Amy Vernon

When Sally Ride became the first female astronaut and Geraldine Ferraro the first woman vice presidential candidate for one of the Big Two parties, I was pretty sure I was living in the world that the 1960s’ feminists had fought so hard to achieve: The post-feminist world.

The Equal Rights Amendment had failed to pass, but it didn’t matter; we were on equal footing as men. Sure, salaries hadn’t caught up quite yet, but that would take time. You couldn’t, overnight, put a bunch of women in top-salary positions. By the time I reached the workforce, all this would be behind us.

Except, it wasn’t.

I’ve had a lot of conversations lately with other women, about rape culture and harassment; about the pay gap; about why “feminist” isn’t a four-letter word (and it’s not just because it’s eight letters, either). One story keeps coming back to me as emblematic of all this: The Time I Didn’t Get the Same Vacation Allotment as the Dude Hired After Me.

Women often are blamed for being paid less. We don’t ask, we’re told. We don’t “lean in.” We don’t celebrate our accomplishments enough.

I was blamed for this in the aforementioned case, in fact, despite the fact that it simply wasn’t true.

I was done at The Miami Herald. After years of leaning in, and pushing my own accomplishments and being an overall pain in the ass, I’d reached a point where the politics of the situation were untenable. I do blame myself for some of this, because I hadn’t learned to pick my battles. I constantly battled. That gets annoying. So whatever. I was moving on. I got a job at The East Valley Tribune, outside of Phoenix – a smaller, scrappier paper, up against the 400 pound gorilla of The Arizona Republic.

I’d always had three weeks’ vacation and asked for the same at my new paper (before I accepted the job offer, mind you). I was told that no exceptions were made to the rule that you needed to be with the newspaper company (different from the Herald’s parent company) for a certain number of years to be eligible. I was still young, I really liked the newsroom attitude and was willing to make the sacrifice. After all, if this was the rule, and there were no exceptions, then everyone was in the same boat. Fine.

Except, that wasn’t true. A couple months after I joined the paper, another reporter my age was hired. We had about the same amount of experience, more or less. The paper he came from also had a different parent company. But, as it turns out, he asked for and was given — with no argument — three weeks’ vacation. I found this out in conversation with him several months later. I should have asked for three weeks, he told me.

Uh, I did. Now, mind you, this was not his fault. He asked for three weeks and was given it. What was he supposed to do? Ask if women hired around the same time as him had been given the same consideration? Of course not.

So I marched my fanny into the managing editor’s office and confronted him with this information.

I should have asked for three weeks, he told me.

Uh, I did. I then looked him in the eyes and suggested that I found it odd that a man hired right about the same time as me was given the vacation time with no argument, while I was told there were no exceptions and wouldn’t get it. Not to mention that I’d been put on the weekend shift while he had not (same thing happened after we were both made editors – despite my being made editor before him).

Needless to say, I was given the extra week of vacation on the spot.

But you know what? The entire situation sucked.

I don’t even think any of this was done purposefully. That kind of makes it worse.

It shows an innate bias toward men that isn’t even thought about. Or, at least, an innate bias against women. Either way, ugh.

I don’t want to be a feminist. I want to live in that post-feminist world I was promised.

But I don’t live in that world.

And I am a feminist. And damned proud to be.

Photo by cathredfern via Flickr Creative Commons.

Much has been made of Sheryl Sandberg’s book and exhortation to “Lean In”.

Funny thing is, my husband and I, many times, have talked about Leaning In – a Buddhist teaching. You lean in to the sharp points – when things get rough, instead of running away or trying to cushion them, you face them head on. You face the difficult times. You don’t give up or hide, you see that sharp point coming at you and lean in to it, get through it faster.

“But Sheryl Sandberg/Marissa Meyer/fill in the blank has so much more money than I do! She has a nanny. She grew up in a privileged home.”

So. What.

The ability to lean in, to fight for women’s rights – suffrage, the right to work in any job in any field – these have always been the realm of the privileged. Because the privileged have traditionally been the ones who can fight for equality because they’re not so busy trying to make sure their children have food that they don’t have time to do anything but work three jobs.

Sure, the privileged in the 1800s, when Susan B. Anthony was fighting for suffrage and the abolitionist movement, was a bit different than today. But Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s dad was a lawyer, Congressman and New York state Supreme Court Justice. The women who led the movement in the 1960s, most notably Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinem, while not wealthy, also were not impoverished.

But you know what? Anyone who wants to succeed needs to lean in. Success doesn’t come easy. Do women have more hurdles to leap than men? Much of the time, yes.

I wonder what the feminist greats of the last 200 years would think if they heard women complaining that they shouldn’t have to give up family or personal time or something else to have the same chance in the workplace as a man.

These women often sacrificed everything for their mission. They didn’t have children; they didn’t marry; they were sent to jail; they dedicated their lives to the struggle. We’ve come a long way, baby, but we ain’t there yet. Just because it’s easier today than it was 100 years ago doesn’t mean it’s easy yet.

Is it fair? Of course not.

No one said life was fair.

Still, it’s more fair for us than for

• women gang-raped and then ostracized in India.
• rape victims forced to marry their rapists in Morocco.
• women in Saudi Arabia, where women aren’t allowed to drive.

If it’s not fair, work to change it.

If it’s hard to work to change it, do it anyway.

When times get tough, lean in to those sharp points. Or, at least, don’t get mad at the women who do.

Photo by Kraemer Family Library via Flickr Creative Commons.

UPDATE: DKNY posted an apology on its Tumblr:

While I believe the explanation, as it appears to have been only the one store that did this, it just goes to show you shouldn’t use work you don’t have the rights to, even internally.
Also, I still think they should ante up more money to the YMCA.

I’ve see folks snag images off a Google search to use for blog posts. Sometimes it’s a company logo, sometimes it’s a photo illustration. Other times it’s a photo.

That’s not cool, and I go out of my way to search on Flickr’s Creative Commons stream or other stock image sites for photos I can use just with giving credit to the photographer. I’ve also used paid stock photo services in past jobs, and plan to again.

Some publications have taken a very lenient view toward others appropriating their content. Dwell, for example, embraced blogs such as Unhappy Hipsters that use Dwell photos (giving full credit to both the photographer and publication) because it is turning the photos into their own sort of art. And to fight against the use of their photos online is akin to plugging a crack in a pipe – another’s going to crop up.

But the case of DKNY (Donna Karan New York) and HONY (Humans of New York) is another entirely.

The image above is a screenshot of the HONY blog today, of part of the image a reader sent in, along with the beginning of the photographer’s explanation of what he’s writing about. Given that Brandon Stanton, the eye behind HONY, requested that people reblog the photo and share his story, made me feel comfortable in sharing the image here, though I’d rather you go to his blog and read it straight from hm.

Quick background: HONY is a fabulous Tumblr in which Stanton posts a photo of a different New Yorker each day, often with a little story about the person – if the person cooperates on that part.

Seems that someone from DKNY approached Stanton a while back, asking him for 300 of his photos to display in a store window. They’d pay him $15,000. That comes to $50 per photo. For the quality of his photos, that’s incredibly low, and given it’s from a company the size of DKNY, a tad bit insulting. So he asked for more money. They rejected his request and walked away.

Fast forward, and an eagle-eyed fan in Bangkok (yes, people from all over the world are HONY fans) sent Stanton a photo of a DKNY store there with his photos decorating the window.

I cannot imagine that is a coincidence. Same company? Same photographer? Nuh-uh. That’s just theft, plain and simple. Many fans have been posting on the DKNY Facebook page, and are starting to complain their comments are being deleted. Bad move.

There are a lot of gray areas on the Internet when it comes to copyright. This ain’t one of ‘em.

Do the right thing, DKNY. Stanton is asking that you donate $100,000 to the YMCA in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Me? I think that’s letting you off cheap.

Imagine my surprise this weekend when I received an email and Facebook message from an Internet friend, Amy Akins, telling (and showing) me how someone on Facebook was using my face. Creepy, to be sure. But things could be much worse. She (or he or it, as this could well be a bot account) could be using my name. Could be trying to pretend to be me in more than just image.

At least all these people thought it was a great photo. You know, if they’re real. Still, this is the photo I’ve used for my social media profiles since late 2010. My friend noticed it because it’s pretty immediately recognizable as me. Not cool. So I reported the profile of Melissa Dugan as impersonation to Facebook. I told a group of friends, many of whom also reported it to Facebook.

I got on with my life, checked in now and again to see if anything had happened yet, and spent time with my family. Sunday morning, I checked in again. The profile was still up. No change. I posted an update on my Facebook profile, including the screenshot above, and asked folks to report the profile for impersonation, if they were willing. Dozens did, and for that I’m quite grateful.

By day’s end, however, still nothing had happened. At this point, several of my more intrepid friends had sent friend requests to Melissa Dugan to see what they could find out from the inside, if you will. She accepted several requests and my friends started investigating.

Yes, those are all photos of me. The first and fourth are stills from videos I posted on my profile at some point or another. The second and third were/are profile pictures of mine.

Many other photos from her profile were along the lines of this:

That was one of the tamer ones.

Then, I did the Graph Search (somehow, I forgot to screenshot it; ah, well). I couldn’t dig up much, as Dugan’s privacy permissions must have been pretty tight, but almost all the photos she had commented on were from Subway (the sandwich shop). Nothing against Subway, but I have never once commented on their page. OK, it might have something to do with the fact that I prefer Blimpie’s.

The only other photo she’d commented on publicly was one that included a yellow duckling calling black ducklings the N word. Classy. I believe her comment was “lmao.”

That’s when I started to get really pissed off.

We are, to a degree, our avatars. When I’m on Twitter, I rely on my friends not changing their photos and catching their faces (or cats or drawings or whatever) as they fly by. On Facebook, a quick glance at comments tells me who’s there when I might not have time to sit and read everything; I still know who’s around.

Look, you can say pretty much anything you want in this country. That’s why the United States is pretty freakin’ great, despite all its faults. And you’re entitled to *think* whatever you want. Be racist. Declare your love for weaponry of all kinds. Eat at Subway. Go for it! You’re not affecting me.

But you are affecting me when you use my face.

Right now, I can’t see Melissa Dugan’s profile on Facebook. The link is dead. But all my friends – those accepted as mutuals and not – still can. I do find it rather … bemusing … that a social media platform doesn’t really have staff on weekends to deal with things like this. What if the person had been using my name? What if the person had been wreaking havoc? Would I still have to have waited until Monday? That’s sure what it felt like.

It’s a pretty cut-and-dried case. I’ve had this photo for years, and lots of people have met me and can confirm it’s me. In fact, it was shot by a professional photographer at the Social Media Club booth at the BlogWorld Expo held at the Mandalay Bay in 2010. So it’s pretty easy to determine it’s me. This fake profile only appeared last summer.

Does this person know me? Is it a pointed “attack” on me? I tend not to think so, as this person made no attempt to make herself known to me. Hasn’t used my name.

But she’s used my face, and it’s the only one I’ve got.

UPDATE, 5:18 p.m. EST, Jan. 28: Facebook removed my photos from her profile! Thank you all so much for your support.

This was the note Facebook sent me:

Thank you for your report. The timeline you reported violates our community standard on identity and privacy, so we removed it. We let Melissa Dugan know that his timeline has been removed, but not who reported it (Facebook never discloses who submits a report).

Note “his timeline”. I wonder if that’s a function of the automated message from Facebook, or an indication of who created the account.

I don’t usually get all up in arms when a social media site I like changes its features.

Stuff happens. Things change. Improvise, adapt, overcome.

But when I heard the news about LinkedIn killing its Answers section today through my friend, Todd Van Hoosear, and then this article on AGBeat, I was upset. This, I feel, is a big misstep.

Maybe not everyone who uses LinkedIn uses the section. The people who do use it, however, find great value, and there are many.

When I answered a question there after I was laid off from my newspaper job a few years ago, that led to one of my first consulting gigs, which in turn led me to the path I walk now. So, sure, part of it is likely sentimental. I can be like that sometimes.

It’s more than sentiment, though. Answers was the best spot on the site to really show your stuff. Your profile can be stuffed with whatever. Groups may or may  not be open to everyone, and so many are filled with so much spam that they’re nearly unnavigable.

Answers, though, was simple. Someone asked a question. People answered. Answers could be rated by the asker, and if someone repeatedly was graded as a “best answer,” it gave their replies in that section more weight. It allowed you to show what you really knew and find out what people really wanted to learn about.

On many of our platforms, we live in an echo chamber, surrounded by others who have similar skillsets. On LinkedIn, our personal network may be like that, as well as our groups, but in Answers, you could find anyone who knew something about anything. Sure, we have Quora now, and some of the questions and answers there are fascinating. But when you want to do business, LinkedIn is where you go. And where you ask your business-related questions.

Sadly, as of Jan. 31, that will be no more.

Photo by Alexander Henning Drachmann via Flickr Creative Commons.

Note: I’ve had the good fortune over the past few months to get to know Jennifer Windrum, a former newswoman like myself and a wonderful human being. She’s the force behind WTF for Lung Cancer (Where’s the Funding For Lung Cancer), the second most common cancer, and least funded. And, no, most new cases of lung cancer are not in people who smoked – her mom, for one. She launches her crowdfunding campaign for SMAC! – Sock Monkeys Against Cancer today (Nov. 1). Several of us are running a guest post from her today to help support her work. If you do nothing else, please read and share this. If you can, donate.

NoMo is the ringleader of “SMAC! – Sock Monkeys Against Cancer”, a gang of monkeys that provides tangible support to those with cancer, reminding them no one fights it alone.

Right now, NoMo is just a prototype.

I’m generally not one to shout  “the sky is falling!” when free social media sites make moves toward monetization.

They’re free, after all, and at some point, they need to make some money. How they choose to make money is up to them. And if we don’t like it, we can go elsewhere.

With Instagram, though, it always seemed a bit different. Especially when Facebook shelled out gazillions for the app – that would seem to be the best monetization strategy, no?

And, it should be noted, Chirpify’s integration with Instagram isn’t a way for Instagram to make money, but rather a way to allow Instagrammers to buy and sell products beyond just their images (through services such as Instacanvas).

Sorry, let me back up. Chirpify is a web commerce platform. With the addition of the hashtag #InstaSale, Instagrammers will be able to buy and sell through the app without having to pull out their credit card or type in all sorts of security information. (It might be noted that you’ll want to be SUPER-careful who you let use your Instagram account if you have a Chirpify account.)

They’ve done something similar on Twitter, and just hooked into the Instagram API.

Speaking with some friends this morning, I was asked why this would be a bad thing. Those with Instagram accounts would still have to have quality images that would make people want to follow them and engage with them if they wanted to sell to them. Spammers wouldn’t be able to just drop in images to their nonexistent followers and peddle their wares, after all.

Except they would. There are many and varied hashtag communities on Instagram. Here in New York, probably the biggest and most vibrant is #igersnyc. Photos such as mine, in this post, taken in New York City, are hashtagged with #igersnyc and a huge community of photographers – professional and amateur – peruse them daily.

The community holds meetups and photography shows and is a true community that’s sprung up around the hashtag. While many professional photographers may have known one another before the advent of Instagram and gained large followings there, there also are many amateur photographers who’ve proved to have an excellent eye and find themselves to be active and popular members of the Instagram NYC community, founded by photographer Brian DiFeo (full disclosure – I moderated a panel that included him at Columbia University’s last Social Media Weekend).

While I don’t think anyone would be able to successfully hijack such a large and vibrant community as #igersnyc – it’s simply too large and spammers would be quickly reported and dealt with, I can see spamming of certain hashtags by people wanting to peddle their wares and not caring about the communities. Much like spammers attack trending topics on Twitter, could this happen on Instagram? Maybe Chirpify has things they do to prevent that from happening. I would hope so. But I do see problems for the lovely communities that have arisen on Instagram.

Maybe I’m being reactionary. Maybe I just have a problem with bringing commerce into Instagram when I haven’t with other platforms because I use it more personally. Maybe this was just my breaking point – does absolutely everything have to be about making money? Especially when it’s not the platform that’s going to be making money off this? Perhaps I’d have less of a problem with this if it were Instagram instituting this as opposed to a third party.

Many other photo apps have sprung up and do what Instagram does, even more attractively – tadaa, EyeEm, TinyPost – if Instagram becomes too commercial, could people begin moving to those platforms?

Or, just maybe, the sky won’t fall and everything will be fine.

A couple months ago, I got an email from my friend, Chris Kieff from Sprinklr asking if I’d participate in an e-book they were doing on the topic of #SocialAtScale.

I’m happy to do anything to help Chris out, and I thought it was an interesting topic, so I immediately accepted.

When it came time to actually write my entry, however, I was stumped. I had, quite literally, no idea what to say. That’s never stopped me before when I had an article to write on deadline, so I started writing. And kept writing.

It doesn’t matter what kind of enterprise you have – you have to care.

It goes beyond caring about your company, or caring about doing social right. It’s about caring enough for your employees that you give them the tools to do the job. It’s about caring about your customers. It’s about caring about your brand.

The book is chock-full of great chapters on important topics: Scaling the corporate social media strategy team, from Sarah Evans. That the willingness to change is vital to scaling social, by Mack Collier. Why your social accounts shouldn’t be left to the interns, from Jeff Bullas. And, of course, why companies need to embrace social, for that ever-vital Return on Relationship, by Ted Rubin.

Here’s the entire e-book, via Slideshare, or you can download it from Sprinklr.

I’ve lived in a lot of different places, and every time I moved, I vowed that I’d stay in touch with people better than I did the last time.

Easier said than done. After a few letters or phone calls, friendships gradually faded away, though the advent of email meant we could share stupid jokes that made the rounds until you saw every joke in the history of mankind at least a half-dozen times and began to regret ever signing onto email in the first place.

That’s besides the point, though. Fact is, until Facebook, there really wasn’t any way to really catch up with all those people who’d disappeared over the years. I’ve learned of one elementary school friend who responded heroically when a maniac shot up her office. Of college classmates who’ve risen to fame in Hollywood. Of friends who succumbed to the siren call of drugs and are still struggling to pick up the pieces.

And then there’s Christine.

My senior year of high school, I ran with a group of punks. Real punks – at least, as real as they could be in the suburbs. We lived in middle-class homes but listened to the Sex Pistols. Spiked hair, mohawks, ripped jeans, safety pins. And those weren’t retro or cool yet. We wore black on the outside because black was how we felt on the inside (yes, we listened to The Smiths, too).

I didn’t know Christine, then. She was the older sister of Justin, my dear friend and the heart of our group of friends. He was magnetic north. We gathered at his house after school more often than not. Most of our funny group stories revolved around him. One day, he and a couple other friends were teasing me and I got pissed off and stormed away. Next thing I knew, Justin was on his knees, asking my forgiveness. Sincerely.

Christine was in college already. She was a few years older than Justin. I don’t think I ever met her until his funeral.

You see, 25 years ago yesterday, Justin took his own life in the early morning hours. Broke the locks on the garage doors, turned the car on and died. His was a closed casket.

It was one of the seminal moments of my life and changed me forever.

The group of friends that surrounded Justin stayed tight for some time. The following summer, when I came back to Long Island to work at a weekly newspaper, our crowd had parties and hung out many weekends. Some were still in school, some were home from college, some were about to head to college for the first time.

During my sophomore year, my parents moved from New York to California. As happens in life, I gradually lost touch with almost all the friends from that group. I kept in touch with Justin’s mom for several years, but after I moved from Florida to Arizona and she moved and her phone number changed, even that faded away.

Still, every Aug. 8, I awoke with a pit in my stomach, which wouldn’t go away until I remembered why. You’d think after a decade or so, I might remember why I felt so bad around that date every year, but something in my brain switched off – almost as if it was trying to protect myself, but failed because now I felt crappy and couldn’t figure out why.

A few years ago, Facebook came into the picture and I started getting friend requests from people I knew growing up on Long Island, at the Connecticut summer camp where I was a CIT, in college, in Florida, in Kentucky, in Arizona – all the places I’d lived over the years. One such request was from John, my closest friend in that high school cabal, and Justin’s best friend. It was so great to be in touch with him again; he posted photos of us from high school, some with Justin and some without – all reminding me of the joy and the pain.

We messaged privately sometimes, just to catch up on people, so as not to be discussing them publicly. He said he was in touch with Christine, Justin’s sister. Would I want to connect with her?

Duh. Of course. I reached out tentatively, saying I didn’t know if she remembered me. I hadn’t realized how connected she was to Justin’s life back then. She knew damn well who I was and was happy I’d reached out.

We chatted on Facebook, discovered we had a lot of likes and dislikes in common and though we’d never spoken since Justin’s funeral, began building a friendship that sprang from a mutual loss but was built on mutual respect and common interests.

John died suddenly, unexpectedly, about a year later. We consoled each other. I sent Justin’s mom a prayer card from John’s funeral. We mourned again, this time as adults grateful for the time we’d been back in touch with John rather grieving the years we knew we’d never have with Justin. It wasn’t easier, per se, but we were older and we understood grief better. And a natural death, even unexpected and sudden at 40, is different than a suicide at 16. Not better, just different. At 40, we’ve had more experience with death and know that, in time, the pain can subside and become tolerable.

Still, Christine and I had never talked on the phone. We emailed back and forth and were so grateful for John having put us in touch with one another, because it brought some meaning to his loss, in a sense. I know I’m not phrasing it well, and I know how much his death rocked his family – his mother, his sister, his wife, his daughter — but for me, I think of John and I quietly thank him for bringing Christine back into my life.

Last year, on Aug. 8, I posted something about Justin. Christine responded almost immediately. I realized she didn’t really know how much Justin’s friendship and death had meant to me. The next day, I breathed deeply, picked up the phone and called.

For about an hour, we talked. We cried. I mean, we SOBBED. We laughed. I finally had the chance to tell her how amazing her brother was and how his death had changed me for the better, despite the searing pain I still felt.

And this year, as the anniversary came up – the 25th anniversary – my brain did what it does, and I forgot. I remembered a couple weeks ago, determined not to forget this year. And yet, I did. Then, sitting at my computer somewhere around midday yesterday, I remembered. And then I looked at my Facebook mail and saw a message from Christine.

Despite the fact that reading her message made me cry, I suddenly didn’t feel so alone.

Photo via Flickr Creative Commons by Jana Shea.

So much has been said and written about Digg in the past couple weeks since it was announced the final assets of the once-mighty site were sold to betaworks for the seemingly paltry sum of $500,000.

I really didn’t plan on writing another post about it, but my piece on Punk Views on Social Media was noticed by the good folks over at The Pulse Network and Tyler Pyburn asked me to appear on his weekly show, The Pulse on Digital Marketing.

We talked about several interesting topics, including the actions Digg took that helped destroy its community, how Reddit managed to thrive and what other sites can learn from Digg’s mistakes.

The entire interview is less than 12 minutes and embedded below. I’d love to hear what you think about my comments – and if you agree or disagree!

Image via ncomment’s epic War 3/3