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So if you read Guy’s Blog Post (link below) you’ll get some valuable info on how to grow your following on Twitter, but if you step back and analyze HOW he has pulled this post together you’ll learn even more.  Don’t take my word for it - go read, then step back and analyze what he’s done here.  I learned more from seeing how cleverly he crafted this than I learned from the GREAT info he delivered, but then, I’m always reading between the lines. (Hey, that would make a great blog title, LOL)

How to Change the World: Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter

I know this is about Twitter and not Squidoo, but in order to promote our Squidoo lenses effectively, we really need to understand the tools of social media, and Twitter is one of the 4 most powerful I’ve observed so far.  So learn from Guy, and use what you learn to expose more eyes to your pages.  Hint: when you get to the part about the SMOREs … and the @-ing them … @ them with a lens link.  You never know how many of the SMORE’s followers will be watching.  If you REALLY want to know how effective this is, use a trackable URL.  Don’t know what that is?  Here’s a link to a blog post that explains it WAY better than I can: 

Twit tips - how to track twitter clicks

OK, now I’m off to implement some of the cool things I’ve learned today.  One last thing - don’t spend the whole day in front of your computer.  I know we’re all in a hurry to get to our next point of call, but remember that this is a journey and it’s good to enjoy the cruise.  Bon Voyage!

Yesterday Bob and I had the opportunity to drive down to a Farmer’s Market and meet one of our online buddies, known as Chef Keem on Twitter & Squidoo.  We had been conversing via Twitter and enjoying his sense of humor as evidenced by some of his amazingly funny Squidoo lenses like Fuzzy Bunny Slippers or Farting As An Art Form (not exactly what you expect, by the way).  He is a Giant Squid (like me) but has also made the Giant100 club, is a Squid Angel, won the Lensography contest last year … in other words, in the land of the Squidoo, he’s a celebrity. 

However, he’s also a businessman selling REAL PRODUCTS on the internet.  Chef Keem sells a flavored agave sweetener and some incredible chocolates, and I wanted to see what he does and how he does it, and I wanted to meet his lovely wife Karen.  Bob and I have begun selling his Heritage Heirloom Cutting Boards online through Etsy and on eBay, and we are going to be in the Old Pecan Street Festival this May.  Plus we own a concession wagon and a L’il Orbits donut maker, so we wanted to scope out this event to see if we had anything that might lend itself to our participation in the market.

Mostly, though, we just wanted to see if Chef Keem was as much fun in person as he is on his lenses and videos.  I can tell you now that he absolutely IS just as charming and easy to be with as you have imagined from seeing his work online.  I can also tell you that the agave is delicious and the chocolates are better than anything you can possibly imagine.

There was a humongous amount of wind at the market.  Many vendors didn’t bother to come, and those who were there had to take down portions of their tents because of it.  So the vending stations looked a bit “naked” as a result.  However, there were lots of delicious things to be had, and “had at it” we did.  I got some aracauna chicken eggs, some coffee, a surprise for a friend (can’t tell you about it yet - he might read my blog!), some brussels sprouts, some tomatoes (which were scrumptious in my salad!) and a rotisserie chicken. I’m forgetting something, but can’t think what it was.

It was an utterly delightful experience.  Of course we got some pictures.

Chef Keem & Bob at the Farmer’s Market Feb. 28, 2009

Bob brought a cutting board for Chef Keem. We really HOPED he would like it.  We chose one for him that I especially liked - it’s not quite as ornate as some, but it’s one that I felt would actually get used, which is what we intended.  Too often we hear “too pretty to use” and that sort of defeats the purpose.  I also liked this one a lot because the knots in the wood are unduplicatable by their very nature, making this cutting board as unique and unforgettable as Chef Keem and Karen.

Two of my favorite things: Chef Keem’s chocolates and my Crucianelli accordion!

Boys will be boys … even when they are past 60! Bob “salutes” behind Karen’s head.
Chef Keem encouraged him. 

Bob, Chef Keem, and Janelle the CCGAL - Feb. 2009

YUMMY!!!  AGA-SWEET ROCKS!!!

Two more of my favorites: Chef Keem’s Chocolates and my Daughter, Kim.
Dang, it was hard to share that candy!

I was surfing and came across this great article by the Copyblogger on how to create e-books that sell.  It’s a good read, and I recommend it highly. 

How to Create Ebooks That Sell — Copyblogger

The good part, and the stimulus for leaving this electronic trail of words, can be found way down the page in the comments section.  Scroll down and look for the name Jack Zavada.  This is only an excerpt:

An odd phenomenon about the Web is that “Internet Marketers” are writing ebooks about Internet marketing and selling them to each other. Or the rest of us are buying them and saying, “Hey! That’s just the opposite of the last Web marketing ebook I read.”

[...]

What I’m most interested in is getting knowledge, experience and wisdom from somebody else’s head into my head. ebooks are a very efficient way to do that, even if you can’t impress family and friends by ostentatiously displaying them on shelves. Well, you could, as printouts in gild-edged leather 3-ring binders. But that’s another post.

[...]

It’s the author’s name and content that flop, not the medium.

Well said!

Yesterday I saw an Oprah segment about heroin addiction.  A fellow got hurt on the job, was given pain killers, and ended up addicted to one that’s been in the news a lot, and turned to heroin because it’s cheaper than scoring illegal pain killers on the street.  OK, I followed his reasoning right up to that turning point - that moment in time when he decided that buying heroin and shooting up was the best possible alternative for his problem. 

Ultimately his wife started shooting up, followed by his two teenage sons after he had done dope in front of them, and they had a small baby - I didn’t get from the story if she’d done the dope while preggers or not - and they ended up on Oprah.  (Because because Maury was booked solid and Jerry Springer’s doing America’s Got Talent?)

Oprah asked them some pretty shallow questions, but that’s not what griped me as much as the idea that this heroin problem is somehow society’s fault because rehab isn’t free.  Never mind that this family was living in a homeless shelter, not having to pay for their own living expenses and managing to hustle (by their own admission, not my judgment) about $30K/year to pay for driving two hours a day to score their daily fixes, the show managed to pass on an unspoken idea that people aren’t responsible for their own actions and therefore it’s not their fault if they choose to shoot up heroin. 

Then last night I saw on a major news magazine a segment about “the poor children of Appalachia and their bad teeth due to poverty.”  So I’m thinking, oh, they don’t get enough calcium maybe, and perhaps they don’t get fluoride, or maybe they’re so poor they are living on beans and cornbread and are malnourished so that their teeth are not growing correctly.  These are all things that I would expect if the subjects are described as being
poverty stricken.

It turned out they all drink Mountain Dew soda pop, and that’s what’s rotting their teeth.  They even showed a clip of a parent putting soda into a baby bottle for a baby.  So they called it poverty instead of stupidity and blamed it on the soda pop and the company that makes it.

Hello?  If you can buy soda pop, are you REALLY poverty stricken?  

When I was living on a lot less with 2 small children to raise, I didn’t have money to buy soda pop, not even the cheap generic stuff.  I know what it takes to put real food on the table when you have hardly got 2 nickels to rub
together, so I’m not buying this “I’m poor but I can buy Mountain Dew” idea.

The problem isn’t with the children, and I am glad that they are getting free dental care, but in today’s world I find it hard to believe that anybody could look at that and slant it as poverty instead of poor parenting and manage to shift the blame to the soda pop company.  The unspoken idea that people don’t have to take personal responsibility for their parenting because it’s not their fault their kids’ teeth get rotten from drinking soda pop is
repugnant to me.

Have we as a nation really forgotten what critical thinking skills are?

Has Madison Avenue really taken over our minds so that our education is coming from commercials?

Say it isn’t so!

The latest pebble in my proverbial pond is that, thanks to Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms I guess, I can’t seem to get a complex sentence out of anybody in response to anything.  I’m bored with 140 character messages.  It’s like eating cotton candy - ephemeral and unsatisfying over time.  I want real conversation, not sound bytes with embedded subtle sales messages.

I hope I am not alone in this.

Any comments less than 140 characters will be returned to you for a rewrite.  I have a red pen and I know how to use it.  *wink*

It all started with an off-the-wall event being held in Boise and my normally rational husband getting a proverbial “wild hare” (wild hair?) and deciding we were going to attend (against my better judgement, I must add).  Who drives 2,000 miles in winter to an event that doesn’t jive with anything you believe or represent?  Only an idiot … or a person being driven by my Guardian Angels.

So drive we did, and if you have been following my blog, you know that it did NOT turn out well.  I refuse to give them any more free publicity, so those people shall remain nameless.  I will share with you, however, that the “Wake-Up” call delivered a powerful message to me, and caused me to see with extreme clarity of vision that I was on the verge of being seduced by the siren song of internet marketing.  Painful though it was, I am grateful to my angels that they got my attention, though I regret that I needed the kick in the teeth to learn that particular lesson.

The past 2 weeks have been rife with amazing situations and improbabilities that have left me dazed and somewhat bewildered as I look back and begin to catalog them, blessing by blessing.

Blessed In Dillon

This is from Doug Firebaugh, and is worth the read; man, I wish I could hear the recording! Check this out and learn from it, my friend.

Social Media Marketing- How to Become an “Expert” in Social Media in 24 Hours | SocialMediaBlogster.com

Funniest blog I’ve seen in ages - ya gotta go see!

This is why you’re fat.

This has got to be one of the best free tools out there, and one that I think EVERYBODY who forwards e-mail ought to be using.  You know those crappy forwarding carrots and bars that each forward adds on? Well, this handy little tool gets rid of most of them.  Super easy to use - instead of just hitting forward, you open a new e-mail - which I HOPE you are doing ANYWAY, because friends don’t forward friends’ e-mail addresses for the spambots to harvest - then use the stripper to remove the forwarding carrots et al and paste the clean copy into the new e-mail.  Use it - your e-mail forwards will then be cleaner and you’ll look so much cooler to your friends.  Here’s the link - bookmark it and use it - you’ll soon wonder why EVERYBODY doesn’t use it, then you can be the cool “in-the-know” friend who shares this resource.  Talk about a WIN_WIN_WIN situation!

Mr. Ed’s E-Mail Bracket Stripper v3.0

I love educational seminars the way some people love chocolate, so I was delighted that my schedule would allow me to attend one being held on Super Bowl Weekend.  Admission Price was touted as being the purchase of one CD on a subject with which I was already quite familiar, so we booked our room and started studying the lessons from the CD we purchased as our admission.  Oh, what a FUN experience this was intended to be.

The event had been advertised as starting at 9:45, and we had completed our registration by 9 am to allow those who had not pre-registered plenty of time and room to complete their process.

By 9:10, when the doors to the room had still not been opened, our registration having been completed, and having no reason to believe the doors would be opened prior to 9:45, hubby and I decided to go downstairs to partake of a quick breakfast at the buffet.  We sat in view of the registration desk so we would know when the doors were opened - it was a short walk up one flight of stairs which would take us less than five minutes, so we watched the small group of people who, lacking chairs and water, were milling around in overheated discomfort. When the doors opened at 9:30, we paid for our meal and proceeded to the conference room only to be told that they had locked the doors and we were not going to be allowed in.  It was only 9:35! Surely this must be a mistake, I thought, because the papers clearly stated 9:45 was the start time - who locks people out of a seminar 10 minutes ahead of time without any forewarning?

The door was then opened and we were “allowed” into the room, whereupon we discovered that filming of an introduction was in progress.  Out of professional courtesy and respect to the speaker and the person doing the filming, we stood quietly at the back of the room while scoping out where we could be seated when it was appropriate to move.

The organizer, who entered behind us with equipment that he had failed to set up prior to the scheduled start time, became enraged, however, and shouted to the room that we were “afraid to walk in front of the camera” and that we should “Get Out.”  His voice was loud and angry.  Heads turned. Mouths dropped open. I left.  (Would YOU have stayed?)

Now suspend for a moment the fact that he verbally abused me in front of a room full of my associates and colleages after pretending to be my friend, which is a personal matter, and think strictly business for a moment.  Ask yourself this question:  Was this Good Business Practice?  You decide.  Here’s what that one moment of non-professional behavior in a business setting has set into motion:

Will I ever buy anything endorsed by this person?  No.

Will I ever buy anything on which this person has placed a testimonial? No.

Will I ever buy anything from anybody who is associated with this person?  Probably not.

Will I remember how it felt to be treated with such disrespect? Oh, yes.

For how long?  For the rest of my life.

Will I tell my friends and fellow professionals? You better believe it.

So what’s the take away from this?

If you expect to be taken seriously as a professional in any occupation, follow Good Business Practices.  Show up on time.  Be clear about your expectations.  Do what you say you will do when you say you will do it.  Use common courtesy and kindness when interacting with others, whether in private or in public.

People may forget your words, but I promise you they will never forget how you made them feel.

First off, a disclaimer: I actually KNOW Twenty-twenty and his wife Carol.  I met them at the Unseminar4 back in November of ‘07, when we were “tossed into the soup” together in a make-shift mastermind exercise. 
Over the past year or so, I’ve come to deeply admire and respect both Carol and Twenty, and to cherish them as honest-to-god real friends.  I look forward each day to reading her Today’s Mantra.
,
OK, that said, Twenty has started up a new internet radio show - well, never to jump in only half-way, two of them.

Monday nights at 10 pm Eastern, he’s having the first ever Call In Master Mind.  Now I, myself, think this is going to be “THE BIG ONE” because it’s the one that’s going to be the most helpful to me and folks like me.  Think of it as “Master Mind On Demand” … you only use what you need without any guilt over not participating on a regular basis with the “same old, same old” people.  With this call-in format, Serendipty and Synchronicity are going to provide you with exactly what you need to hear from exactly whom you need to hear it from at precisely the perfect time for you to hear it.  This is the one I’m excited about - and it debuts TONIGHT!!!

One thing you may not know about Twenty-Twenty is that he and Philosopher William James both know that mental life is controlled by noticing.  You’ll notice nuances that can mean the difference between doing OK and doing REALLY GREAT when you begin to focus the way Twenty-Twenty can teach you.

Please join us on the call tonight - you will be making history and a good decision.  Hear you there!