Archives for November 2013

Busy bee

November 26, 2013 by Jen

I had an insanely busy weekend, so busy that I lost sleep on Thursday night stressing about it. Stupid I know.

I had to work on Friday then come home and get ready to go out. I don’t know where the second wind comes from. Where I’d normally sit around home and relax I was out until 2am the next morning. My night involved lots of standing on my feet, dancing, and karaoke. I’m a karaoke convert. I love it.

It helps that I’ve had singing lessons and had a couple of songs that I’d kind of pre-prepared but I sang a lot more than these couple of songs. It helps that the large group of people I was out with were into it – really into it. Dancing and singing along to every song that was sung – into it.

I didn’t sing alone as there were three microphones people would join in and that was fine. I hope I wasn’t too much of a microphone hog but it’s not like I barged in to grab a mike for every song, I did let others have a go too.

I felt tired on Saturday but not so tired I couldn’t do some domestic chores, and then we went out again on Saturday night. It was a great night for a friend’s birthday at his house. It was another dressup thing. Lucky I’ve got an extensive wardrobe to call upon – in this case – a crochet outfit.

Sunday morning I was super baseball mum. Even more super because I had to score for the game. I never knew until JJ started playing baseball that scoring the game isn’t just ticking a box when they get a run. No. You pretty much keep a running sheet of where all players are at any one time for both teams. It’s complicated and it was my first time doing it. And the other team’s scorer was brand new as well. Luckily I had a helper to call upon otherwise it would have been a shamozal.

I think when they finished the game I resumed breathing normally. But I felt pleased with myself that I made it through.

I was able to relax on Sunday afternoon at a friend’s place having a couple of drinks. It was a good catch up with a few friends. I’ve got amazing friends.

I was in bed at 9pm on Sunday and had a really really good sleep.

This little busy bee needed it.

Digital content roundup – November 2013

November 26, 2013 by Jen

I want to share some useful and interesting reading I’ve come across this month. Note, some of the links are from further back but still relevant. There’s a strong content strategy theme here.

Repurposing content

It takes a lot of effort to create great content so try to repurpose the content you do create. This article shows different methods of repurposing content, the process, and different content types.

Create Great Content? How to Get More From It Through Repurposing

How to create a content strategy

There’s 652 steps in this ‘how to’ guide for creating a content strategy. Don’t let that put you off. It’s broken down into four major steps.

How to Create a Content Strategy (In Only 652 Steps)

Crafting a killer content strategy

Notes from a conference outlining seven key points to creating a content marketing strategy.

7 Tips and Tools to Craft a Killer Content Marketing Strategy #SESCHI

How to create a social media content strategy

There are 26 tactics here to strengthen your social media content strategy and you could give each one of them a go one at a time so it’s not so overwhelming. There are some good tips here though. For example, replicating your brand across platforms.

26 Tips to Create a Strong Social Media Content Strategy

A content strategy case study

I would love to combine my love of fashion with a job in content strategy. Here’s how Modcloth have done it. I’ve bought from Modcloth and one of the things I like about their site is their user content. People buy their products and then go back to the site and review them, and some upload images of themselves wearing their purchases. User-created content. It seems to really work for Modcloth. I wonder if they’re opening up in Australia?

How Modcloth Tries to Be a Fashion Friend and (Amazingly) Succeeds

Have you got any useful links to share?

Animated gifs – yay or nay?

November 21, 2013 by Jen

If you had asked me 15 years ago if using animated gifs was a good idea I would have said an emphatic NO!

If you weren’t using the web that long ago, here’s a reminder of how they looked back then.

Remember the ‘Under construction’, and the famous dancing baby?

Best forgotten. They were pretty primitive – although the dancing baby was kinda interesting. Another overused animated gif was the flashing *NEW* for when you added new content.

Here’s a page full of them just in case you need to see more.

Here’s the history of the animated gif.

If you watched the video you’ll already know that the animated gif made a resurgence in the last few years, especially on Tumblr, and more tools were available to create animated gifs.

Courtesy of Ozneo Tumblr.

If you want to create your own animated gif then there’s heaps of mobile and desktop apps.

I love the animated gif to make a point about a tv show or movie that isn’t as easy to get across in a still photo. It might be a series of animated gifs, or just one. Or they’ve become a bit of an artform as in the one above. Do you know the TV show it’s referencing?

Don’t forget if you add an animated gif into your website, like all images, add alt text for web accessibility purposes. But think about the purpose of it in the first place. The gif above is starting to do my head in so for me it would really depend on the type of content I’m posting, and the message I’m trying to convey.

But to the pronunciation of gif, ie jif and gif? I’m a gif girl (with the hard g sound). How about you?

Maybe this is temporarily a dog blog

November 18, 2013 by Jen

How could you resist this? He doesn’t jump but he does sit and put his paw on me to get my attention.

But when I was sitting down this time I was a captive audience. How could I not love him?

Behaviour training

November 17, 2013 by Jen

Was a great day on the beach the other morning for the dogs. There was nobody else there so they had free rein to run and run and run some more.

Phoenix is settling into his life with us. However, there’s a couple of things we have to sort out.

One – he gets car sick for just about any trip longer than 20 minutes. I’ve cleaned up three car vomits so far. I’m hoping it’s something he grows out of but for now I’ve bought him some insanely expensive carsick medication.

The other thing is how he reacts to other dogs. He obviously gets on well with his mate in these two photos, and he gets on well with my sister’s dog. He’s also met another friend’s dog and they had a great time.

However, he’s not very predictable when it comes to unknown dogs. So I have to leave him on the lead when there’s other dogs around. There’s been a few times when he’s been fine and then there’s been times when he’ll meet another dog on lead, it will be fine to start, then Phoenix will have a go.

I’ve organised some private training. I need to be confident to take him out and about without stressing and I want him to feel confident too. I think his reaction stems from fear and/or anxiety so with some proper training I think he can get around it.

This is the only downside to not really knowing his history. Apparently he wasn’t socialised much, if at all, with other dogs before he was surrendered and that’s what’s made the difference with him. Hopefully I have positive things to report as time goes on. I’m sure I will.

Why you shouldn’t simultaneously update Twitter from Facebook

November 10, 2013 by Jen

Twitter and Facebook are two totally different social media platforms yet there’s one thing about people trying to integrate their social media updates on both these platforms that’s really annoying to me.

Facebook has the ability to automatically post your status update to Twitter. That’s great right? You only have to do one update and it’s done on two of your platforms. No, it’s not great, and here’s why.

Facebook will allow longer status updates, and Twitter, as you probably know, only allows 140 characters. Therefore when you automatically send your Facebook update to Twitter, it truncates and adds a web address, like the below.

The clue that if you click on the link and you’ll be sent to Facebook is the fb.me part of the web address.

Many people do automatic posting to Twitter from Facebook for their brand page because the Facebook updates have to be public to allow Twitter users to be able to see them.

The other Twitter statuses I’ve seen have been along the lines of “Like if you …….”. I can’t like your Twitter status. I can maybe favorite it, but ‘Like’ is a Facebook thing. I’m more likely to unfollow than anything.

Because of the difference between how the platforms operate you’re really much better off posting to them separately. You have to monitor both platforms anyway right? Right? I hope you’re doing that. There’s nothing more frustrating for a follower engaging with you to be ignored.

But maybe you don’t know how to disconnect the two. It’s easy.

How to revoke access between Twitter and Facebook

Go to Twitter, select your profile’s Settings. Click on Apps and Revoke access to Facebook. It’s easy. You might want to check out what else is connected to Twitter and do a spring clean while you’re there. Go and check. I’ll wait.

If you want to check what Facebook is posting to Twitter, check it out at www.facebook.com/twitter. You can unlink Twitter from here as well.

Other platforms can work well when posting to Twitter, like FourSquare and Instagram, just not Facebook.

But that’s my opinion. What’s yours?

Gossip

November 7, 2013 by Jen

Gossip Girls

I’ve been watching Big Brother this season (nothing new there) and we watched a recent episode where they did some recaps of what’s happened during the season.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the Big Brother house when you’ve got no outside distractions to talk about so you become very focused on the people and their actions inside the house.

This is probably why when someone bitches about someone else, another housemate will usually immediately go and report it to the person that was being bitched about. There was one instance where something quite nasty was said about one of the housemates. That was immediately reported to the housemate being gossipped about which (understandably) really upset her.

I wondered why you would tell someone something that makes them upset if they’re your friend. I don’t think it’s because you want to upset them. It’s probably more because you want them to hate the person that said that nasty thing in the first place. Especially when you’re trying to avoid nominations and eviction.

But this happens outside of the house as well. JJ and I were talking about it and he said he’s witnessed similar things at school. He reckons he wouldn’t do it unless he wanted to get revenge on someone by making them upset. He’s seen other people do it though.

I know as I get older I’m making a conscious effort only to pass on news, good or bad, if I’ve not been sworn to secrecy and if I know it’s okay for me to pass on. It’s a common sense thing that I’m sure I didn’t have when I was younger, and let’s face it, most of the housemates are younger and don’t have that filter.

But back to Big Brother. They’re all out of the house now and I’ve got ten hours a week of my life back and I’ll forget who was even in the house within the next week. PS: I’m glad Tim won it though.

photo by: digitalART2