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Confirmation That I Suck As A Superwoman

October 7, 2012 By 3 Comments

By now, most everyone knows about Pinterest. It’s basically a virtual bulletin board of things you love, hate, aspire to, inspire you….really whatever you want to ‘collect’. It’s the same thing we all did as teenage girls, collected magazine pictures of bands, outfits and boys. Someone just figured out how to make it online and let you share it with the world.

I’m not going to lie. I am kind of obsessed with it. I fall asleep most nights swooning over cupcakes I will never make, projects I will never do, and pictures I wish I had taken. It’s addicting. And I am in awe that there are women (and men) out there that really do this stuff.

I’m convinced pinterest is made up of two groups of people: my mother-in-law, the uber Martha Stewart Room Mom extraordinaire  and then people like me. You know, the mom that is actually asked to just buy some cupcakes at Costco instead of bake them at home.

Pinterest has given me some awesome ideas that I am totally planning on doing. Like this surprise for my nasty mailman this winter…

Source: smosh.com via Barb on Pinterest

 

Or the creepy cupcakes I could totally buy from Costco, mess up and stick doll parts in to make the boys laugh…

 

Source: lilluna.com via Barb on Pinterest

 

But, let’s face it…I am never going to make this. I’m honestly wondering why anyone would…

Source: blog.pinkcakebox.com via Barb on Pinterest

and I sure don’t have the patience for this…

Source: notmartha.org via Barb on Pinterest

 

So even if Pinterest makes me realize I will never be a supermom, I’m OK with that. I am totally going to steal the other groups ideas and at least pretend in my head that I may be someday…Join me if you haven’t already.

Filed Under: happiness project Tagged With: , ,
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For the Love of Fairies, STOP the Freaking Auto-DM’s

August 25, 2012 By 9 Comments

Dear Auto-dmer’s,

fairy zombie See her? A few moments ago she was flitting about petting butterflies in my garden. Now she is dead. I hope you’re happy.

You see, every time I get an auto dm on twitter asking me to like someone’s FB page, a fairy falls over dead. Your DM’s annoy me so much that a fairy has to leave her peaceful flower garden to sprinkle me with pixie dust so that I don’t reach through my laptop and punch you in the throat. In her gallant effort to rush here to save your throat, she invariably suffers heart failure and falls to the ground dead shortly after.

And for what? REALLY? Do people actually rush over to facebook and follow you? Do you get responses like:

Oh, thank goodness, I was looking all over facebook for a link to like you & could only find your twitter account!

or

If I follow you on facebook, can I please get more spam messages like this?

or

I know we just met but I can tell in your last 140 characters you feel the connection too. Let’s FB chat!

Cause I am kinda thinking you don’t. Or if you do, you may want to look into places that provide bulk restraining orders.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and hope that somewhere in some social media ‘class‘ some ‘guru‘ told you this was a great idea. Or perhaps you read an article on building social media presence that was written in 2008. It’s OK. We all make mistakes. I admit I had my fun with an auto-dm too. Then this decade started.

But now that you know you have made one? Stop doing it OK?

I promise that besides needlessly killing fairies you are most certainly harming any chance you have of building ‘trust capital’. 

Sincerely Yours,

@chaotic_barb

and if I dm’d you this link in response to yours, know that I am only trying to help you. I followed you because I thought you were interesting but then you blew it with a horrible first impression. Buy me a drink and we will be good.

 

 

Filed Under: Blog Tips & Tricks Tagged With: , ,
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The Case For Being Clickable VS Pinable #pinterest

April 10, 2012 By 3 Comments

Last month, I gave a presentation on the Disney Fantasy Cruise on using Pinterest to gain traffic for your blog and increase brand recognition. The crux of my presentation was sharing the discoveries I have made through trial and error pinning food, lifestyle, and  DIY photos for the purpose of driving web traffic.

I cautioned people to learn from a mistake I made last month in trying to make our photo’s pin-able. What I found is that being pin-able does not always translate to being click-able. Which is the goal of most people trying to use the pinterest platform to drive traffic. Mind you, I use Pinterest for many reasons other than traffic building but as pointed out all over the web, for some lucky sites Pinterest now drives more traffic than google +, linkedin and youtube combined.

Case in point are two DIY posts that I orchestrated the social media behind (a relationship that has since ended)

 

Comparision of traffic from two DIY food photos pinned on Pinterest

As you can see from the graphic, the Skip The Frosting post was repinned approximately 62,000 times and resulted in 89,000 pageviews while The Lorax Dinner Makeover had a great Pinterest showing of 48,000 repins but only 9,000 pageviews.

Looking at a sample of these two pins it is easy to see why.

Lorax Dinner Pasta Pin SnapshotSkip The Frosting Pinterest Snapshot

The pasta pin tells you everything you need to know in the description. The cupcake pin gives you a reason to click on it to see what is happening in this photo.

One is pin-able. One is click-able.

We can’t control how other people describe our photos when they are pinning but more often then not, people tend to just hit the “repin” button and leave the original comment. Start your pins off right and don’t give it all away in the description. Just a teaser will do if you want to earn the click through to your site!

At Organized Cook we use the Pin It plugin to help us gain a little control over pins generated from our site by allowing us to pre-select suggested images and descriptions. Would love to hear if you have any other suggestions!

 

Filed Under: Blog Tips & Tricks Tagged With: ,
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Has Social Media Killed the Online Forum?

December 16, 2011 By 1 Comment

If I had been asked that question a year ago, my answer would have been a resounding no. I would have said people will still want to gather in forums and bulletin boards regardless of facebook or twitter or google plus. But it appears I would have been wrong.

The concept of ‘community’ online has been changed forever with the advent of social media and as even our parents, and in some cases, our grandparents finally climb on the social media bandwagon, I fear death is very near for the forum model. The idea of community is shifting to a more individual perspective. People can now create their own, personalized, community with circles and groups.

Years ago, if you wanted to connect with quilters (for example) you would join a community forum just for quilters. You would make friends there, share your love of quilting and perhaps have off topic conversations. Your online life was quite compartmentalized into specific areas of interest.  Now, quilters just have to add each other to their google plus circle or ‘like’ their favorite quilting bloggers on facebook and it is all filtered into them, aggregated into their streams and merged with their love for say, coupons.

Ghost Town

Photo credit via Flikr to JCOlivera.com

There are certainly forums that will survive this community personalization shift. Long established, niche boards will continue to maintain and grow as long as they adapt to integrating social media successfully. Nurtured communities that have a loyal membership will still have long, happy lives. Medical niches will most certainly stay as people want that compartmentalization. They don’t want to talk about their bowel issues on Facebook. They will still look for closed communities that provide more understanding of their specific illness.

But if I am asked, and I have been quite frequently lately, “should I start a community around my blog?”, my answer is a resounding NO. Unless you have a thriving (and I mean very active) readership, look at ways to become a more active part of your readers lives. Go where they are. Find ways to interact on Facebook (create a private group perhaps), create a group Pinterest board, host a weekly chat on twitter (not talking about the sponsored party model).

I have seen more forums turn into virtual ghost towns over the last few years than I can count. This isn’t the time to be trying to build and force a ‘new’ community. They take a significant investment of time, money and nurturing to be successful. The ‘if you build it they will come’ model doesn’t hold up anymore. Find where your potential community members are already engaging and go to them.

Filed Under: Blog Tips & Tricks Tagged With:
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Triberr-Blog Sharing on Steroids?

July 3, 2011 By 8 Comments

Last week my friend @lucretiapruitt clued me in, as is usually the case, about a great new reach multiplying tool I needed to know about- Triberr. I spent the better part of this am checking it out and figuring out what it is about and why I should care.

As this moves more out of beta and into the mainstream you are likely to start getting twitter dm’s asking you to join a triberr tribe. So consider this your heads up-a quick and dirty explanation of what this is all about.

triberr image
What is Triberr:

  • What is Triberr? Simply put it is a way to have your blog post links retweeted via twitter
  • Who retweets my links? People in your tribe.
  • Who is in my tribe? You start off in a tribe of the person who invited you. It’s up to them who is in the group.
  • Can I make my own tribe? Once you are invited into a tribe you can then create 3 other tribes that you lead.
  • How many people are in a tribe? The default is 7 (free) but the tribe leader can expand the group by paying ‘bones’-triberr currency (which you can earn or buy through paypal)
  • Do I have to retweet other peoples links? Yes. That is how the love gets spread. You can set your mode to not auto tweet your tribal stream if you are the leader. As a member you go into auto-tweet. I can’t see a way to change that.
  • What if I don’t want to tweet something a member of my tribe posts? Tweets go out every hour, you can check your dashboard and see what is scheduled to be sent out through your account. You can delete any posts there. Under “content settings” you can gain some control of the types of tweets you don’t want sent.
  • How many tribes can I be a part of? 4 – the one you got invited into and 3 you create. That’s it right now

Why Use Triberr:

  • It’s blog linking on steroids.
  • Automatic tweets which keeps your stream active (helps increase your Klout score)
  • People re-tweeting you (again helping with Klout)
  • Great exposure at zero cost (unless you choose to use premium features)

How Do I Start:

  • You need to be invited. It seems most invites are coming through Twitter DM’s. There is an invite code in the dm.
  • Accept the invite, use the code. Set up your account with your blog RSS and set your preferences.
  • You should now be able to create 3 tribes of your own. The kicker though is that you can’t add people already in triberr at first. That is really weird to me. You have to upgrade your tribe with ‘bones’ (just their name for points) and have at least 3 people to add existing Triberr people. They call this ‘inbreeding’.
  • Point your friends over to my post (haha, but no seriously, here is the link: http://tribr.it/1Bj5P) so they have a clue what this weird DM is you are sending them.

Possible Pitfalls:

  • Unless you are watching the tribal stream carefully, you have the potential to retweet something from a tribe mate that you wouldn’t normally share.
  • Too many tweets if your tribe is full of super active bloggers.

My Choice?

For now I am testing the waters. I am playing. I do see its potential and as long as I am comfortable with the tribe members I see no real harm. I will report back how helpful (or not) it is.

My suggestion is that if you are lucky enough to have someone invite you to join? DO IT and see for yourself.

Thoughts? Questions? What didn’t I cover that people need to know right off? Leave me a comment or check out the Triberr FAQ

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