Social Media Sizing Cheat Sheet

Anytime I can find a cheat sheet for just about anything online, I'm all in. It's already hard to update everything and keep up with everyone else... I don't have time to manipulate a background for twitter 58 times. 

Here's a handy little cheat sheet for sizing your social media photos and such. Who would've though getting that profile picture the right size would make such a difference!?

Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and Twitter... It's all here!

Also, you're welcome.

Interest In Pinterest

Pinterest has grown like few social networks have... Believe it or not, it's replacing search engines in some aspects.

How do you use Pinterest? Do you see it lasting or falling like MySpace and so many others?

Browse more Social Media infographics.

Social Media Cheat Sheet

Social media is changing so fast that it's really hard to keep up- Here's a great little cheat sheet that can hopefully get you a leg up on the most popular way to communicate!

#KBTribeChat - Why Your Business MUST Go Social

We talked about social media the last time that I was asked to host #KBTribeChat on twitter. This time around it's social media from a whole new angle. Get ready for the tough questions... Is social media marketing? How to I incorporate the traditional marketing with social media? Do I need help?

You'll not want to miss this chat! Need more details? Jump on over to the #KBTribeChat site and get the info. We'll see you there, Wednesday at 1pm CST!

by Wix.

What's Really Scary About Social Media

First of all, thanks to all of you that follow us on twitter and other social media outlets... If you aren't following us, you need to get with the program.

Keeping up with the Jones' is something that will always be around in social media. I love this info about what is scary about social media.

Are you scared? Ha!

Click to Enlarge
Via Shoutlet

The Internet!

Via: MedicalBillingAndCoding.org

Small Business + Social Media Use

Obviously, our small business uses social media. After all, you're reading this blog and may have come here from Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Google+ or another of our social media accounts.

Social media has been good to Cupboards. If you aren't taking advantage of the resources available to small businesses in social media(face to face or virtually), you're missing out.

Time to get on board! 

KBIS Wrap-Up and Nick in a TUB!

When I started planning my trip to the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Las Vegas a couple of months ago, I knew that this would by a different experience than any other KBIS I'd ever attended. 

Boy, was I right.

Between Twitter, this blog, knowing some kitchen industry hotshots and my delightful Southern charm(ha!), I saw more friends at KBIS than I ever would have imagined.

Pictured(from left): Susan Serra, Corey Klassen, Pam Rodriguez, Kelly Morriseau, Sarah Lloyd, Arne Salvesen and myself.

Not everyone was around to have their picture taken, and had I taken pictures of everyone I wouldn't have any pictures from the show! 

It was worth the trip just to sit and talk with some of the most fierce kitchen and bath folks in the industry. Through social media, we've created a force that the industry recognizes. Maybe they see it as a resource, maybe as a threat... either way, it's improved the experience at trade shows. The kitchen and bath world has taken notice, and it's rockin' awesome to be a part of it!

I could probably go through a zillion people that I met and spent time with, but a few more than the pictured folks need a shout-out: Sarah Reep, Mark Johnson, Jeremy Parcells, Jamie Goldberg, Dean Larkin, Becky Shankle, Brandon Smith, Laurie Burke, Serena Spell, the entire gang from Brizo(Judd, Jai, Christiana, Stephanie, Brian, on and on), Mike Tadros and gang from Igloo Studios/Google SketchUp, and I could go on and on... If I missed you(which I know I missed a lot), I'm sorry.

Without having these fine folks around, do you think this picture would have ever made it to public viewing?

via Arne Salvesen

KBIS was tons of fun this year... Even though I slept WAY less than I intended, the trek across country and lack of rest was all worth it. The show may have been the smallest I've ever seen, but there's nothing like walking through the aisles and having folks yell at you just to say hello. 

Thanks again to all of you that made my KBIS such a blast! 

*Additional thanks to all of those folks who knew I was a bit of a nervous wreck on Wednesday during the show- everyone knows the horrid outbreak of tornadoes that Alabama endured while I was helplessly watching from Las Vegas. I was blessed to have all the family safe and sound- so many of you have reached out and words cannot express how grateful I am for your friendship and concern.

Blogging Matters, Doesn't It? #LetsBlogOff

Certainly blogs are important if your name is Huffington or Perez Hilton, but what about those of us who don't write about Justin Bieber and the latest Republican to have some dirty laundry set out on the clothesline?

The Cupboards blog began as a bit of an experiment and a bit of strategy. Few local kitchen and bath shops have a consistently updated stream of aimless stuff carefully thought out information that shows a current online presence and really, that's what the mission was from the get go. The past couple of months with a fairly good increase in traffic, the mission hasn't really changed but the new wrinkle of staying interesting has emerged.

Not everything on the Cupboards blog is relevant to the kitchen and bath industry. Because our business is a very personal one, lots of the personality of the real people that work here comes out. Is that a bad thing? Does it make us look less than professional?

Part of what has made the Cupboards process work is that we are real people that want to help our customers achieve the end result of the project at hand. That always takes a personal touch. Potential customers can look at our blog, our twitter, come by our shop and they'll see the same thing. Real, live people who do real life things.

Measuring the success of our blog is a different monster. Everyone measures success in a different way and fortunately, the good folks at Technorati did the research for me-

Technorati

So... you Hobby Bloggers just revel in your blog, eh? I tried to figure out where Cupboards fit in- we'll say "all". I don't blog as my full-time job(so part-time), it is a business blog and technically since Cupboards is our venture it's kind of a self-employment, too. 

Looking over Cupboards blog statistics for the past couple months I have decided to measure success based on one metric that probably falls under "Business Leads" or "Other". My measure of success is how much traffic we get based on people that are either looking for us specifically, or end up on a page because of a specific topic search. If people use a search engine and find us that is a win for me. Fortunately, the statistical software that I use shows what's being searched for and on what search engine.

Are we making the grade? Who's to decide, really? Each month traffic gets better and more people say, "Oh, I saw **** on your site!" Win.

Technorati

Love this one. See that "I am better known in my industry" category? I'll gladly take a seat there, though the one right above it is a bit tempting, too.

So to wrap up the ramble, bloggers to me have a bit of a narcissistic streak about them. Most love their own blog and probably view it higher than most others do. Other's are truly there to share expertise and some just clog up the stream with chatter. Blogs are one cog in the ever-changing social media world and blogging is the social media long-hand. We're just glad to play along!

Click on this tag and then go read other bloggers take a shot at this topic.

#LetsBlogOff - Plugged In or Shut Out?

toon via 

The latest in the #letsblogoff series- 

Do social sites like Facebook connect the world or isolate people?

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Since you already have Facebook open on another of your tabs, look me up. 

Wait a minute, you can't. Why? Not on Facebook. So I'm seriously in the minority considering that 500 million people are active users(and according to Facebook, 50% of that are online at least once a day).

Do I have any right commenting on Facebook then, as an obvious hold-out? Sure I do. That's my right as the Head Typist on this blog and most know that I have a comment on just about everything. I'm not going to get in to why I don't have Facebook, other than to say that it has absolutely no appeal to me personally. When I deleted my Myspace page a couple years ago, my personal online social life ended.

bookface

Until of course, Twitter came along. (Follow me HERE)

Everyone uses social media for something different from the next user. The marvels of Twitter and linking it with Cupboards has been somewhat a whirlwind of social successes. When I step back and look at the last 16 months(our active Twitter life), I recognize that without it my daily life would be different. There are pros and cons to everything we do in life, and my visual nature wants me to write down a list(so I did). My list has lots of pros(not going to go in to all of them):

• Social media has allowed me to meet fellow designers and industry professionals from around the world that I may have met otherwise but would rarely have the opportunity to seriously engage in a meaningful exchange

Think about it... In each industry you have trade shows and conventions and the like. What's the average interaction like in that environment? Shake hands, exchange niceties and business cards, try to keep from standing in the middle of the aisle and disrupting the flow of scurrying convention-goers. Sheesh. Those same meetings now go something like this: Connect on Twitter, talk/email/chat on phone about things you might/might not share with strangers(for weeks/months/years), plan to meet at convention but text each other at the airport and embrace like long lost cousins. (You think it's crazy... well maybe it is crazy, but its reality nowadays)

Are the people that I have connected with on social media my friends? I certainly think so, and if someone close by tweeted me and invited me to the ice cream parlor or coffee shop for a visit, I doubt it'd be a hesitation. 

• Social media has reinvented customer service policies. 

The next time you're on Twitter, do some fun searches... like "customer service fail" or "bad service" and marvel at what comes up. If you haven't, you'll be shocked at how honest(fairly or otherwise) that people are. Businesses have to do better or risk the barrage of not just negative comments, but nasty ones. Gone are the days of quietly mentioning to the manager that there was a fly in your soup.

There are only a few cons that I could come up with as far as my social media use goes... I get less time to look at ebay, the world knows I eat WAY too much ice cream and until the rest of rural South businesses catch up I am occasionally told that I'm just "wasting time."

The cons aren't so bad... I spend less money when I'm not on ebay, I like ice cream and I've rarely given a whole lot of credence to negative people.

toon via

The big question is whether or not the social media in my life inhibits my personal life and interaction. I can confidently say that it has done the polar opposite. We have a small business in a small town. As much as I would love to say that Cupboards has the same amount of foot traffic as Wal-Mart, it doesn't. There are some days that I just don't see a whole lot of people, and after having your head stuck in a series of folders for a few hours it's nice to be able to take a few minutes and laugh at a blog post or chat with a friend on Twitter(or Facebook, if that's your deal).

Am I interested in every time someone has a snack or runs to the bathroom? No, and I try to leave those same details out of the Cupboards twitter stream. The balance between a business social media presence and a personal one is a careful dance though, and I believe that without some personal touches even the biggest most corporate social media accounts get stale. Therefore, my tweeps(twitter followers) occasionally get the dose of football-cheering, motorcycle-riding, sunrise-enjoying, dog-walking, recipe-sharing personal stuff that I do on a daily basis.

Exactly 6% of the people in my cell-phone contacts list are folks I follow on Twitter. If social media inhibits personal interaction, it isn't showing up in the numbers.

Maybe I'm the exception, but without social media my daily interaction with people would take a major hit- not because I ignore those around me in real life, there just aren't that many people around. Social media has been really good to Cupboards, and me personally. It'd be sad to give it up.

Now... I'm gonna go tweet this so my friends can read it!