I’ve been hanging around the blogosphere and twittersphere for years.  Almost too many to mention.  Ok – at least 5.5 yrs because I remember writing a blog post about my first pre-natal Dr’s appointment when I was pregnant with Sierra back in November 2004.  See – here’s that post.  Over the past 5 yrs that I’ve been blogging I have become very friendly with a great number of people that I have never physically met.  I call them my bloggy friends.  I chat with my friends on Skype, Twitter and through our blogs almost daily.  I really really want to meet my friends – in person, but we’ve never really had the money for me to go visit my friends – there’s always a more important bill to pay. 

This year a great number of my friends are going to the BlogHer Conference (yes – a blogging conference, can you believe that I have NEVER been to a blog conference?).  The conference even has a 5k Fun Run that I’m putting together a learn-to-run forum and clinic to help other bloggers train for this run.  I really really want to meet my friends in person, and meet the people that I’ve helped train for this event. In particular I really want to attend this seminar: “Fitness Blogging: Motivate yourself and Your Readers“.  But, I can’t afford to buy a ticket to go.  Hubby has enough air miles for me to get to NYC, but we don’t have enough cash to pay for my conference ticket.  But wait!  There’s a contest!

I want to go to this conference and meet my bloggy friends so badly that I’m entering a contest to go.  Moomette, who has a product reviews and giveaways blog can’t go due to other commitments, so she’s giving away her conference pass!!  Moomette – please pick me so I can meet my friends, run the 5K and cheer on the gals I’ve helped train for this run!  Thanks!

Mom On The Run - Sharing Health and Fitness Tips Because Life is a Marathon... Not a Track Meet

0 Comments | Digg! this story.

I don’t pay attention to blog stats and analytics, if I did I probably would write more to get more comments and visits etc… So tonight I randomly decided to check my Google Page Rank – ok so it wasn’t entirely random… There’s a contest I wanted to enter and you need to have a PR of 2 or higher to enter). I was surprised when it showed me this:

Mom On The Run - Sharing Health and Fitness Tips Because Life is a Marathon... Not a Track Meet

0 Comments | Digg! this story.

Recently my employer issued a questionnaire to all employees asking for suggestions on how we can incorporate Social Media within our projects and operations. (I’m ecstatic that I work for such a forward thinking organization, as my last employer viewed Social media as the devil). Being very active in Social Media during my somewhat “free” time, I had quite a number of suggestions.

I work in Government (have I mentioned that before?), so we are accountable to the rate payers that we serve – all of our social interactions must be professional. One of the first things I noticed was that our web site that “broadcasts” news does not produce an RSS feed. WTF? In my opinion an RSS feed is a given if you want people to return to your website, not optional,. I’m not sure what the figures are, but I suspect that quite a few of our younger rate payers have set up an RSS reader account somewhere, be it Google Reader, Newsgator or what have you, or a Facebook account or a Twitter account, so why the hell do we not have an RSS feed?

My basic suggestion to my employer is to set up an RSS feed and provide visitors with ways to subscribe to our news. Once we have an RSS feed a whole new world of opportunity can open up to us to share our news and thus increasing our reach such as: feeding to a twitter account to broadcast news, feeding to a Facebook account, MySpace, LinkedIN etc… We could also use the RSS feed to push out a weekly newsletter to subscribers… The options are really endless.

All of this got me to thinking – Maybe I should ask my readers for suggestions:

How does your company use social media with their web presence? What else could a government agency do with Social Media? How can we use Social Media to better serve our rate payers? Yanno – besides using my blog for ideas on how to use social media I’d love to hear your suggestions (and I’m sure my employer would too).

0 Comments | Digg! this story.