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 ...
For the Love of Fairies, STOP the Freaking Auto-DM’s
Dear Auto-dmer's, 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 ...
The Case For Being Clickable VS Pinable #pinterest
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) 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 ...
Has Social Media Killed the Online Forum?
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, ...
Triberr-Blog Sharing on Steroids?
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. 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 ...