Category Archives: Designed To A Tee

So…How’s Your Facebook?

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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

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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?

The Question That Was Too Geeky To Ask At The Time

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This past week I attended a session of the Anatomy of Design lecture series as produced by the Northern Ireland Design Alliance. It was a talk by Mike Reed of Reed Words titled: Giving Voice to Ideas.

Mike is what he calls ‘a creative writer for brands’. Or, to the rest of us, a copywriter.

It was a great talk about collaborating with designers in creating branding that includes words as well as some insight into the best way to choose words for design.

During the Q&A Mike was asked what he thought the difference was between the way words were used 10 years ago and now. His answer was that the biggest difference was that people were more aware of words impact now than they were then.

And the geekiest question in the world came into my head. I spent the rest of the Q&A agonizing over a) if I should ask it and b) how to ask it without looking like the biggest geek in the world.

In the end, I didn’t ask it. So I’m going to ask it here, where I can plan it and edit it, and maybe if I tag Mike in my Twitter of this post, he’ll answer.

In Robert Heinlein’s Future History Universe, in more than one story, word science is mentioned. PR companies and Advertisers have created a whole science around the impact of words, to the point that some words are consider too ‘loaded’ to be used. That their meaning and  context were much to manipulative.

Not necessarily words we think of as un-PC today, but other words that might have sub-meanings or context that can be upsetting. Or influential to buyers and the like.

I wondered if Mike thought we might be headed in that direction. Towards a science of the impact of words. Or if we already have it to some extent.

God I’m such a Geek.

 

Why my Twitter and my Facebook are connected

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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

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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!

Railway Children, Mumsnet and Aviva – Please Help

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People tell me, sometimes, that they can’t believe how much I put on the internet. My real name, the name of my son and husband, my general location, my health issues, both mental and physical.

But what they don’t realize is how much I don’t put on the internet. About my childhood. About my parent’s divorce. About my journey from being a troubled child and teenager to being an adult with those mental illnesses.

About my running away.

I’ve run away twice in my life, once when I was about 13 and once when I was 25.

30 years on I have no idea why I ran away when I was 13. A fight with my mom and step-dad no doubt. About…who knows?

But run I did. Out the door and down the street and, I remember, to the left. To the right was known and led to major roads they would be able to find me on. To the left was unknown and led to I didn’t know where.

I was just looking at a map and I can’t remember how far I went or where I ended up. I do know a nice lady stopped and tried to help me, but I jumped out of her car at a light, stories of kidnapped children in my head. And then was picked up by the police and taken home; the nice lady had called them. It was dark and cold at that point. I was gone for at least a few hours.

My parents were, of course, relieved. My step-sister, who was home from college, was really mad, but still ran me a bath to warm me up.

I have no idea what my mom said to the police to get them to just leave me and not investigate further. But that’s what happened.

And I was lucky. I was on the street for hours. Not days or months. And at this point, I don’t remember the aftermath. In what way, if at all, I was punished. All I remember was thinking I had to get away from them. From myself. From my pain.

My second running away at 25 was the beginning of my mental breakdown that led to my diagnoses today. But that one was by car, with my cat and isn’t what this post is about.

It’s about runaway children. It’s because Mumsnet and Railway Children and Aviva have come together to help young runaways. The ones who don’t get taken back home in hours. The ones who are on the streets. The ones whose home lives are probably filled with horrors I can’t even imagine; horrors that make the streets better than home.

For every blog post, every Tweet, every Facebook status, every comment on this blog and all the others writing about this, Aviva will donate £2 to Railway Children, up to £200,000 by the end of 2013. Money that will go towards helping runaways, like I might have become.

If not for one nice lady and some police.

Why I Don’t Work Full Time

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1 trip to school

1 walk to the bus

1 bus ride

1 shopping trip

1 bus ride

1 monitor setup

1 ride in the car

1 meeting over coffee with a client

1 meeting/networking event with strangers

Means I’m out of spoons at 3pm

Still have to do:

1 pick up of a small boy from child minder

1 dinner cooked

1 boy into bed, with no help as Simon works late on Wednesdays

So I’m about 3 spoons short…

We’re Making A Garden

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We being Adam and I.

But I’m going to cover it over at the Designed To A Tee Blog.

Why? Because it’s design of a sort.

And because that blog needs some traffic! Maybe one of you millions  10s of people who read this one will go read that one and realize you need to hire the very best Online Media Specialist/Graphic Artist/All around good egg on the ‘net and we’ll revolutionize the web with our ideas.

Hey. It could happen.

And nothing to lose by trying!

Sunday Sunday….

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Posted as part of One Topic / Forty Opinions via The Belfast Bloggers Network.

Sunday. What can I say about Sunday?

It used to be so different, when we started living in City Centre. Nothing was open before 1p. Well, things were open, i.e. Primark, at 12:30, but you couldn’t actually buy anything until 1p. True fact.

Then the Tesco Express opened on Dublin Road. Just around the corner from our flat. And it was open at 7. Very handy when we had a small boy and had run out of milk. Or needed some croissants. Especially chocolate filled ones.

Because the opening laws are based on square feet, you see, and that was the right size. The law hasn’t changed.

And I was a bit sad, handy as it was. It had been, for years, that, unless you were going to church, highly unlikely in this Jewish/Atheist/Something house, you not only had no where to be but no where you could be.

You had no choice but to be lazy in bed. Or on the sofa. Cruising the ‘net, watching a movie, eating a huge breakfast, what have you. Until after lunch.

Now, living here in Finaghy, several stores are open on Sunday morning. And Simon likes to run and get the Sunday papers. Sometimes Adam can be convinced to join him.

But he really is my son.

He’d rather watch a movie on the sofa with Mummy and wait to turn on the kettle when Daddy gets back with the paper…and apple cake…