social media

Kennebunkport Dress for $62.99 at Modcloth

One of my new Twitter friends @Dinalisafraioli just introduced me to this lovely and stylish company @modcloth.

I fell instantly in love! You will too OMG! Here’s why:

Not only is their site a breeze to navigate but it gives you the same delightful pleasure of window shopping through fashionable city boulevard! What’s also the #awesomesauce about this online boutique is the innovative way their social media is managed: a quintet of lovely ladies called the “Social Butterflies” who all happily blog and tweet about the gorgeous goods they love.

They have sassy shoes that I’ve not seen anywhere else including a pair called Unicorn Princess. The dresses are to die for, including the one I’m drooling over at the top of the post. And what’s really awesome is how wonderfully affordable EVERYTHING they carry is!

Check them out!

And make sure to follow me on Twitter for more fashion goodness and tweet me your favorite fashion finds!

Keeping It REALLY real online and off :)

photo credit: dollie_mixtures

Today I am on a roll!

You want to instantly plug in awesome photos like this one? Check out Photo Dropper!. This fantastic wordpress plugin lets you grab Creative Commons photos right from your dashboard and sizes it and puts all the lovely code in for you.

Ah…blogging hacks…so wonderful.

Like the buttons? Aren’t they cute? And they are all in one lovely little bunch. I picked them up at buttonshut.com so go on over there and grab some for yourself. There is a lovely selection to choose from.

Btw, this is random but I just added a few words to the Urban Dictionary – you might get a kick out of the definitions. I was inspired after I UD’d my own name…turns out I’m lovely, hot, AND possibly an evil genius! Nice!

Anyway, I just spent about an hour and 1/2 modifying my page – adding shtuff, gettin rid of shtuff. I may change my theme again in the future cause this one is already startin to feel old but that will have to come at a time when…you know…I have “some”. That is “time” that isn’t already assigned for work and shit.

The modifications were to make my website more of a hub – where you can find all the goodies that involve 365daygirl. Well not all of it…they don’t make nearly enough buttons for ALL the stuff I do. But I can always add links right?

Okay, so with this page, and my web presence reasonably situated I will probably be focusing my content on more real stuff and genuinely sharing my story about why I’m doing this all in the first place. It’s been an interesting, almost sobering couple of weeks. The challenge of putting up all manner of content led me to a point of exhaustion. So now I’m trying to re-focus and re-build my energies.

In other news, I finally “get” Twitter! It isn’t the total waste of time I thought it was! lol.

Okay, back to work.

I have a sinus infection…again! But thanks to facebook one of my very informed and well meaning friends just told me about a product I can use to kick this infection to the curb. Here’s the process:

1. I tweet about my misery via my facebook and twitter account
2. Friends leave well wishing comments and condolences
3. One friend in particular recommends a product she’s had awesome experience
4. I jump on Google to find the product, read ingredients, instructions, other customer reviews, and get a price.
5. I search engine where to find it in the REAL world.

while I was checking out all the specs for this amazing nasal flushing product I read one of the best reviews ever. I mean, this guy was fantastic! Funny, lyrical, illustrative…just a joy to read. He even wrote a haiku about an instant brownie mix! Freakin awesome.

God I love the Internet.

So, this hot guy is Curtis. Curtis Mock, Guru in the Business of Fitness (Summer, bookmark his site! You’re hot personal trainer boyfriend could learn a LOT from this guy). I am using him, or rather the “brand” of him as an example of awesome social media “practice”. It is an art form and a science, one of which every business owner and professional today is wise to put into habit. Get that? TODAY. Not yesterday, like your good ole dad’s day of cold calling.

Apart from his rockstar “personal brand” Curtis is real and genuine about interacting with his audience, his fellow business colleagues, and I’m sure his clients. Do you notice how his authentic concern for YOUR success effortlessly comes through? You just want to eat this guy up don’t you? He’s informative, takes time to explain something, and he’s damn funny to watch and listen to. He shares his realness, his story, and his desire to help YOU be awesome. You WANT to leave a comment because he wants to read it! He wants you to share YOUR story. You WANT to ask him a question – cause you see him answer others questions. He is actually taking the time and interest to “interface” with you via the media at all our fingertips.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been on a blog and wanted to be part of the discussion, be heard and answered and then get nothin. Or even a youtube video. The “I don’t have time to respond” is not an excuse if you want to build a business or be a personality on the web. In fact it’s total bullshit. Social media is there to facilitate conversation and hopefully start the foundation of a relationship, be it friend or business partner (actually it’s usually both!). The beauty of it is you can use it to reach customers, business partners, and real friends, across miles and miles of land.

Curtis does not live anywhere near me, which could have been considered unfortunate a little while ago (and perhaps a little now since I can’t like pat his butt or anything physically flirty *nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink*). But thanks to the internet I get the pleasure of both receiving his awesomeness as well as sharing my own in the form of actual real communication. This is both because we are awesome at employing these tools and networks.

He is a perfect example of why it pays to jump into this whole social media ocean. In in we will either sink or swim. For those who have said there are not real connections to be made in this day and age, in business or personal, I say you are letting yourself sink. For the rest of us, we are happily learning how to dog paddle ;)

Exhibit A: amusing spam comment this very blog! Click on the photo for the full size.

Click play on the video below to “lemme esplain”:

Meanwhile in other social media adventures….
my facebook and unused @catthegirlguru twitter profile was gettin spammed by my auto news tweets. *sigh* I turned them sh*ts off for now… They were putting like stock quotes on my facebook…*sigh* that’s not very friendly.

I am really enjoying twitter now! Thanks in part to this chick and @silran666 aka “The Magical Mexican”. We are going to have a pow wow at her lovely little cookie shop next week! I’m so excited!

-Happy real life and web-ness!
Aprylcat

Numbers…data…numbers…letters…comments…posts…tags…spam…tweets…email…letters…numbers…Oh. My. God! There’s that fried brain feeling again :P

So I’ve been learning a ton about social media, personal branding, even tweeting! It’s fantastic! But…still a lot of work.

My flickr account has fallen by the wayside recently as I answer emails and make comments, upload my videos on youtube for 5 hours, record videos for my dragon boss and my “working projects”, and sleep.

And then today, I check my blog and lo and behold I’ve got 83 new comments! 90% of which are total gibberish. Into the trash with you! Perhaps there is a better spam filter out there but I don’t know where to find it. Recommendations?

It’s been AWESOME talking with REAL people on the web. Especially women on the web. Right here in town too! Such as Summer and Stacy and @Ghennipher and Tami. As well as getting questions about my 365daygirl adventures from real folks in interent biz.

Meanwhile the Magical Mexican and the Russian Photo Babe are still super fans and keep poking me to see if I am okay and still producing content for them to ingest ;) Love you guys!

I’m curious, how do ya’ll keep up with all this stuff? I’d love to hear your blogging/posting/tweeting/vlogging/facebooking strategies and how you keep it all in check with your real work!

-Aprylcat

No time to tweet huh? Bullshit! I mean…Sure ya do! Just set the way back to FORWARD by using a handy little tool from Socialoomph.com and send wonderfully original and unique tweets on schedule while you nap, shop, or otherwise attend to that REAL life of yours :)

And, in case you haven’t noticed you can also time your blog posts…a damn convenient option I just recently discovered.

Hey! I’m learning here!

Blogging about something actually interesting in the first challenge, day to day. I mean, if I treat this thing like twitter I could ramble on about just anything I do in way more than 140 characters.

However, I’d rather not bore every friend I have on the planet, real or virtual, with what I had for breakfast each day.

So, then it is a matter of choosing a topic of interest, and that, takes time to think about. Which then brings us to the second challenge: Time to produce.

Strangely in this Information Age of faster than light communication, the time it takes to produce something may still be about the same. Then there is the time to market the piece or the time it takes a person to find it, read, and THEN decide if they want to comment which also means some of us must take a moment to think up just want we want to say right?

*Phew* sometimes I am actually tempted to type about my cheerios…

Meanwhile, I am reading about Tigergate and how mr. Woods let his own personal brand go to utter crap. I feel almost superior to that guy in my newbie personal branding skills, even though I totally blow at golf.

I’ve been occasionally plagued by nightmares since I was a child. In fact, I can recall quite a few of them even today in my middle age. One in particular involved a giant, brightly lit pastry shop full of all manner of goodies that I was forced to choose from while suffering from not-so-surreal-stomach-pains. Upon waking I promptly puked all over the side of the bed.

This night however was strange in that I don’t actually remember the visual images that spawned the horde of nightmare spooked anxiety. It seemed more about how I felt in the world rather than watching some horrid dream about disease or violence blossom before my inner eyes. Specifically I how I feel in the winter wonderland that has just graced our doorways yards, and streets.

I feel simultaneously clutched by claustrophobia and lost and alone in the cold white vastness of the season.

This is not unlike how I sometimes feel about the web actually. The big, world wide, usually friendly, web. As I sit down and type out a piece of my story on a white background, I wonder how much of it will actually get heard, how much will just get swallowed up by the vastness, or how much will just get piled on top of all the rest of the content out there as millions of readers slide right over it unknowingly.

I really hate to add to that pile, what one of my internet guru friends calls the “echo chamber”. Millions of digitized voices all saying the same thing over and over, in blogs, videos, comments, etc. It’s this popularity contest that we as social media “personalities” both strive for and I think in our hearts probably abhore, if we are REAL anyway.

This preoccupation with getting large numbers on the web reminds me of one of the musings within the book The Little Prince :

Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: “What does his voice sound like?” “What games does he like best?” “Does he collect butterflies?”. They ask: “How old is he?” “How many brothers does he have?” “How much does he weigh?” “How much money does his father make?” Only then do they think they know him.

But on days like this I almost fear that I am too small a blip on the screen…a very childish fear I am sure, but one I cannot help have while being so sensitive to the world, web and real.