday people (primarily British and German) with newspaper accounts of the changing public mood as war approached.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. I’ve heard people describe this book as “life-changing,” and I can see why. Clear’s book is easy to follow and provides actionable insight on how habits form. You can get an idea of his style here.
The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham. A particularly hopeful read for these troubled times. Meacham takes episodes from American history - the Civil War, World War II, the rise and fall of McCarthyism in the 1950s - to illustrate that each time America faced an insidious threat, our better angels (a reference to the stirring ending of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural) were able to prevail. Of course, today we are having to deal with some issues that we didn’t have to in the past, namely, coordinated mis- and disinformation and the powerful amplifying force that is social media.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. This is one of the most comprehensive books I’ve seen about a subject that I have heretofore poorly understood. It talks about redlining, housing covenants, and how they have influenced racial disparities that persist today.
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