So, it’s a Leap Year. It only occurs in every what, 4 years? It’s like the World Cup, happening in Australia this year. Or like the Olympics.

And now, in The Year of the Rat, the 2nd month of the 20th year, on the 2nd decade into the Millenia, there is yet another one!

Coincidental? Or am i just a superstitious-like hopeful hoping i win the lottery? I think some things we are “led into” by intuition or maybe we asked the right questions, and we were answered (either literally by the person you asked), or by “the universe at large” (sometimes called the internet, pinged by search indexes on enabled applications or browsers).

(Pictured here is my friend Caren Grey from early uni days, but ended up having the same circle of good friends in advertising - and we are friends as well as loafer twins!)

I chose this picture to replace my colourful old 2014 Clarke Quay selfie for my...

I have been writing this half way, referencing the last post on GreyMatterSocials as the year came to a close, when it dawned on me: That was just Ten Years gone by! Twenty Years since i’ve launched my first product. And twenty years (next year) after my first expat posting.

I was just walking the halls of the ROM in Toronto (in the year 2008-2010), waiting for dinner to a chic Greek bistro with family, when i altered-reality actually enjoyed myself strolling around the un-explored other world of “if i wasn’t married and didn’t have children, and wasn’t in Trinity.” This was my life if i hadn’t been on that path. Or perhaps, the one where i ate cupcakes in Baked and Wired, in Georgetown, all day long. As i did, when i stayed in Virginia for two months, to claim my 2010 passport - when i renewed it in Washington DC. It was a little chaotic to have thought about the brilliance of the Dr...

Sustaining socials, is more than a word-of-mouth conundrum.

Again, we go back to its definitions: social (as in the system of government), and socials (as in the mingling, and the after-party decadence of PR and business people - varying per culture), and social (the digital place where we are asked to be proprietarily engaged, as well as orderly).

Bit advanced for a 2020 assessment? Not really. Reviewing the millennia so far - 2000 had seen a million launches of websites, as google and social applications that were on Netscape - and a few such as iconic messenger on desktop (not on browser) launched the (inter)face of a thousand independent messaging applications. Not like g-talk which was the early FB messenger - you can only access it if you were g-mailing.

And this being the early norm, collapses the perturbed awakening of a generation’s connectedness without leaving their...

Of prom dresses, and the licence to Excel.

When i was fifteen, the early marriage of lisa bonet to theo huxtable’s nagging no-no, weren’t atypical to the rest of our interactions in real life. Across the pond, we understood that serious matters were afoot. We are at the age of decision-making skills-up monitoring to (what we now know as) the rest of our lives.

Looking back, it is a hazy shade of rose-and-grey : it’s a hard-core science school element to assuage the times that we don’t live in our Strange island, to gather up our national waking up that we were normal teenagers. Thus, Prom.

Pins and needles were sending me into cathartic exalt of what happened that summer. That was an epic year, and only because we needed to accomplish so many things, in so little time. I had to get my prom dress, (which my mom actually came home for), and then go to court hearings (for...

I think i’m posting this quite emotionally - to commemorate (physically, not metaphorically) birthing a little boy sixteen years ago. (And the other half to my Logo in The Social Think).

(On that odd winter’s day, when the snow first fell softly on the ground, quietly he came and as pink as his apgar scores could take him to a perfect 10. I didn’t really expect it, since he was clamouring to be birthed 2 weeks ago, and i suspect he was a tad late, when i took to the bed. (Also, you mustn’t trudge up and down stairs when you’re 36 weeks along). There is a good strategy to resting and rustling up the courage to tell people that “your water had broken”, and have them help you by taking you to your doctor and assigned hospital to execute the birth plan. And like jesus, mary and joseph, we took to the snow - cold, wrapped, and happily birthed, lavished in flowers-in-buggies and...

Applications that violate your rights to privacy. And data ownership.

Is it a policy, or public-entropy-basher? We can’t keep defecting, to that place where we can’t rely on our working spaces/ big brother surveillance modes of “seeking out the enemies of state”, or “state of mind”? I think there’s a line to which we can push back and demand our weight in gold - our private lives being compromised - by the people who “fund our being”, to improve other people’s?

That’s shitty.

The multiplicity that is not reflecting on individual privacy - to defer our rights to an ether of public multiplier effects? Put into effect by a nod, a grin, a cofounded allocation to whomever situated themselves in our stead, to our seriously daunted chagrin???

It’s something else. The gall of recovery that follows - that people think suffice us - because of the affixed assumptions to our needs as “the...

Okay, so the New Year had befallen all of us.
(More like, the NEW Decade.)

And we are far from being out of our Social Egg-noggins. Even if you weren’t born in the Gregorian Start of the New Year. Like, every year. Why couldn’t it have befallen another for a Valentine’s, or a lovely cool Spring Easter, or even a midsummer August Proustian event?

That would have been ideal.

But as things come and go, we are at the end of our helm. And sometimes, we corrupt ourselves with the thought that our immediate need for Process, can overrule our need for Order for more natural Interactions.

I have no plans on colliding with your natural OS-es (neuroses / internal Operating Systems-es), but my real statute of the final stages of (liberalness) or my general-definitions of “liberty” - is not to confound those with the internal processes already existent in them, to deliver unfounded need to...

So two guys walk in a bar, and made small chitchat with the barkeep….
I’m not giving you free beer.

Ok, whatever. (Not that kind of bar.)

We take the coloured pens of our childhood and just scribble afternoons and scrolls of time away.

On that precious white page.

It’s like taking it out on all the post-its. Where there might be a resolution to all the weird public outcries that hold people to their dignities, very wantonly, than irrevocably simply wanting to understand.

It can absolutely succumb itself to the slacker mete-ing of being a social collateral for the crowd. (Yes, it’s another post that concerns social posting, and the demise of actual socials within the social media circles). I was out for dinner, and ran across an ex-officemate from Ogilvy, i said Hello, and she barely recognised me. I figured, my general rule to Social media networks from now on: (As a resolution, no...

Another Friday café downtime, another passive article.

What is Activation?
And how does it matter in our lives?

When my main aim was to engage, enhance, and solve these matrices of problems that people carry with them - in their happenstances, as they are.

Whether it was a problem for the ecosystem to solve or whether it was a crucial estate evolving the current status quo.

(Always a really good problem).

When tactical marketing was on sight, three decades ago, it was about espionage, now it’s about information - and the funnels that concern the platforms that hold their places in the sun, firmly.

Now, we know how that evolved. Do you?

Or is the cyclical seeking of patronage-to-media take us back to the medieval Dark Ages, and not the Renaissance of its enlightenment?

I think our Bandwidth is wider now. And there is no need to captivate the wrong side of the audiences -...