An Old Dog on New Tricks

I knew that my web site was outdated years ago.  What had been cool at the turn of the millennium was looking shopworn.  Furthermore the infrastructure of my site was so arcane that I had to hire someone if I wanted to add a school visit to my schedule page.

I finally pulled it together and started looking for someone to hire.  Being a nontechno type who wanted to remain so, I couldn’t imagine anything else.  I approached people I knew.  Busy.  I asked the people I knew for people they knew.  Busy.  How could this be?  It’s a bad economy. 

Then I thought of a former MFA student who came to Lesley University to learn more about writing for kids, but was already an accomplished illustrator, photographer, animator (http://bryanballinger.com/).  Bryan graciously replied that I couldn’t hire him, but that he would mentor me through the beginning steps of building a site.  Damn, it was that old “teach a man to fish” line.  I had really just wanted to go to the fish market or, better yet, ordered my meal at a seafood restaurant. 

Wait a second, I thought.  One reason I wanted the new site was so I could be more self-sufficient.  If I knew how to build the thing, maintaining it would be a snap.  Many normal people seemed to be doing it. And I’d been blogging for a few years; I knew how to insert pictures into text, would bad could it be?

Pretty bad.  Mainly because I not only had to learn this foreign language and skill set, I had to get over my resistance and fear of doing so.  Bryan opened an empty Wordpress site for me, gave me a Skype tutorial and then it was the first day of the rest of my life.  I found something I thought I could do and did it.  Hooray.  I crept along until I came up against a wall, metaphorically speaking, with no idea of how to remove it or get around it because I had no idea why it was there.  I simply Xed out of the site—for a week.  Bryan sweetly got me back on track, but sometimes the problem of asking for explanations meant not knowing enough to understand the answers.

Here we go again, I found something else I could do and in doing so, figured out that first problem.  Happiness!  Hours went by as I slowly learned why what I designed didn’t look the same once the page was in view mode or how to line three photos up across the page.  My new skills kept growing.  Rescaling picture sizes, using Skype to get tutorials, learning enough html to do sidebars, too many colors on one page are too distracting, saturated colors make print vibrate uncomfortably against a black screen, have patience, have patience.  Writing affords you many words and choices to produce a desired result.  Html—just one—so what did I do wrong?  Obsession, then another block and shutdown once more.  For two weeks.  Again and again I’d inch my way back in.

Ultimately I guess this is how we learn most things.  If they are easy for you because you have the aptitude or temperament for them, the push/pull isn’t so painful—or noticable.

Thank you Bryan, and thank you Tim John (http://boismierjohndesign.com/) who stepped in at the end to add the banners, programming, bells and whistles far beyond my pay grade.  Yes, it took an absurd amount of time to make this web site.  But maybe not so long to learn a new lesson about learning.

I proudly present to you www.susangoodmanbooks.com.

Five Things I Learned in Social Media Class

Last fall, I decided to get my bearings in the world of social media by taking a class at my local community college. The class, “Social Media for Business,” included an overview and then hands-on sessions focusing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. There was also an introduction to the tools companies use to evaluate the impact of their social media presence. A lot of information was tossed around during those nine three-hour sessions, but thanks to my detailed notes, I was able to capture most of it. Here are some things that stayed with me:

#1. Send Seven Tweets a Day: My teacher, the former head of social media at A&P, suggested that one should tweet seven times per day. That includes several new tweets and a few retweets (incoming tweets that you forward to your own followers). He also suggested following 150 people and/or companies. I’m currently tweeting two or three times on a good day and following 90. Those people represent my main business and personal interests: children’s books (love @SLJournal and @CBCBook), sports, women’s issues, entertainment, friends, and a few celebrity tweeters. I’ve dropped some people who tweet too darned much about pointless things, like the singer who tweeted every minute of a three-hour car ride. And I continue to add folks who seem to have interesting things to say.

#2. In Twitter, Avoid Naked Links and Don’t Pander: (This is not nearly as naughty as it sounds.) Tweets may be only 140 characters long, but they still can have plenty of voice and personality. “Naked links” are tweets that are solely Web addresses, with no introduction, no extra information. They’re boring and annoying, almost as annoying as companies (and people representing products or companies) that pander to their customers. If your customer says, “I love your turkey sandwich,” don’t reply, “You have very good taste!” Say something useful like, “Try it on toasted bread,” or “That’s our best-selling lunch product.” Something that adds information.

#3. Get Demographic Info From Facebook: When you set up a Facebook page for a business (as opposed to a personal page), you gain access to all sorts of demographic information that Facebook hopes you will use to advertise your products on their site. You can find out how many Facebook users in your state or town or Zip Code like Glee, or Harry Potter, or The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie. You can find everyone on Facebook who ever worked for the companies you worked for (you also can do this on LinkedIn) or who shares your birthday. You can search this information to your heart’s content, and you never have to actually buy an ad. All that, and setting up a Facebook business page is free.

#4. Remember LinkedIn: Since social media is not an actual job for most of us, there’s only so much time we can spend posting and reading posts. But LinkedIn is a valuable professional resource and having a presence on the site can pay off in unexpected ways. A former acquaintance recently recommended me for a speaking gig at her new job because she’d been following the news about Wheels of Change through LinkedIn. And because you can program your tweets to show up on your LinkedIn profile page, you can keep the page lively without writing actual LinkedIn posts.

#5. Consider Haul Videos: This one isn’t a tip, it’s a head’s up. Until our YouTube class, I’d never heard of “haul videos.” In case you haven’t, either, they are videos in which young women (I haven’t seen any by young men) parade their purchases from a recent shopping trip for all to see. According to my teacher, haul videos represent the fastest-growing segment on YouTube. One enterprising video maker, juicystar07, has entertained close to a million viewers by showing off her winter wardrobe purchases and 1.4 million viewers by revealing her birthday haul. She’s put up so many videos that she had to add a second YouTube channel and she and her sister have started an online business selling makeup and fashion accessories. As of this month, her videos had over 172,000,000 total views. I could have written an entire blog post about haul videos. Do they signal the impending downfall of society or are they evidence of female ingenuity and empowerment? I'll leave it to you to watch a few and decide for yourselves.

My social media connections: Twitter LinkedIn