Be a Friend of Mine

A session of following the white dimpled ball consumed time yesterday..a pitiful exhibition by the way….

Being aware (you can’t avoid it nowadays) that there is something out there called “Facebook” and “Twitter” that is all the rage, and is how largely how the “younger set” communicates these days. So, I figured maybe I should try to learn more about it. I got notice of a “workshop” to be led by some guy named Mario Armstrong, to be held at the Hilton Garden Inn, with the title “Using Social Media” or something akin to that. I signed up and went over there Wednesday afternoon. Skeptical as usual, I figured it would be some self styled expert, maybe hawking his software or something. So wrong, Oh pessimistic Bottom Feeder! It turns out that Mario is indeed an expert, but far from self anointed (such as the Weather Channel shouting “We’re the Hurricane Authority!!), he is pretty much generally accepted as the sharpest in the industry. He has his own program on CNN, a show on XM Radio (XM 169) and frequently appears on the Today show when they have a spot on gee whiz electronics and stuff. He turned out to be extremely knowledgeable, entertaining, and willing to answer any questions.

Besides the poor lonely food blogger, the audience consisted of tourism folks, local museum reps, media people, one restaurateur that I noticed, and owners of small businesses. They of course wanted to know how they could increase their audience and reach potential customers. Like it or not, Social Media, through (at least FB and TW) is the wave of the future. Nobody has time for print, we can’t visit websites, we want it dropped in our lap. Immediate information. Just follow Twitter and it’s yours in real time. He presented some statistics showing the growth in “social media” and it’s not just the “kids”, the over fifty something is re-joining the computer age at an astonishing rate. Mobile (smart phones, iPads, etc.) is the fastest growing sector. And, this is not being lost on the software developers out there. Here I thought there were the big two, and oh yeah, Flickr, YouTube, and a couple others, but there are a bewildering amount of things to help you locate, find out about, contact pt0ential customers and friends. You can type your product into Tweetdeck, and it will find all the posts that have whatever you typed in included. Where they are, what they said, etc. Big Brother folks..

Besides the standard FB/Tw/Linked in, etc., here is a partial list of things available to you (I’m not going to include links, use Google): Hootsuite; Foursquare; Tweetdeck; Wordpress; Squarespace; bit.ly; Klout.com; Twellohood; Meetup.com; Twtpoll.com; Mashable.com; Google alerts; Google analytics. Then we can talk about Title Tags and Hash Tags. I had only a dim view of what they do, some of them allow you to display things you’re following all on one page, others allow you to know where your friends are, what people are saying, etc.

He said that food blogging is expoding in many areas. Here’s an interesting food blog he mentioned that focuses on single dishes called "FoodSpotting. Check it out....Amazing

It sure was eye opening. There were a couple of things you can do to help expand the breadth of your blog, and that was attractive to me, so maybe you’ll note some changes in the near future. I have some friends (personal not cyber) that consider this whole subject of “social media” anathema, but I’m not sure they are the majority. It is very seductive and hard to resist the siren call. It’s gone way past “I’m exhaling now”, or “My 3 year old just pooped”. A brave new world. And no mention of

DFD