social media

Together Again ? 25 Years Later: A Social Media Success Story by Debbie Kipp

Our story was set in motion during those wonderful college years. It starts long before the term social media was coined and meanders through graduation, relocation, marriages, children, careers, and over 25 years of life. It ends, or rather begins, with LinkedIn and Facebook.

During the early 80?s, as students at Missouri State University in Springfield, MO, my (now) husband joined 17 other men and founded the Zeta Nu chapter of Delta Sigma Phi fraternity. Their chapter survived on campus for eight years before college antics forced the hand of their superiors and ultimately closed the chapter.

During that time over 180 men became active members with the love and support of nearly as many wonderful women. It was a surprisingly close-knit group comprised of students from all walks of life. We loved, we laughed, we shared, we studied (well, some of us did), we supported, and we played. In short, we were together during a time in our lives where strong bonds formed friendships that would last a lifetime.

As we each graduated, moved on, started our careers and began the ?adult? chapters of our lives, we somehow managed to let life get in the way. Sadly, many of us eventually lost touch.

Fast forward to March 14, 2009. I received a message from my LinkedIn account that read, ?So what?s new in the last 25 years?? Blink. Blink. OMG! It was from a friend that I hadn?t seen since my last party as a college student.

That evening, I excitedly told my husband about the LinkedIn connection. Our conversation ignited a curiosity, the result of which would not have been possible without the assistance of social media. Who else might we find on LinkedIn? And what about Facebook?

We began what most would refer to as an intense search, spending every evening and many weekend hours for several months on a mission to find as many old college buddies as possible. We plugged name after name into the Facebook and LinkedIn search fields. If we couldn?t find someone on either platform, we turned to Google and the Internet. We created a database of current contact information and continue to share regular updates with everyone.

It wasn?t long before reconnection conversations turned to talk of a reunion. A planning team was formed and on July 24-26, 2009, we held the first-ever Reunion of the Zeta Nu Chapter of Delta Sigma Phi. Old memories gave way to new and all enjoyed a truly delightful weekend!

In the end, we reconnected with over 150 friends, had almost 100 join our Facebook group and another 25 connect in our LinkedIn group. Today, our renewed relationships are sustained through social media and we continue our search for those not yet found. Tomorrow . . . another reunion, of course!

About the Author: Debbie Kipp is a Production Manager at Paradowski Creative in St. Louis, Missouri by day and a social media nut and amateur genealogist by night. Learn about life on the production side of the advertising/marketing/graphic design community by visiting her blog The Production Side. Or, follow Debbie on Twitter at @DKKipp.

Social Media and Travel ? A Social Media Success Story by Jeanne Dee

What could be better than traveling the world on an open ended tour?

At Soultravelers3, we have been amazed to find absolutely stunning opportunities, beautiful connections and world wide collaborations through social media.

When we began our open ended, family world tour in 2006 we had no idea that it would play such a big part of our journey? and our lives.

We travel the web 2.0 while we travel the world and it expands our benefits as well as the benefits of our audience that travels with us virtually.

We are the opposite of geeks, don’t own an iphone or ipod, yet our world traveling digital lifestyle as a family led us to be early adopters in some ways, primarily in social media. We knew nothing about blogs when we began, but wanted to share with family and friends, plus create a memoir for our child, so we are shocked that out of the estimated 200 million? travel-related websites on the net, that we are in the top 20 today. We were stunned when our first Youtube travel video went viral with over a million views.

We live richly and travel the world on just 23 dollars a day per person and find ourselves to be accidental trail blazers for a new way of being. Social media has also played a huge part in our daughter’s education as? a 21st century global citizen which is the primary goal in our journey ?(as well as wanting to spend more time together).

The very best part has been the people that we have met that have enriched our journey beyond measure in so many unique ways.

Before leaving, I researched information about what digital piano to buy on a piano forum and by chance the most helpful person was a man from Spain who lived an hour away from where we would winter. That family became one of our best friends in Spain and our guardian angels.

Our daughter takes piano and violin lessons via Skype webcams with teachers on a different continent, both found through social media. We find great travel secrets by asking on social media and we share the great secrets that we discover.

The positive stories are truly endless and I wrote about some a while back in a popular post called “Twitter and Travel 2.0”. We’ve had a lot of fun meeting up with some of the people we’ve met online, like Wendy Perrin from Conde Nast Traveler who invited us to do Hallowe’en with her family when we were in New York City meeting the thousands of disadvantaged school kids who followed us virtually through a non-profit. Her kids were fans of ours because of our Youtube videos and they all had a blast together.

When I had a bike wreck on the Danube and landed in the hospital in Austria, a quick tweet on Twitter allowed my mom and sister to find us and call us. When I tweeted about my daughter taking an online? class with John Hopkins University’s CTY program, a teacher sent her the books she needed from London,? gratis because he was a fan.

Perhaps the biggest way social media changed our lives is when we got a Twitter Direct Message out of the blue which resulted in a featured story in the New York Times from one of our favorite writers. That led to many literary agents finding us and now we are writing a book. Social media makes it a small world today!

About the author: Jeanne Dee is an internationally recognized travel guru and creative lifestyle design consultant, via her award winning website Soultravelers3 that National Geographic Traveler called “One of the best Family Travel Blogs in cyber space”. Find us in Social Media via our Google Profile.

Opening Up Social Media for Local Small Business

While becoming more mainstream, social media still holds fear for many businesses, especially small local business.

Fear of time involved; fear of where to start; fear of where to be.

While this fear is understandable, it also means that many local small business owners miss out on social media and all the benefits it can offer, especially when it comes to competing with the big boys.

While I’ve written before about how expensive social media can be from a corporate campaign viewpoint, for small businesses it’s still one of the most cost-effective methods of being visible to your customers, new and existing. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube – they all offer possibilities for the small business owner.

Then there’s the real workhorse – the blog. The best marketing tool you will ever have as a small business owner, a blog can be a myriad of things:

A promotional tool.
An information hub.
A resource centre.
Your own personal social network.
A live, ever-fresh FAQ section.

In fact, the only limitation to what a blog can do for you is the limitations you put on the blog itself. And again, this is where many small business owners – especially local small business owners – bypass social media’s strengths and opportunities.

Fear comes back in. Fear of what to blog about; fear of how to target an audience; fear of how to promote a new (or existing) blog; fear of setting yourself apart when there are so many other voices around.

Apart from that fear, perhaps the biggest stumbling block is setting up the blog in the first place. If you’re not doing it yourself, where do you find a designer (and for many small business owners, one that doesn’t break your budget or rip you off). Again, this fear is only natural.

Yet help is at hand.

In the next couple of weeks, a new course will be unveiled that takes the fear out of social media and blogging for small business owners. Some of the features will include:

Using social media and your blog to market your small business.
Using online tools to benefit your brick and mortar business (or a simple home-based one).
Getting a fully-functional blog and social media tools set up from day one.
Course “mentors” that bring a vast and comprehensive set of skills to the table (oh, and me).

These are just some of the features and benefits, with more to be announced over the coming weeks. It’s a course designed specifically for small and local business owners that get social media and its benefits (like blogs), but need that extra bit of help to really start utilizing it. Best of all, it won’t cost you anywhere near $22,000 a day…

More information will be available very soon. To make sure you get the latest updates, as well as details of what’s in store and who’ll be part of the course, you can sign up for the latest news via the newsletter form below. Don’t worry, you won’t be spammed and you definitely won’t be sold to any dodgy characters!

Social media and blogging was made for small business owners. Here’s a great chance to be that business – look forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

photo credit: DBarefoot

7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub – Day 4: WordPress

This is the fourth part of a seven part mini-series looking at how and why to turn your blog into a social media hub. You?ll be able to find the complete series?here.

So far we’ve looked at prepping the networks you’re going to be using for your hub, and what features you might want to consider. By now, you should have a pretty strong idea on what your hub is going to look like, so all we need to do now is find a home for it.

For that, the best option is setting yourself up with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

While there’s nothing wrong per se with free blogging options like Blogger or WordPress (the .com version; self-hosted WordPress is on the .org domain), they severely limit how much interaction you have with them from a user perspective. Designs are limited as well, and add-ons aren’t supported, and to make a truly effective social media hub on your blog, you need fluidity to design.

The worst thing about free blogging options is that you’re also placing all your content into the hands of a third-party. If Blogger, WordPress or any other free blogging platforms change their Terms and Conditions, you could find yourself without a blog. With a self-hosted option, all the control lies in your hands. While there are other options like TypePad and Squarespace, I just prefer WordPress for its ease-of-use and community support.

Going Self-Hosted

Just in case you aren’t already using self-hosted WordPress, here’s a quick guide to getting set up :

Choose a domain name and a web host to host your blog. Bluehost is perfect for this, since it offers packages that set up the domain and hosting as an all-in-one package. There are several others, so Google “web host” and find the one right for you.
Once you have your account, you’ll be taken to an area called C-panel. This is simply the Admin dashboard for all the backroom stuff associated with your site. Once in there, its simply a matter of using Fantastico to set up your WordPress account, as shown by my friend John Haydon’s video.

Planting the Seeds

The reasons for using a self-hosted WordPress blog are numerous, but the main two (at least as far as a social media hub is concerned) are design and add-on flexibility. Since the hub is going to be both your home-base and outpost, you need a platform that can handle your needs – WordPress is perfect for this.

The look and feel of your hub will define how useful it is to your visitors. The less cluttered the look, the more effective the hub can be, although some folks prefer a more information-led design. This is where WordPress and a premium theme comes into play (a theme is just a pre-designed look or framework for your blog) -? you can choose a template, page, sub-pages, sub-domain or any number of design options to present your hub.

There are benefits to each option:

A page holds everything in one area, although it could get cluttered.
Sub-pages allow you to set up different niche hubs (more on that tomorrow).
Sub-domains offer a completely separate hub altogether, but still tied to your blog’s main domain.
Templates allow a different look and feel from your blog design, and help give that unique hub feel.

What you choose will mostly be determined by how many resources you populate your hub with. How you populate these resources is up to you; again, the great thing with self-hosted WordPress is that the flexibility of design is limitless, thanks to plug-ins.

Social Media Plug-Ins for Your Hub

WordPress is an open-source community, which means that there is a whole community of developers making really cool applications (or plug-ins) every day. These are released to the WordPress userbase (almost always free of charge) and you can then use them on your blog to help turn it into anything you like.

Some of the best ones for a social media hub (and ones that I’ll show you examples of in the design post coming next in the series) include:

Enthropia’s Lifestream. One of the ways to show what you’re up to on different networks is Lifestreaming, and Enthropia’s plug-in for WordPress is one of the simplest. This is perfect for those that don’t want a full-on social media hub.
Twitter Tools. Offers great integration between Twitter and your blog and vice versa, including tweet archives, posts, admin options and more.
Smart YouTube. Ideal for video bloggers, this gives you a larger set of options than just video embedding – playlists, RSS feed support and iPhone compatibility being just a few.
FotoBook. While there are plug-ins and widgets to integrate your blog with Facebook, one of the coolest to do this in reverse is FotoBook. This imports all your pictures from Facebook and enhances the personal aspect of your social media hub.

These are just some plug-ins that, along with your design and the existing applications from the various social networks, will make up your social media hub. The great thing with WordPress is that, no matter what you’re looking to do via your hub, you can probably find a plug-in for it. Just go to WordPress Extend and start searching – that’s where the treasure is to shape your hub, your way.

Takeaway: Make a list of how many features you’d like on your blog. Decide if you want to go for a single page, sub-pages, sub-domain and how intensive or lite you wish your hub to be. Sketch some ideas for layout, since tomorrow we?ll look at the various options available, with examples of each to a successful hub. To make sure you receive the latest from?7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub, feel free to either?subscribe by RSS feed or?email subscription.

photo credit: pexatar

Note: This blog no longer runs on the Headway framework. Instead, it’s a custom WordPress design by Lisa Kalandjian of SceneStealer Graphics.