SMBTV #4

I rolled myself out of bed early for the fourth Social Media Breakfast for Tech Valley. This meeting focused on blogging and coordinator Amy Mengel had as guests Lara Kulpa, Christina Gleason, Amanda Magee, and as moderator, All Over Albany's Greg Dahlmann.

My college's Communications Department sponsored the event (and they're hoping to host the next breakfast in their new media center in January) so a bunch of my colleagues were there. So was my pal Kim, who's becoming quite the media matrix herself and was indulgent of my less-than-wakeful state.

I'm not going to give you a summary: you can see the tweet stream here and get a good picture of it. The by-words for blogging remain the same: passion, responsiveness, content and the big one, community. The rules apply whether you're talking about a personal blog or a business one, something a lot of businesses still don't understand.

Ahead of time, I had put a question on the Facebook group asking whether blogging was needed anymore given the popularity of social media sources like Twitter and Facebook; of course, it was a bit of a leading question. Fortunately, the panelists all said the same thing I think, which is that the ephemeral nature of the more instantaneous lacks the stability of blog posts, which you can go back and find. Sure, there are Twitter aggregators, but the swift chunks of tweets don't add up to the same kind of experience.

But I've been thinking about the structure/planning issues. By default, Thursdays end up being BitchBuzz day; should I have themed days? Monday is movie day or Tuesday is beer day? What kind of topics should I cover regularly? How about a day for complaints? Everybody needs to complain. What if you had one day a week to just get a pet peeve off your chest? What do you think?

UPDATE: Local TV coverage of the event, as well as Humberto Martinez's article for the Times Union.

Social Media Breakfast--Tech Valley

Yesterday morning, much too early, I headed downtown to the Capital Rep Theatre, host of that morning's Social Media Breakfast for the Tech Valley region. The lovely picture is from the CapRep stage: they're currently deep into Shear Madness. Great set, eh?

The featured speaker was Justin R. Levy, a PR/social media maven, who live-tweeted his own wedding. While his experiences were centered in business, there was a lot of useful info for everyone, including the most useful aspects of different social media -- e.g. how building relationships on Twitter is different from doing so on Facebook, but also how you need to use a mix of media not only to cast the widest net, but also to deal with glitches like the recent takedown of Twitter.

And yes, we're back to that sticky issue of branding, again. If you want to make the most of SEO, then you need to know what the search terms are that will lead to your virtual door. Once again I'm stymied by shoehorning my work into some kind of catch phrase. Perhaps one will come to me.

You can see a stream of the event (featuring the back of my head). The lovely Amy Mengel was our hostess and organizer (who's so on the ball she tweeted to tell me there was tea along with the coffee and bagels when I complained on Twitter that there was no tea). While I hold to Wilde's edict about breakfast and brilliance, it was worth getting up early to be there.

Write Here @ Arts Center

Yesterday was a blustery day but on the agenda was Write Here, a panel on writing resources in the Capital Region hosted at the Arts Center of the Capital Region and co-hosted by the Hudson Valley Writers Guild and the New York State Writers Institute. It was a chance to get together with folks and start the long process of creating buzz for Unikirja, and also to promote Albacon as well as to sell a few other books as things turned out.

We hadn't been to the Art Center before -- conveniently located across the street from Market Block Books, an independent bookseller -- but it's a great space. Of course it made it much more pleasant to immediately run into Robyn Ringler, proprietor of East Line Books and hardest-working bookseller/writing promoter in the Hudson Valley. Robyn is such a joy to be around.

The panel itself seemed to be aimed more at beginning writers, while a large part of the audience really got involved once the topics turned to promoting your writing and networking with others. I was kind of staggered by one panelist mentioning that she had been working on her novel for fifteen years (but hey, she has an agent and I don't so what should we conclude from this?). The panelists seemed to be less oriented toward the practical side of writing, but I was among a number of people from the audience who shared tips about promoting and networking using the internet (it all comes back to karma! help other people and they will help you, too. Focus only on me-me-me and no one will care).

Thanks to Megha Godambe for the invite!