Tag Archives: DTAT

Not Resolutions. Goals.

Posted on by

I don’t like New Year’s resolutions, because I never keep them. Does anyone?

And then I read this post on A Cup Of Lee and it resonated.

To be completely honest, as I like to be here on my blog, Leanne isn’t just a blogger I follow. She’s a friend and Adam’s best mate’s mum.

She’s also the one who walked up to me at the pre-school line up and said ‘Are you Tee?’ My first stalker. 😀

Anyway, I love her blog, both because she writes well and because I don’t know a lot about PR so I find what she does really fascinating. It’s a job I probably would have like to do myself, but my career took me other directions.

Oh, she’s also a client!

Anyway, I like the idea of making business goals, rather than personal resolutions and I really like the idea of posting them here on the ‘net. Accountability is a good thing!

So I opened my Wunderlist (which I highly recommend if you need a list/goal/note app) and added a new section called ‘Goals’.

And I started a list called DTAT Goals 2015:

  1. Blog at least once a week
  2. Redesign the DTAT web site
  3. Launch the Etsy shop
  4. Work on my novel

All four of those have a completion date of 31 December 2015. Lots of room to get them done.

Unlike Leanne, I do have one personal goal:

  1. Earn driving license

That has a completion date of 1 June 2015, because I really want to have my license before we go to California next summer. And I have my second lesson tomorrow. 😀

So hopefully you’ll see more from me here at Tee’s Blog.

And more from Designed To A Tee.

And you may want to pull over if you see an Abba Driving instructor in and around South Belfast.

That could be me behind the wheel. 😀

So…How’s Your Facebook?

Posted on by

Mines pretty annoying, thanks.

My friends, most of whom are also Social Media and web type people, and I have recently noticed an odd thing.

If we post something to our business pages, in my case Designed To A Tee, it doesn’t always show up in our own feeds.

That’s right. It’s our page. We post something. We never see it.

So we started to wonder what our fans/clients/others were seeing then.

Apparently, not much.

If you don’t like or comment or, apparently, click a link that’s posted by a page you like, you will not see that pages updates. Even if you’ve liked the page.

You have to do some hanky panky with also following and other things which my friend who runs Fazenda Rodizio Bar and Grill put on their blog. I won’t rewrite it all here, go read that one!

Why has Facebook done this? Because they want us, the business page user, to pay. The tell us constantly to ‘boost’ our posts. Boost is their fancy way of saying ‘give us money and we’ll let more people see what you have to say’. Which, where I come from, is blackmail.

Now I have a problem with this. My marketing budget is very small. I spend a bit on business cards and of course I own my domain. But to give Facebook any percentage of that small part of my yearly budget, especially since they don’t guarantee reach even if you do ‘boost’ a post, is just not going to happen.

So high cost, low Return on Investment…yeah, think I’ll skip it.

So what to do?

Well, we’ve started a movement, some of these friends of mine and I. A movement towards, believe it or not, Google+.

Now I was the first person to scoff at G+, at the idea that we needed yet *another* social media outlet.

But if Facebook is going to decide for my users and me who gets to see what I say?

Then I say: G+? Here I come.

I don’t have a company page on G+, even though I could. I am trying to consoldate all my social media anyway, so I’m just using Robyn Fraser. It’s still a work in progress, as when isn’t my own stuff, but come take a look. See what I’m talking about.

You’ll actually get to, you know, see it!

By the way, it’s my professional opinion that this attempt at blackmail by Facebook will end Facebook as a marketing tool for small business.

So good luck to them.

I guess.

What I’ve Been Up To…Company Wise

Posted on by

I have recently volunteered for Organization for Transformative Works.

The what now?

The Organization for Transformative Works.

It’s an organization formed for the protection, promotion and predilection of fan work.

Fanfiction, fan vids, Podfic, etc etc etc

I’ve been a fanfiction writer for years. Stargate. Buffy. Supernatural. Avengers. Sometimes all mixed together. Always with love. Usually slash. Sometimes het. Occasionally…undefined, really.

And so when I was looking for something to do last summer, after we got back from California, and I saw OTW was looking for graphic artists, I signed up. And got accepted while in Cali.

So I’ve been doing it for a few months. Myself and a few others do the graphics for their blog/Tumblr/LJ posts. Usually for OTW FanNews. I tend to Tweet and/or FB them when a graphic of mine goes up. I’ve got one due next Friday, in fact.

Other than that, the company chugs along. Just got a new assignment from a previous client that will keep be busy the next week or two. Plus OTW, plus, it looks  like, a writing gig.

Of course I also still write for JUMP! Magazine.

And, as always, I’m trying to redesign the DTAT website.

So I’m keeping busy.

Although I’ve got time, if anyone needs a Graphic Artist?

Happy Christmas and a Lovely New Year

Posted on by

Number one resolution? Write more blog posts again.

Number two resolution? Launch my Etsy shop with knitting patterns.

Yes, I now design knitting. I’ve got a baby cardigan, a scarf and I’m working on a hat. I hope to have gloves and a scarf soon. New dimension to Designed To A Tee. 😀

Also coming up are a brand new website, designed from the back to the front from moi and maybe some greeting card designs.

So here’s to 2014. May it be happy and fruitful for all.

Why my Twitter and my Facebook are connected

Posted on by

I read, all over the place, that they shouldn’t be. That the two should be completely separate because they are different tools.

I disagree.

I find I get a lot more interaction on Facebook than on Twitter. Oh sure, people respond to me on Twitter or Favourite a post or re-Tweet. But not nearly as much as they do on Facebook.

So I send my Twitter feed to Facebook.

I could, of course, post to Twitter and then post again onto Facebook. But I’m lazy.

Why use Twitter at all then? Because I like the challenge, really, of figuring out what I want to say in 140 characters without using much, if any, TxtSpk. I like language and playing with language and Twitter can sometimes be like a big jigsaw puzzle of odd sentence construction to get my thoughts out.

I do use Facebook on it’s own as I sometimes have things I need to say in more than 140 characters. But I always feels slightly bereft that I do, as I feel I’m leaving my Tweeps out and making them miss my brilliance. Maybe I should link back…

I do have an exception to this rule. I never send my Mumsnet Belfast Tweets to Facebook or vice versa. Because it’s not me. It’s a page and company I represent and I do use Twitter and Facebook differently on a corporate level.

So why have I combine my company and my personal?

Designed to a Tee’s Twitter and Blog were stagnating. I made the decision it was better to put my personal life into my public life and, maybe, get some personal connections interested in what I do professionally. Networking, in other words.

Because the number one of rule of Social Media? If you’re not using it? There’s no point in having it.

By the way, if  you hear a small explosion from Scotland in the next hour or two, it’s probably my friend and fellow SM expert’s head exploding as she believes the complete opposite of what I put here. Sorry Lynn. 😀

More Changes Coming

Posted on by

I have come to the executive decision that I will be shutting down the Designed To A Tee blog and Twitter account and combining them with this one.

So if you follow @DTATTWeets or have that blog in a feed reader, go ahead and kill them.

I’ll be tagging any DTAT blog posts with DTAT and part of the (never ending) redesign is going to include a separate tab for those posts on here.

Time to bring my life into one place!