Raritan Avenue last fall, near PJ's Coffee where BNCJ meets
On Tuesday I attended my first meeting of a local networking group, BNCJ. I found the other attendees friendly and informative, and I look forward to joining the organization. There was a lawyer, a home inspector, a contractor, a travel agent, a financial services representative and an stock broker. And me, the web designer! Or web builder, as I sometimes call it. Design is only a small part.
At one point I mentioned Twitter, and some of other people had never heard of it. “Twitter? Is that like Facebook?” Actually, it’s much easier to use, I responded. Instead of connecting with people you already know, it’s easy to meet new people. I cautioned them not to use Twitter for direct sales (you will get unfollowed fast if you are too pushy). The people I follow want to have intelligent discussions on a variety of topics.
Yesterday I posed the following question on Twitter:
"Question: can local biz (ex. contractor, plumber, doc, even hair dresser) use Twitter to grow biz? Thoughts?"
Shimon responded: “answer (IMO): yes if they have tips and promotions (like make up tips for women or computer coupons). Women oriented should b better”
liajen (aka Jennifer Fong) responded: “I believe it can. You just build your targeted niche through local searches (such as with twellow) & build relationships.”
What do you think? How can a local business use Twitter?
Sky Watch Friday is a photo meme with photos of sunrises, sunsets, blue skies, gray skies, pink skies, dark skies and any other kind of sky posted by bloggers all over the planet.
Raritan Avenue at Sunset on Feb. 24
My daughter points at the sunset
She was happy to be included with the sunset. Personally, I think she’s more interesting to look at than my sky photos, which all seem to look alike. To me. Sky Watch is great to do with your kids.
For many years this was the Corner Confectionery. Then that little ice cream shop/candy store on South Third Avenue closed its doors, and a FOR LEASE sign haunted the windows for several months. About a month ago the sign disappeared. I wonder what it will be?
I have been telling the librarians at the library about Twitter. If you put in a little effort at first, you can later use Twitter to increase contacts and resources in whatever area interests you.
Step One: Sign up and pick a username. You are going to need to stick with the name you pick, so pick carefully. It can just be your first or last name with an initial, or you can choose an alias like this one: jedilibrarian. If/when you are ready to represent your library on Twitter, you can use a username that reflects your library. You should also get an identifying user pic (I use my little froggy), because you might stand out a bit more if you have a good picture. You can poke around on Twitter to see what others are using to get some ideas. It doesn’t have to be a photograph of yourself; just something that looks good tiny. You can change the user pic easily later, if you like.
Step Two: Find some people to follow. I’m going to make this easy for you.
Step Three: You can find others twittering about any topic by keyword by using search.twitter.com. You don’t have to follow someone to read their tweets (unless they have them protected). You can also learn about hashtags.
Step Four: Write some Tweets. Tweets need to be 140 characters or less. It takes getting used to, but you can learn to shorten “you” to “u”, for example. If you want to Tweet a URL, just paste it into your tweet. Try to fill up your tweet with key words. Let’s say you are writing about teen films. You may want to use the words ‘animation’ or ‘movie’ or ‘film software’ or any other descriptive words. Hash tags can be useful, too; you can find lists of hash tags (key words with a # in front, such as #books or #library) on the hash tag site.
Step Five: Get others to follow you. You can’t force anyone to follow you. But if you provide Tweets with valuable information (valuable is relative, we all have different ideas about what’s valuable!), others might find you and decide to follow you. You will probably also find that if you follow others, they might follow you back. No guarantees.
Step Six: Reply to someone. Did someone Tweet something of interest? You can reply publicly by typing an @ sign in front of their username and then write your Tweet. Like this:
@leoraw Thank you for your post on how to get started with Twitter.
Note my regular readers: if you see ideas that were repeated from old posts, thank you for being such an avid reader! I’m planning to write a series of How To Use Twitter type posts, and I hope to gear them toward different audiences.
Enjoy this film about time travel “In Between Times” written and directed by my middle son. Michelle Reasso, the fabulous teen librarian at the Highland Park Public Library, put this up last night (and she will be putting up the other films that were part of the Library’s teen film festival, too). Michelle has a major role in the movie as Miss Puffin the librarian. The main character is played by two different teenage girls, because the first one had midterms and couldn’t continue to show up on Sunday afternoons.
I am greatly enjoying the work I do for the Highland Park Public Library, especially the page for 2009 Teen Film Festival. I must admit some bias in this project; I have a talented filmmaking son whose film will be one of those screened on Sunday, February 8 at 2 pm. I understand he has some cameo roles in some of the other films. A beaming mom!
I consulted with my local tree expert, and she thinks these trees outside my office window are American Sycamores. There seem to be quite a few in Highland Park.
I was attracted to them because of the round seed balls.
The above is a photo of the seed ball, before we got white snow now gracing Highland Park.
The trunks have this distinct peeling bark. This particular tree is on Abbott Street.
