Follow Me: How to Use Social Networks to Build Visibility & Drive Sales

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Cynthia Closkey

Today I’ll be speaking on a panel at the 5th Annual Business Technology Conference, organized by the Small Business Development Center at Duquesne University. Our moderator will be Betsy Benson, Publisher and Vice President of Pittsburgh Magazine, and sharing the panel with me will be the delightful Victoria Dilliott, owner of Affogato Coffee Bar.

Our session title: “Follow Me: How to Use Social Networks to Build Visibility & Drive Sales.”

Follow Me: How to Use Social Networks to Build Visibility & Drive Sales

View more presentations from Big Big Design.

My portion of the session will be an evolution of a session I gave at PodCamp Pittsburgh 5, “Blogging for Business.” I wanted to expand on the ideas I’d discussed at PodCamp, going beyond blogging to a more comprehensive social media communications strategy (and actually beyond social media to online communication as a general thing).

The slideshow includes lots of neat visuals from Flickr and elsewhere (all Creative Commons attributed), but there’s one particular visual I’d like to highlight: the “Killer Blog Strategy Mind-Map” diagram by Johnny Haydon. Communications — and social media/online communications in particular — act much like a loop system, and this diagram does a great job of visualizing the loops of causes and effects. A full diagram of the system would be much more complex, but sometimes the complete complexity obscures the core of what’s going on. If you’re trying to set out your plan to build communications (and community) online, this diagram is the place to start.

More notes to come after the presentation.

FOLLOW-UP:

Thanks to everyone who attended our session. What a fine discussion we had! Very big thanks to Victoria for sharing her story, and to Betsy for moderating the session.

Here is more information for some examples I mentioned during the talk:

Cooks Source controversy: Thorough summary write-up here, the main post by the blogger who first discovered her material had been reprinted without permission.

A sample of how Paper.li shows interesting content from a Twitter account and the users it follows: my Paper.li

Eat’n'Park using social media for last-minute promotions during the Stanley Cup playoffs: coverage in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (6/21/2009)

Web Marketing for Writers

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Cynthia Closkey

Last weekend I spoke at the monthly roundtable of the Pittsburgh Writing Project. My topic was Web Marketing for Writers — a subject close to my heart, both as a writer and as one who has helped many writers establish and maintain an online presence.

You can download the Powerpoint file here:Â Web Marketing for Writers (PPT)

Or if you prefer a PDF: Web Marketing for Writers Presentation (PDF file)

(You’re free to use or adapt this presentation, but please attribute the content to me and Big Big Design, and link back to bigbigdesign.com.)

We had a fine discussion, with several members of the group offering tips from their own experience.

Tip for presenters: You will benefit greatly by having someone in the audience corroborate what you say and offer examples from a different and complementary perspective. In this talk, my unexpected collaborator was Paul Kelly, publisher at St. Lynn’s Press.

Paul’s perspective (I’m paraphrasing): Every writer who wants to be published must have a website — it’s required for credibility and for creating and building your marketing platform. As a publisher, he loves to see that a writer has developed an audience, and the web makes that possible. Show that you’ve got 5,000 or more web visitors a month, interested in what you have to say, and you’re much more likely to be offered a publishing contract.

Refresh Pittsburgh meeting

Posted on March 24, 2008 by Cynthia Closkey

The next meeting of Refresh Pittsburgh will at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, April 1 at the Creative Treehouse in Bellevue.

Refresh Pittsburgh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of Internet developers in the Pittsburgh area.

To start the evening, Pat Collins will present “CakePHP: Rapid application development with PHP”.

Why learn a new programming language when you can use your existing PHP skills to become a better coder and increase your productivity? Let Pat show you how to build a blog application in no time, and how you can help!

Then, Val Head will be presenting “A, B, C, D-esign!”

Val’s presentation will be a discussion of the basic building blocks of design as they apply to designing fo the web. She’ll show examples of concepts like colour, typography and hierarchy and talk about how these fit in to a web page design.

As usual, if you would like to show off a recent project or pose a few questions to our group, please let us know and we’ll fit you in.

We’ll make sure to provide a good supply of coffee and cookies and other sweets to get you through the night.

Please RSVP to let us know if you will be joining us. We need to make sure we have enough seats and most importantly, coffee and cookies! And by all means, please forward this invitation to anyone you like.

Refresh Pittsburgh meeting

Posted on February 15, 2008 by Cynthia Closkey

The next meeting of Refresh Pittsburgh will at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, February 26 at the Creative Treehouse in Bellevue.

Refresh Pittsburgh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of Internet developers in the Pittsburgh area.

Cynthia Closkey (that’s me!) from Big Big Design will present “Google-Friendly Blogging in Five Easy Steps.” I’ll talk about basic search engine optimization for WordPress, and by extension, for other blog tools as well. I’ll talk about misconceptions about SEO, and I’ll give some simple steps one can take to improve one’s search ranking.

Next, Jeff Hunter, organizer of Devhouse Pittsburgh will present an introduction to Ruby: what it is, why you may want to consider using it for your next project.

Full details are at the Refresh Pittsburgh website. Visit there and RSVP so we have a headcount.