All I Do is Win

All I do is win, win, win no matter what…

No, not really. But...

I did win tickets to see Fun. tape their show at Austin City Limits Live last September, thanks to KLRN and their Facebook post. It was fun and awesome and amazing!

That's how close we were to the stage!

I won cookies from Cookie Cab  about a week ago on Facebook. I still need to order them!  I know, I know, who can resist ordering fresh cookies that will get delivered to your door?  Somehow I have.

And my latest prize?  A fun gift basket from Evite thanks to the fun of retweeting. It’s full of cute owl goodies that are supposed to be for a kids playdate.  But I don’t have kiddoes. I am however planning a baby shower for a friend that is having a little girl.  Owls are smart and most of the owls on the printed materials have bows, so I think it’s kismet.

The basket itself is awesome too!

How cute is everything!

In the mean time I’m gonna keep following, sharing, retweeting and hashtagging.  I’m still convinced the Eursance people went to the wrong house with the $1.5 million they gave away after the Super Bowl.

You can't win if you don't retweet, share, like, follow, hashtag, etc...

What have you been lucky enough to win using social media?

In the meantime try to get this song out of your head.  

Please note: None of the entities from which I won anything asked me to blog about it.  That would have been insanely flattering. I just wanted to give a shout out to all of the organizations in one place. 

Aha! Moment- RAISE Your Facebook Influence

I don't have them often. Aha! moments. It's really quite rare.

Today while working on a social media recommendation for a client I had one.

That rare moment when you wonder why your genius doesn't shine through all the time. Not that this is Einstein level genius. But no-duh genius.

There are a million and one ways to recommend people work on increasing their influence on Facebook. I just came up with an acronym to make it easier.  This was an organic process that actually evolved into what you will see below. Brand new and and thought up by yours truly.

If you want to RAISE^TM your brand's influence on Facebook you can start by doing the following:

Reply- to posts and recommendations from fans and other brands, at least like them!
Ask (for engagement)- On Facebook it's one of the few places where it's acceptable to Ask people to like something you do or comment on something you posted.
Inform- use your posts to Inform fans about topics related to your page, or anything that you think they'll like!
Share- make sure to share posts by other brands and tag them so they see you doing it. It should relate to what you do and never conflict with your goals- both online and offline.
Entertain- people are more likely to like something you post if it is Entertains them. A comic, or a funny cat video. Whatever makes someone giggle is more to get shared with their friends too.

There you go. Five seemingly easy steps to RAISE^TM your influence on Facebook. You can book me (Ariana Barbour) for speaking engagements. I'm actually quite entertaining despite the recent barrenness of my blog.

Hoot Who?

It was cute.  Last night I was using hootsuite while watching the State of the Union address (#sotu for those tweeters out there).  Justin looked at my screen and was like what the heck is that...
This is what he saw (this is only columns 1 through 4, it took up my whole screen and has a horizontal scroll)

And I explained to him:
"Column 1 has feeds I follow.
Column 2 is the stream for #sotu (the keyword/hashtag so I can see what everyone says about it).
Column 3 has tweets that mention me.
Column 4 has direct messages to me.
Column 5 (which you can't see here) has tweets I've sent out. 

I really only have to pay attention to columns 1, 2 and 3 right now. "

He just looked at me and said, " I'm glad I don't have to worry about that."

Like anything else you get used to it.  Just like the new Facebook profile and the yearly update to the iPod line up.  Technology waits for no (wo)man.