Alas, to get a handle on all the shows and to find the nooks and crannies you’ll most enjoy, you’ll need to visit a number of websites to map your route. I start with the founder show, The Tucson Gem and Mineral Society. This show culminates several weeks of gem show frenzy (Febrary 9 – 12) and is probably a best best if you just want a quick look at the excitement. But if you’re interested in beads I’d also look at the To Bead True Blue show schedule. I also check in with the African Art Village and The Tucson Gem Show Guide to identify exhibits, speakers, vendors, Native American village and other eclectic offerings I’ll want to explore.

The natural geological wonders, fossils, trade beads and the folk arts clustered around the show themes always have been fascinating to me. Beads especially are symbolic of cultural tradition, ornamentation, religion, art and commerce…and I still prize the ones I selected and purchased last year from Bead Trader and historian Steve Ellis. I am interested this year in getting more beads revered as trade items here in the southwest, including the Bohemian hand-faceted Russian Blue beads, the Feather beads Venetian hand “trailed”), the Black Skunks also known as eye beads and worn for protection, and the hand-made Venetian glass Gooseberry bead, later 1800s, also beloved by Native Americans.

All the beautiful natural elements (or historic hand-made items like trade beads)  transcend time and relate important stories about our world’s natural wonders, our cultures, our economy and our arts.

Can any rock hound out there help me identify the beautiful mineral-embedded rock that sits in my front yard? It was there when I purchased my home…and most every day I look at it, admire the beautiful/colorful swirls it houses, and wonder where it came from. I pray it traveled here easily and fairly (I have nightmares about taking from mother earth just for the sake of adornment or material pleasure). But even if it was stolen from its natural place, I honor it and hope it knows it has a respectful new home. Mother Earth gave us great natural wonders to admire and explore. I hope you enjoy what you find at the Tucson shows scattered around the Old Pueblo this month.

For me, trekking through Arizona has been a way to help me slow down, enrich and clarify my personal as well as professional life. Whether looking out the window of an historic railway, visiting a sustainable farm in Patagonia, or climbing to an arch along Navajo highway — the world around me has been invaluable resource to  refresh the soul as well as help hone the writer craft. I just needed to stop, listen and look. Five examples of journeys that have encouraged my creative spirit:

1. A visit to the imposing mountain Baboquivari… where a rambling dirt road taken past the lovely Himdag Ki museum leads to what the O’odham people call the stony ground. I didn’t climb to the top of this mystical spire but I hope to in 2012. The quietness, interrupted only by birds and rustling lizards, is magic for the soul.
2. Colossal Cave: In once great ranch land where cattle still roam, there is a beautiful outpost that hides a treasure of a cave. In monsoon season the tourists are scarce, and lazy horses or burros slap tails against the flies. The wind rustle through dried grasses. It’s all like a summer desert song that reawakens creativity.
3. Coronado Trail Highway 191: We zig zagged the car past the mines and funky towns of Clifton and Morenci, and drove up through the glorious Coronado Trail just a week before the horrific fires in 2011. We were surrounded by green blankets of forest and moss, saw packs of bighorn sheep and couples of elk. The quiet majesty of this area was breathtaking. Still is, its power to nurture the spirit undiminished by the late spring firestorm.
4. Navajo and Hopi Land: Past Flagstaff off Highway 89, following route 160, there are offshoot roads that take you to the land of Dine and Hopi. Here you find wide open spaces cut by redstone arches,  expansive colorful canyons, monuments, petryglyphs and strangely-formed monoliths that spiral to the sky.  It is a universe of nature, beauty, history and stillness like no other in Arizona.
5. Salt River to Petrified Forest: Above Globe, Highway 60 takes you through high desert and a scenic bridge that leads through a canyon full of Apache history. Passing this, then through White Mountain vacationer towns like Show Low and Snowflake, you find more unique Arizona beauty along the Colorado Plateau in a forest of a different kind. The wind rips in the Petrified Forest, where temps get to zero in wintertime. But it is a strange land of fossils, petrified woods and strange formations, carried here and molded millions of years ago.

Each trip brings amazement at natural wonders, new respect for ancient ways….and a cleansing of the spirit as technology slipps away and the here-and-now speaks loudly.

In 2012, take the time to break away. Speak to yourself, not your Facebook page. Did you enjoy this moment? See — It is gone already!

Resources for writers:
From CopyBlogger: 10 Terrific Writing Blogs
From New York Times: The Joy of Quiet
Useful for Entrepreneurs: Blogs and Twitter Accounts For Entrepreneurs to Follow

http://surfaro.blogspot.com/2011/12/best-friend-forever-salute.html

My session focused on Social Media Toolboxes. Everyone was looking for ways to continue to inspire loyalty and advocacy at the local level and at the industry level, in order to promote their interests and their brand.

For this group and for everyone – It is all about influence in a very noisy Internet world. Google and others are designing the filters of the future to guide us through the slush. And so users of social media must look for ways to keep their organizations at the top of the heap as gatekeepers strive to bury the weak in the noise.

I discussed a strategy for keeping up influence in a noisy world. My recommended strategy involves this 6-part formula:

1. Developing the goals that will get you to influence the conversations you need to be part of.
2. Identifying and defining your voice…your brand…in these conversations, these platforms.
3. Aggregating and managing all the platforms, all the fans, all the contacts and all the communities you contribute to and maintain on the Internet. If you don’t do this step you’re sure to get overwhelmed.
4. Enacting processes that methodically help you connect and acknowledge all the people you engage on the web, on a regular basis.
5. Distributing your messages on your platforms and in widely crowd-sourced  newsvines and Internet communities. It’s a big, wild west world and you need to find those places to imprint your message.
6. Monitoring….analyzing…and monitoring again your visibility….tracking it against your plan and measuring its ROI.

The deal is to focus a plan like this around involvement in meaningful platforms. In 2011 and probably 2012 there are a few obvious hot-buttons:

• Location-based platforms like Foursquare are wrapped around the growing importance of mobile. Check-ins are generating excitement through Deals. The check-ins are building brand virally, with fans promoting through their own social media.
• Looking at the various online marketing and e-commerce trends of 2011, what stands out is the incredible growth of localization, with Groupon and Living Social dominating social commerce. There are many perks of social commerce beyond the deal. There is the viral aspect of having people tweet your deals or post them, extending buzz and opportunities to make brands visible.
• Facebook may be huge and popular – but search is still a primary online activity. Most of your searching is via Google, I’ll assume. So Google+ is formidable and should be part of a 2012 social media strategic toolbox.
• LinkedIn is NOT just a resume-based website for professionals. There are over 101 million members, and it is a place for leverage in any social media marketing strategy – whether through use of LinkedIn Answers or LinkedIn Polls for market research.

At the Symposium we discussed where social media is headed. Think one word: MOBILE. We have moved past the question on whether mobile has arrived. It is embedded in the fabric of consumers’ habits, with millions owning Smartphones. That means optimizing your website for mobile, and developing a strategy to help people make the choices for your biz, service or venue when they are using mobile.

We also spoke about QR codes. QR codes need to be employed as a meaningful experience for users in 2012. It’s important to use QR codes to their full potential – or it could be just another fad. QR code is the gateway to an incentive or a special message that increases loyalty, community engagement and a return on your campaign.

Filters of the future: We talked about Google and how other browsers are looking to personalize user experiences and to filter out noise. The simple and most important way to respond – on your website, in your blog and all your social media – is to make sure your content has substance, is continually refreshed and is engaging your visitors.

Recapping some resources:
Mashable always has wonderful lists, and this Mashable list of top trends spotted in 2011 is a worthy one.

Read Write Web also has good lists and this one focuses on top 2011 social media products.

Here’s another list, this one of top social media bloggers to follow. You know most of them but are you following them for routine advice?

This collection of  27 Free Social Media Marketing Video Tutorials can be another resource to help you refine your toolbox.

Closing thoughts: No matter how active you become in social media space, be mindful that having an authentic voice is not just about spewing promotion. Importantly, look to localization.. and remember that person-to-person engagement holds priceless value.

Local face-to-face conversations refresh the creative spirit and our humanity, and are vastly different from our digital, global conversations. As we reach for global influence in social media, I hope we won’t lose sight of the place and the people where we physically live, work and play.

Architecture and the built environment is important locally too — it is a legacy written in structures of brick and mortar. In the midst of all this economic chaos we look to our local communities for new sources of strength. Great Communities Are Memorable Places, especially now. They are centers of local culture, health, nature, arts, structures, economy, history and well-being. They inspire people to live, work, play and imagine a better world.

Go out and support the businesses, foods, the culture, the public or built spaces, the nature around us or the arts that help you define your local sense of place. And know that — whatever your focus — it is all interconnected.

Here in Tucson the time for our All Souls Procession also approaches. All Souls is a community ritual of great healing and expression, an annual celebration of joy and grief and folklore. It represents a tremendous spectrum of human expression and is a dynamic experience for the entire Tucson community, inspiring feelings of family.

The All Souls Procession is Tucson’s longest running story of remembrance, and is now in its 23^rd year. It is a Procession that whispers of ancient times and celebrates a cycle of life and death. For me, it is my community’s most anticipated ritual of the season, a tradition that links spirituality, art and riveting spectacle.

What began as a personal expression of grief for artist Susan Kay Johnson to honor her father’s passing is now an evocative series of workshops, performance art and special events. The weekend of All Souls festivities is held in November and includes a juried exhibition, a Procession of Little Angels, an Altar Vigil and Poetry readings. The Sunday Procession is the centerpiece. Momentum for it builds each year, generated by thousands who participate in the astonishing community gathering that nourishes the spirit of the living while creatively remembering the dead.

The Procession is a magical ritual and a fantasy which unifies our community and which soothes my spirit. It is a mix of beauty and sorrow, color and experience, and it weaves a lovely tapestry for me in this Sonoran desert, where I’ve found my place.
Note: Read my Hand/Eye Magazine post here.

Low-cost creative innovation certainly expands our opportunity to communicate and connect. But honestly before you start talking and using all the toys, it’s more productive to first focus on key basics.

One key basic: Listening. You can’t network if you don’t understand the conversations! I listen broadly to a variety of conversations using Google Trends, Google Alerts, as well conversation overview platforms like Trend Buzz.

In general, do you know what to listen for? I ask these questions when I listen on social media:

• What are people talking about that is relevant to me, my passions or my customer?
• Where are “my” conversations boiling, particularly here in Tucson? Do I find my relevant conversations on Twitter, or are they on LinkedIn?
• Blogging is not dead. What are the relevant blogs I follow?
• Who are the discussion leaders?
• Am I (or should I be) in the conversations? Are my competitors and partners there?

The matrix of how conversations are conducted in social media is by Brian Solis and called The Conversation Prism. It’s regularly updated and is an interesting tool.

Someone who really understands the importance of listening in social media is the Chief Digital Officer for NYC, Rachel Stern. This presentation she gave (via a PSFK conference) was a very good overview of how NYC government listens and interacts on social platforms

OK, now that you’re listening, the way you continue to engage and bring people to your conversations is through Search engine optimization.

I love these simple SEO guidelines by Global Voices Advocacy, created to help advocacy bloggers get their voices heard. You’ll learn about keywords and other good stuff critical to your SEO. In this little guide there are wise words for everyone.

Note: You may have heard about “keyword phrase density.”  Don’t focus on it too much, but density should be 1% – 3% of your total text. See http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ But don’t overdo it because “keyword stuffing” or “search spam” can get you in trouble.

The conversations are out there. Be selective, but part of those that add value. They’ll enrich you, fuel your passions and support what you do for your customers.  Thanks for listening!

Resources:

Brian Solis speaks on The Conversation Prism.

Chris Brogan talks about listening.

So with respect for tradition, I’ll head to Mercado Sin Agustin to pray to St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of water, to encourage our rains. The El Dia de San Juan fiesta which comes with the prayers is wonderful, with a traditional procession and the blessing of the altar, as well as the charreada (Mexican rodeo), mariachis and folklorico dancers. Charros and escaramuzas perform on horseback.

Fiesta starts at 5 PM and runs until 9 or 10 PM on the west  bank of the Santa Cruz River at West Congress Street. Come on down!