Social Media Club Louisville

SMC Louisville/Block5 Block Party

As Alice Cooper would say “school’s out for summer.” Though the business world doesn’t quite follow the same “shut down for summer” model that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the warm weather and some laid back fun. That’s why for our July event we’re teaming up with Block5, a communications startup downtown, to throw a block party complete with food, beverages, free geek schwag, shoe giveaways (Streetmoda.com is a sponsor!) and funnel cakes.

We do hope you’ll come by and join us. We’re starting at 6PM so downtown workers can just cruise by after work and help us kick the party off.

SMC Louisville/Block5 Block Party

720 W. Main Street

Tuesday July 21, 2009 6PM-8PM

Full disclosure: I’m working for Block5.

If you’re reading via email or an rss reader I highly recommend hopping on over to smclouisville.org. We’ve got a brand new, beautiful new site design and I want you to see it.

This design was very generously donated by a local SMC supporter. Then the design was turned into a brilliant, functional and altogether awesome Wordpress theme by local designer Ricky Irvine. Thank you designer who wants to stay anonymous and thank you so much to Ricky. I can’t recommend Ricky’s work highly enough. And he’s a super nice guy. Win-win.

Social Media Club Louisville has a good lineup of events ahead of us for Spring and I’m so pleased that we get to start this busy season with a new look for our home here.

If you made it out to our bootcamp for nonprofits last week (or looked at our slides from the event) you know that a couple different presenters references the work of Beth Kanter. Business Week has done a little feature on her and how she uses her social networking to do good. Very much of interest to nonprofit folks I would think.

Beth Kanter remembers it as the year that Yahoo ruined the holidays. In was late 2006. The Boston-based Kanter had already notched lots of successes in fundraising for her Cambodian charity, the Sharing Foundation. But when Yahoo (YHOO) offered $50,000 to the do-gooder who could enlist the most contributors, Kanter shifted into overdrive.

“I showed the people on the [charity's] board how to send the e-mails pointing people to the site. I made my husband go to work. I went totally nuts. We were starting to get gifts that were second or third degree out. (That’s social networking lingo for friends of friends.) On New Year’s Eve, we were watching the ball drop and suddenly donations went up $15,000 from someone we didn’t know. We raised $53,000 and won the $50,000. And we doubled our donor list.”

Wild Apricot has a roundup and explanation of some online payment processing options for nonprofits. This ties in very nicely to our Social Media Bootcamps for Nonprofits yesterday so I wanted to pass it along.

Perhaps the most important part of the post though is this:

Ease of use is a huge factor — if the payment process is a big hassle for you to set up and manage, there may be an investment in time and/or tech support that’s more than you can manage right now.

Further, a membership payment or donation may be abandoned before it’s completed if the process is not quick, simple, and relatively painless from the online donor’s perspective. Users will be quick to abandon a payment if they are uncertain about what they’re doing, for fear of making a costly mistake.

Sometimes, “trust” and “ease of use” come together to create a barrier to donation

We had a great, interested and interesting group turn out for our Social Media Bootcamp for Nonprofits this morning. Thanks so much to everyone who attended. We sincerely hope you enjoyed the session and that you found value in it.

As promised here are the slides from the bootcamp. First is David Finch’s presentation on listening, then my presentations on Blogging and Personal Branding, then Brendan Jackson’s talk on RSS & Twitter. I’ll have Nick Huhn’s Facebook slides up as soon as I can as well. Nick Huhn’s slides have been added in now.

In light of weather reports that Louisville may receive significant (at least by Louisville standards) snow this evening we have opted to postpone the Social Media Bootcamp for Nonprofits. The new date for this event is Thursday February 5, 2009. We’re very sad to do this but feel strongly it’s better to be safe than sorry if serious winter weather does actually hit our area.

Registration for the rescheduled event is closed because we had reached our maximum capacity for the original date. However if seats become available for the new date we’ll let you know.

Social Media Bootcamp for Non-Profits
Thursday January 27, 2009
8:30AM-10:30AM

Registration for this event is closed.

Webster University (Google Map)
1031 Zorn Avenue
#200
Louisville, KY 40207

In light of weather reports that Louisville may receive significant (at least by Louisville standards) snow this evening we have opted to postpone this event. Details on the new date for the event will be posted here as soon as possible.

On Tuesday January 27, 2009 Social Media Club Louisville presents a unique opportunity for the Louisville nonprofit community. The Social Media Bootcamp for Nonprofits will cover the basics of social media including the tools and technologies needed to participate, best practices for getting organizations active in the social media space and address some of the unique benefits and challenges nonprofits have in social media from fundraising to increasing organizational awareness.

Speakers will include leaders in the social media space from the Louisville area whose experience includes individual, small- to medium-sized business and big-brand success with social web programming and strategy.

Social Media Bootcamp for Non-Profits
Tuesday January 27, 2009
8:30AM-10:30AM

The fee for the Social Media Bootcamp for Nonprofits is $50 per person and space is limited.

Registration for this event is now closed.

Webster University (Google Map)
1031 Zorn Avenue
#200
Louisville, KY 40207

On Tuesday November 18, 2008 the cold was braved and much social media technology was learned at Social Media Club Louisville’s monthly meeting. Social Media Club Louisville president Jason Falls and Vice President Michelle Jones (um, that would be me) pulled back the curtain and discussed the social media tools they use and love.

Skip to list of links

The first rule of fight club Social Media Club is never go on after Jason Falls. He wowed the crowd with live demonstrations of Ustream and ooVoo, including a live video chat with Phillip Robertson who works for ooVoo. It was a perfect example of how quick, easy and functional video chat can be. Speaking of Ustream, this link may suck all the productivity out of your day, but it’s so worth it: Shiba Inu Puppy Cam.

Next we discussed the third party Twitter client that turns out to be both my favorite and Jason’s favorite: Tweetdeck.  We both appreciate the flexibility that Tweetdeck gives us in terms of saving searches, separating people we’re following into groups and having our entire streams, replies and direct messages all on one screen.

As Jason noted I run several blogs, including Consuming Louisville, so I briefly spoke about some of the tools I use every day: Movable Type, Mint, Google Analytics, Tweetdeck and Google Reader. First up was Movable Type, my content management system of choice. The ease with which you can maintain multiple blogs, security and having a company backing up the product and providing technical support were the main reasons why Movable Type meets my needs so well. Movable Type is not the easiest blogging software to get up and running with though. So I mentioned both Wordpress and Blogger as free blogging alternatives that get you up and running really quickly.

Mint and Google Analytics are the website statitstics packages that I consider to be a great 1-2 punch for tracking both how many people are coming to various blogs and where they’re coming from. Mint gives instant feedback which is really valuable when testing the effectiveness of linkbaiting and promotional efforts. So I use Mint to look at quick stats including day to day and hour to hour comparisons. I use Analytics to look at larger time periods and to go a little bit deeper into statistical info.

I quickly threw some more love to Tweetdeck and then brought up Google Reader. Google Reader became the jumping off point for a discussion of RSS feeds at large which led to Google Alerts, Twitter Search and other listening mechanisms.

A few other technologies were briefly discussed Tuesday evening like Presently, a private twitter client,  Ping.fm, social bookmarking tool Delicious, photo sharing site Flickr and lots of good questions from the audience were presented and answered.

Feedback after the event was very positive. Everyone seemed to have a very good time and picked up some good knowledge about specific social media tools.

Are you a fan of Twitter? A Friendfeed power user? A Flickr diva? A blogger extraordinaire? Are you a new media using, technology savvy woman? If you said yes then the honor of your presence is requested at Let Them Tweet Cake! 

Inspired by Let’s Tweetup, Louisville Geek Dinner and similar meetups Let Them Tweet Cake! is a social gathering for women with interests in social media, blogging, social networking and other online technologies and all manner of geekiness. We want to get together to talk about our shared interests, learn about new technologies from each other, develop new friendships and social connections and just generally have a good time. And oh yeah, eat cake.

While many meetups are held in pubs or restaurants Let Them Tweet Cake has a decidedly sweeter location: Sweet Surrender.  Not only has Sweet Surrender graciously agreed to host our meetup they have also agreed to have half slices of cake available for purchase during Let Them Tweet Cake. Half slices of cake are better for my hips and also better for my wallet. Thank you Sweet Surrender.

What: Let Them Tweet Cake!, a meetup of new media using, technology savvy women in Louisville
When: Thursday October 16, 2008, 6:30PM-8:30PM
Where: Sweet Surrender
1804 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, KY

Please RSVP to info@consuminglouisville.com (preferably with “Let Them Tweet Cake” as the subject) by Tuesday October 14, 2008 so we can have a loose estimate of how many women to expect. If you decide to come at the last minute or forget to RSVP please come anyway, we want to see you there!

Thanks so much to everyone who came out for our first ever Social Media Breakfast yesterday. 80 folks joined Jason Falls, Brendan Jackson, Nick Huhn, Aaron Marshall and myself at the Jefferson Club for a Social Media 101 presentation on Social Media for Business. We defined and discussed what social media is, mechanisms, tools and the hows and whys of implementing social media into existing business and marketing strategies. We also touched on companies that are doing social media well and seeing dividends. I thought the presentation went well and I was really pleased by some of the great questions during the QA session.

I know this is going to sound maybe a bit too earnest but it really makes me happy and excited to see so many folks  from the Louisville buisness community up so early on a Thursday morning to talk about social media. It inspires me to be even more passionate in my own business as well as even more dedicated to Social Media Club.

Thanks very much to all who attended, all who asked questions  and who have participated in Social Media Club Louisville events.