April 2013: Special Topics Call Rebecca Coleman

Transcription

1 April 2013: Special Topics Call Rebecca Coleman Hello, everyone. This is Alyson Stanfield with Welcome to our April 2013 special topic call for our Silver members of the Art Biz Incubator. Our guest today is Rebecca Coleman. Hello, Rebecca. Hello, Alyson. You are joining us from where? Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We have some Canadians in our midst. That s good. I don t know if they are on the call or not, but they are definitely in our Silver program. Let me just go ahead and introduce you properly. Rebecca has been a freelance theater publicist since She is very passionate about helping small businesses, artists and nonprofits to become better marketers, and she often consults with them, creating social media marketing plans. An early adopter of social media, she has become increasingly interested in using it as a marketing tool and writes about the subject frequently on her blog, The Art of the Business. Rebecca has written several books, instructs courses at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and travels internationally giving workshops. In addition to her info-packed site at Rebecca writes a personal foodie blog, I am just giggling because mine would be CookingByiPad.com. I know. I actually use my ipad probably more in the kitchen these days than I use my laptop. It started with my laptop, but since I ve had my ipad, I use it pretty much all of the time. 1

2 I think we understand. I ask guests here who are knowledgeable in a variety of areas, and I ask them what they are most excited about because that is what I want to talk with them about. When I asked you what aspect of social media you are most excited about these days, you said Instagram. Is that still true? Like most people who are in social media, I suffer from the It s shiny disease. I say, Oh, look at this new thing. I do sadly suffer from that disease a little bit, but I do really love Instagram for a bunch of reasons. Do you want to tell us why you are excited about it, or will that come out? I don t really know what else to say other than the fact that it is really beautiful and there are a lot of lovely images. I think when you are a creative and artistic person, you are inspired so much by the world around you. You are inspired by beauty around you. Sometimes I just like to sit down with my iphone and just scroll through my feed and look at all of the really beautiful pictures. On a soul-satisfying level, I just find that in and of itself it is almost enough for me. Having said that, as artists, it can also be a really great marketing tool as well. Let s back up a minute because there are probably plenty of people who don t have an iphone to scroll through Instagram so have never done that. What is Instagram? At its very essence, Instagram is essentially a photo app that you can get. It works on iphones and on Android. You just go into your app store and do a search for Instagram and download the app. It is a free application, so you don t have to pay for it. You have two options. You can boot up the Instagram app and then a camera opens up and you can actually take a photo using that, or you can go onto your camera role that you already have on your phone and import photos into Instagram from photos that you have taken in the past. What you do next is what makes Instagram different than all of the other different camera apps out there. There are a lot more camera apps out there now that do this, but Instagram was kind of the first one. It allows you to put what is called filters over the top of your image. If you happen to be on your computer and you want to go to you will see my Instagram feed. What you will notice is that most of the pictures that I take have a sepia tone to them or they are manipulated in some way to make the image a bit more beautiful or interesting to look at. 2

3 You can apply these different filters to your image, and then when you like what you see, you can upload it and it goes out to anybody that follows you on Instagram. They get to see your picture. You can write a little blurb about what you are doing, use hashtags and that kind of thing as well. I just opened your site on Instagram. I have never been to Instagram online. It is a new thing. I think they just started on the web in October of last year. Up until then you could only look at it on your mobile phone, but now you can actually see stuff on the web. That s cool. There definitely is a look to a photo that has been instagrammed. You can recognize it, although there are other apps out there. I have another one that I really like. There are other reasons to use Instagram. You have explained to us how it is used technically, so how do we use it as a social network? What is the one that you really love, Alyson? I love Camera Awesome. That is my favorite Camera app, but I can send my Camera Awesome photos to Instagram. That s cool. There are so many of them out there. I haven t even heard of that one. I have about 10 of them on my phone, but that one I don t even know about. I found it a couple of years ago through a The New York Times article, and it has tons of filters. I have since bought them all because I ended up loving them and I wanted to give them more money. It does a little more than Instagram does, unless I am just not using Instagram correctly, but Instagram is super-easy to use. That s right. I think it is very simple. Basically, you take a picture and you apply a filter. You can do a tilt shift, which is something like in the olden days before there were DSLR cameras and we just had regular SLR cameras. Do you remember how you used to be able to buy a clear filter to go over your lens and you could smear Vaseline around the outside of it to give it a blurry look? That is what tilt shift does. You can do that on Instagram. Other than that, that is basically all the options that you have with Instagram. You are right in that there are other camera apps out there that probably will take a better picture. The reason I love Instagram is because of the community on there. I just feel like the community on Instagram is really beautiful and there is so much common love in the community. There are so many wonderful professional photographers that have accounts on there that are posting their pictures on there, and I really appreciate that a lot. 3

4 How does it work? How do people get connected on Instagram? Is it like other sites where you just tell people to follow you? I m sorry. You don t ever tell people to follow you. You ask people to follow you. Exactly. You say, If you would like to follow me, I am on and then they know to search for Rebecca Coleman on Instagram and find me. There are a couple of things that you can do. When you first open your account on Instagram, one thing you can do is hook it up to your Facebook, Twitter or temporarily just so that they can go in there and search through your addresses and see who you already know is also using Instagram. Once you have that information, you can go through and follow those people. That is always a really great place to start because it is like a warm lead as opposed to making a cold call. These are people that you already know and you say, Oh, they have an account on Instagram. That s cool. I ll follow them. A few months ago, our local daily newspaper here in Vancouver put out a list of the top 25 people in Vancouver that you should be following on Instagram. They are local photographers who take really beautiful pictures, so I went through and followed all of them. It depends on what you are into. Obviously there are a lot of celebrities on there, so if you are the kind of person who likes to follow celebrities, you can follow them. It is really up to you as to how you build your following in that way. The basic thing is really similar to other social networks. You build a presence there with your images, you get followers, you comment on other people s pictures, and you are connected with other people that way. Exactly. It is really the same as any other social network except that the language of this particular social network is photographs as opposed to words, music or videos. Can you comment on the photographs? Yes. You can comment, and you can also mention people. For example, if I took a photograph of you, in the comment I could and then your username. Then you would be able to see that. It would show up in your notifications that I had tagged you in a photograph. I was laughing because I don t know what my Instagram name is. You just have an account and it goes to that. That is funny. 4

5 I m going to find out what it is. Really simply put, of all the social networks, the one that it is most like is Twitter because you can use mentions and hashtags, and a lot of the same rules of Twitter apply very similarly to Instagram. That is good to know because that will help give us context if we are not used to using IM. I don t know if this is the place for it, but Facebook just bought Instagram, right? Yes. They bought them for $1 billion about a year ago in April. From what I have read, and you may know more about this than I do or not at all, this is a big deal for your Facebook feed. If you use Instagram, you will get higher rankings for using Instagram since Facebook owns them now. I don t know if it is specifically Instagram as much as it is just photos in general. EdgeRank is how Facebook controls what you see and what you don t see in your main Facebook stream. What we know is that one way to get around Facebook s EdgeRank is that images tend to get seen more than a plain status text update. If you go to your Facebook and write, Today I am on a conference call, and post that as a plain text status, that won t get as many views as if you posted an image. When you post an image, it gets a lot more views than a plain text status update. I m not sure if it is Instagram specifically or if it is just images in general. Maybe this is because I am cynical, but I have to believe that since Facebook owns Instagram, if you send something from Instagram to Facebook, you will get a higher ranking than if I send it from Camera Awesome to Facebook. That is entirely possible. This is my cynical thought process. Maybe I read it somewhere, so I am blaming it on someone else. You say it is most like Twitter. How does it compare to Pinterest? They are both visual. They both upload pictures. That s right. Pinterest is primarily about other people s images whereas Instagram is primarily about your own images. You won t see a lot of people uploading photos to Pinterest. The whole purpose of Pinterest is to give people a visual element. 5

6 Whenever you write a blog post, for example, it is really important to make sure that you include an image in your blog post. The reason is because that image becomes the key for Pinterest. The only thing you can pin to Pinterest is images, so when I write a blog post and there is an image in there, if somebody wants to save my blog post to Pinterest, what they are going to do is save the image that is in there. Then when somebody clicks the image, it will follow through and take them back to my website. Pinterest is about gathering images, but it is about gathering images that already exist on the web. Instagram is more about taking pictures of something and then uploading them into your Instagram feed. Just for the sake of our audience, there will be plenty of artists that do upload photos to Pinterest, but I think the difference is that you take the photos instantly in Instagram and upload them. They don t necessarily exist before you do that. Exactly. If I was a painter, I would absolutely put my paintings on Pinterest, but I would have those paintings on my website first and then pin them from my website onto Pinterest so that people can follow the breadcrumb trail back to my website. Ideally you want them to be able to click on something and come back to a place where they can look at more of your art, sign up for you enewsletter or maybe buy something. Absolutely. There are just some people that don t have that in place yet. Because they are both so visual, I wanted to be sure to cover that. I have a teleseminar coming up about Pinterest. They are very different and they are used differently, so it is important to know, but you can still follow people. Can you have albums on Instagram? No. It is all just one straight-up feed. Again, it is similar in that way to Twitter. It is all organized by dates. The most recent photo will be the one at the top, and then it works its way down. That is good to know. Are you going to give us some ideas for using it as a marketing tool? Sure. There are a couple of ways that I like to use Instagram as a marketing tool. How I use Instagram personally is that I use it to document a day in the life. 6

7 I work with artists all the time and I hear this from people all the time. They say, But I don t have anything to say. I have my life. I get up in the morning. I get my kids off to school. I go for a jog, I go to the studio and then I paint for a couple of hours. Then I come home and maybe I ll do some paperwork. That s not exciting. That s just my life, and nobody cares. The truth is that people who are not artistic are actually quite fascinated by people who are artistic because people who are not artistic will say, Oh my god. What is your life like? I get up in the morning, get the kids off to school and go to my office and crunch numbers. To them, what we do is very fascinating and foreign. I think people are actually quite interested by what our process is. The other piece to this for me is that the work that we do is very subjective. For example, if I look at a photograph that someone has taken and it costs $500, I might look at it and say, Are you kidding me? Five hundred bucks for that? I could take that picture on my iphone. It s because what the average Joe doesn t see are the four years you spent in art school, the tens of thousands of dollars you have invested into photographic equipment and the thousands and thousands of photos that you had to take before you got that one photo and then all of the hours that you in Photoshop or Lightroom making that photo look how it looks. They don t see the process that you go through. All they see is the finished product. One thing we can do as artists to help sell ourselves is to educate the people that are our fans and followers as to what it is that we do. We can do that by sharing with them our process. If you are creating a painting, it could take you hundreds of hours to create that painting. One way to share that process is to document as you are going along. At a certain point, document the painting, take a picture of it and share that with people, and then document it again a couple of days later or whenever that is. Just by doing that, it can really help people to understand that this stuff doesn t just pop out of our brains fully formed. It is a process. Ask yourself things like what inspired you to make that painting? If I purchased a painting from someone and I had the back story of where that painting came from and what inspired it, it makes that painting even more special and personal to me. Think about things like that. For artists, I use the term a day in the life. What kinds of things happen to you in your everyday routine that are interesting? It could be painting, going to the art 7

8 store to buy new paints or brushes, a certain location where you were inspired to create a piece or a really beautiful sunset. I think as artists, we naturally go through the world with our eyes open looking for beauty and sources of inspiration, and Instagram can be a really great way of capturing those moments, saving them and then sharing them with our audience for later. That makes sense. Some artists are used to using their blogs to show that kind of process. I like the way that you expanded it. It is not just showing the work in progress, but it is showing the things that you do. The work doesn t just happen. You have to go to the art supply store, do the research, find the subject matter, and mix the paints or grind the pigments. You may be teaching yourself a new skill. I have a friend who is a photographer, and he is doing a lot of experimenting recently, all of which he is documenting online. He is doing a lot of experiments where he will take a piece of photographic paper, treat it with something and then put it out in the sun awhile, and then all of these cool patterns start happening. I don t even know exactly what it is that he is doing, but he is experimenting. They are called photograms or sun prints. Yes. That is what he is doing. It is all really fascinating stuff. I know nothing about this, but he is documenting it all and putting it all up online. It is really interesting. Not only that and not only the process of making the art, but it s the process of having a business as an artist. People don t know that you go to tax classes, you learn how to do this, and you have a new credit card processing way. People don t think about those things, that your business doesn t run magically and that you are being a professional in every way. All of that can be documented by photos. That s totally right. I just ordered a Square, so I am super-excited. I can t wait until my Square gets here. I will probably take a picture of it and Instagram it. It is that kind of stuff for sure. I think most of the people on the line know what it is, but for those of you who don t know, a Square is a credit card processor, and it is awesome. I just ordered a backup one because I heard people saying that they were going kaput, so now I have two. We just got them in Canada recently, so I was super-excited to hear that we can get them now. 8

9 They are really sweet. Are we ready to move on? I think so. Where do you want to go next? There are a couple of things we were going to talk about. Obviously it is useful for you if you are a photographer and if you are a painter. I know that there are a lot of people out there that worry about people stealing their work. One thing that is really great about Instagram is that it is really high security, so it is actually quite difficult to download photos from Instagram. The only way you can get a photo off of Instagram is by taking a screenshot of it, and we all know what that looks like. A lot of people are really worried about that. They say, Is somebody going to steal my work? The truth of the matter is that it is really difficult to steal people s photos off of Instagram. You can certainly share them and re-tweet them with no problem, but you can t actually download the photo. It is impossible to do that. That is something that a lot of people are quite nervous about, but that is really great about Instagram. That is interesting. I know that most of our members, because they learned from me, aren t that concerned about that because they like to share their work and they have better things to think about but there still are legitimate concerns there, and it is good to know about this site. I have a friend who is a photographer and he has an amazing Flickr feed. I asked him once, Are you ever worried that people are stealing your work on Flickr? He said, Yes, it happens. People steal my work on Flickr, but I have gotten so much work from that Flickr feed. Having the presence on social media by far makes up for him in terms of the amount of work that he gets compared to the tiny amount of whatever is going on there that is negative. I think that it is really important. I want to say this for all of the members who are listening. When you approach your work out of fear and you keep it to yourself and are too protective of it, you are not going to experience the abundance that is available when you are giving. I don t mean that people can steal your art whenever they want to, but I just mean the whole mindset of sharing your work with the world is very different from thinking, I ve got to protect my work all of the time. 9

10 You have to police this. I have asked two people recently to take down blog posts that were direct copies of my blog posts without attribution, so you just ask. Neither one of those people were very apologetic. You ask and you follow through and be diligent, specifically because art is such a gift to the world. For you to hold that gift so tightly to you is very different. With Instagram, we re not talking about your fine art here. We are talking about your day-in-the-life pictures. Exactly, although there are a lot of professional photographers on there that will take professional photos on their DSLR camera and then import them into Instagram so that people can see those. That is really nice. I need to go check out Instagram. Do you want to talk about connecting Instagram to your other social media sites? Yes. It is sharing. One of the things that Instagram allows you to do when you have your account is when you take your photo, go through the filter and do all of that artistic stuff, then you will get to a screen that will allow you to write a little blurb about your photo. Yesterday I was chained at my computer all day and it was a beautiful day here. I said, I have to get out of the house, so I left my computer and ran to my Starbucks just around the corner. I live in a beautiful part of Vancouver that is right by the water, and it was just so beautiful and sunny. I sat down on the steps for a few minutes with my coffee and I took a picture and posted it to Instagram. I said something like, This is what my coffee break looks like today. Look what a beautiful day it is, or something like that. You can write a little blurb, and then when you hit the Send button, it goes into the Instagram feed and out to all of the people that are following you on Instagram. You have the option to then push that photo to Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Flickr or an if you like. I just want to say a couple of things about that. When I take a photo on Instagram, most of the time I do push it to Twitter right away for a couple of different reasons. One is that Twitter is so immediate and in the moment that if I am doing this thing like a day in the life, I will often just send that thing straight to Twitter because it s what I m doing right now. I m having a coffee break. The weather is really beautiful. Look. It s that kind of thing. I don t send it to my Facebook that often. For me, I think best practices say that you should probably post to your Facebook about once or at the very most a couple of times a day. If you have a Facebook page or even a personal 10

11 Facebook account, even on my personal Facebook account I try to only post there once or maybe twice a day. I just feel that posting any more than that will start to burn people out and they re going to say, Really? Again? so I don t post my photos to Facebook that often. I don t think I have this on my Facebook page, but one thing you can do is install an app on your Facebook page that would stream through all of your Instagram photos, not publishing them to your Facebook page, but it s just an app that when people click on it they can look and see all of your Instagram photos on there. It would be one of those boxes that appear at the top or when you click on More. Yes. You can just select which ones you want. The other reason why I don t think you should always post them to Facebook every time is because Instagram works like Twitter in that it and it uses hashtags. Hashtags are really great on Instagram. Sometimes when you are looking at people s photos on Instagram, you will see a huge, long string of hashtags and that really helps that person to connect with their audience properly. It is because hashtags are about searching, so it really helps that person. As you know, on Facebook hashtags are useless. They are annoying. They are talking about integrating them in, but they haven t yet done it. They are looking at how to integrate hashtags into Facebook, but they haven t yet made that happen. That is the other thing. If I post a photo to Instagram and push it to my Twitter right away, then if I want to post that to my Facebook, after I have published it I will go back in and just click on the Share button and send it to Facebook but just scrub out all of the hashtags on there. There are a lot of people that are on Facebook that have no idea how to use Twitter and what the hell all of those hashtags signs and all that stuff are for. It looks weird in Facebook if you don t know what that is, and you can t explain it because you can only have 140 characters or less. I agree. I think they are separate totally. From a professional point of view if you are running a business page on Facebook for your artwork, which you should be, then I feel like there is a certain level of professionalism that comes along with that business page. 11

12 Don t get me wrong. I love HootSuite. I m a big fan, but if you are just using HootSuite to post and then auto post from your Facebook to your Twitter or using HootSuite to post from Twitter to Facebook, it doesn t make you look professional. It doesn t make you look like you are really trying and doing the best possible job that you can. Yes, it is a little tiny bit more work to go back in and repost that thing to Facebook, but I really think it is worth it. I think that as long as we take the time to use these free tools, we need to use them correctly or they won t be effective for us. Definitely. It s funny that this is coming up today because I had a conversation with a client the other day. He literally just wants me to set him up on HootSuite so that he can auto post everything. I am honestly thinking about saying, I don t want to work with you, because it is so against my values and my philosophy. Do you know what I mean? Yes. That brings us to the last thing I wanted to talk about, which isn t exactly related to Instagram but I saw it on your blog. It is about auto posting versus scheduling. Can you tell us the difference between those two? Sure. I use scheduling all of the time, but I am really against auto posting. Let s say you write a blog post. I do this all of the time. I often will write my blog posts several days in advance. I probably write about four blog posts a week for various blogs that I have, so I will usually sit down on the weekends and write out a couple of posts and put them in the bank or save them. Then I can schedule them to go out on the days when I publish blog posts. On my business blog, I publish posts on Tuesday and Thursdays. I can literally sit down and write those posts on Saturday or Sunday, have them all ready to go and then schedule them to go out on Tuesday at 10:00 or on Thursday or whenever it is that I want them to go out. That is scheduling. I do a very similar thing with HootSuite where every morning I get up and go through my feeds. I go through my Facebook, my RSS feeds, my and whatever, and I usually try to get at least five different articles that I think are really interesting. Then I schedule those to go out on HootSuite at various times during the day. I would schedule them to go out at different times. For those people who don t use HootSuite, you are talking about Twitter and tweeting, right? Yes, exactly. That is exactly what I m using it for. I am scheduling tweets so that I don t have to be there for those tweets to go out. These are not tweets that are personal in any way. They are just me sharing information that I found useful. 12

13 I do this often on your blog, Alyson. I will read an interesting post on your blog and I ll say, Oh, that s really cool. What I will do is schedule that to go out at some point during the day, and I will sort of space those out during the day. With HootSuite, they actually have a thing where you can automatically schedule it to go out for you during the day. That is scheduling. Auto posting you can do from Twitter to Facebook or from Facebook to Twitter. Auto posting is when you write one status update and you hit a button and it automatically pushes it to Twitter and to Facebook at the same time. That is auto posting as opposed to scheduling. Scheduling is great. Scheduling can be really helpful. For example, this morning I was teaching a workshop between 10:00 and 11:00. I wrote a blog post this morning and I scheduled that blog post to tweet at 10:20 or something. I was literally in the middle of teaching a group of people how to use Twitter and I tweeted, although I didn t really tweet because I was doing something else at the time, but I had scheduled it to come out at that time because I didn t want that tweet to go out at 8:00 in the morning when I wrote the blog post because that is not an optimal time for people to get the most amount of eyeballs. Scheduling can be really useful and great. I do some auto scheduling from my page but not from my personal profile to Twitter, but not from Twitter to Facebook. Again, the complicated thing is that on Twitter there are hashtags and on Facebook there are That s why I don t do the Twitter to Facebook. I just do the reverse. It has also made me very cognizant how I start my Facebook post updates because it only shows 140 characters, so I have to make sure that it s in there. I ve been experimenting with that recently. The other thing is that now you can actually schedule Facebook posts as well, so you can actually go into Facebook and schedule things for tomorrow, the next day or next week. I love that feature. You can only do that on your page though and not on your personal profile. I love it. I use it a lot. I love it too. 13

14 It seem like you think of things in groups and you don t want to post all of that at once, so it is nice to be able to update. It s really nice, especially if you are traveling. Yes, it s great. Is there anything else before we get to the questions? The one last thing about scheduling is that you just have to be a bit aware of what is going on. There was a story that happened last year. Did you hear about this? I have heard of so many things happening with that. You do have to be careful, and that s why when I schedule a thing to go out, I only schedule things that are not personal but that are just blog posts or articles that I am sharing. Last year in Toronto there was a Radiohead concert and it was outdoors in the summer. Whoever was running their Twitter feed scheduled a bunch of posts to come out right around the time the concert was starting. They scheduled tweets to come out that were like, Tweet us pictures of you guys having fun at the concert and hashtag it with whatever. There was a horrible accident before the concert started, the stage collapsed and somebody died. These tweets were coming out after this horrible thing had happened and somebody literally died. All these tweets were coming out saying, Take pictures of yourself at the concert having a good time and hashtag it. That s why you have to be super-careful with that kind of stuff. Be on top of it. If you are going to do that, have someone on the buttons. When the Boston Marathon thing happened a couple of weeks ago, I had a whole series of things scheduled to go out that day, and I actually pulled all of them. Honestly, it was just sort of a respect thing. I didn t want there to be all of this extra noise going on on Twitter at a time when Twitter was being used as a communication tool. I didn t need for people to be seeing my tweets that were coming out about such-and-such a blog post. There were other things going on in the world that were way more important that needed that kind of attention than my stuff, so I pulled all my stuff that day. I just took them all off. 14

15 That is a really good thing to remember. This is what HootSuite is so good for. You can see all of your pending tweets and edit them. You can do this on Facebook too if you preschedule your posts as well. Let s open up the line. If you have a question for Rebecca, and I hope that you do, we have about 14 minutes left. I ll bet Rebecca will take questions about any kind of social media. I am speaking for her. Does anyone have a question? I can talk about how to run a contest on Instagram if that is something you would be interested in learning about. Yes, why don t you talk about that? One thing that people are using Instagram for as a business is to run contests. What you do is choose a hashtag for your contest. I would say write a blog post or something and say, We re running an Instagram contest and here s how it works. Really simply, you ask people to take photos of something along a theme. I used this idea last year. One of my clients here in Vancouver is a very large tradeshow called The Wellness Show, and it runs once a year. There are 300 exhibitors, and it is anything to do with wellness, such as chiropractors and people who are selling health supplements and all of that kind of stuff. We ran an Instagram contest and the hashtag we chose was My Wellness. We had people take pictures of things that they felt thematically represented My Wellness. If I were to participate, maybe I would take a picture of my morning smoothie. I have a smoothie every day and I have certain things that I put in my smoothie, so what I would do is take a picture of my smoothie, upload it to Instagram, and hashtag it with My Wellness. As the person who was running the contest, I went to Instagram and I just did a search for the hashtag My Wellness, and all of the images came up for the people who entered the contest, and then we chose a winner from those. I think just chose a random one. We didn t choose one the basis of merit or whatever. Then we gave that person the prize. You pulled a number out of a hat. Basically. I imagine there are rules for this on Instagram. Are there rules? 15

16 I think there are, but it is not nearly as fussy as Facebook. The rules for running contests on Facebook are so fussy that it s almost not worth running a contest on Facebook. It is much looser than that, for sure. I like that. In fact, I just thought of a contest I want to run. I know exactly what I want to do, so everyone stay tuned. That sounds like a lot of fun. We should have a contest for contests. Who can come up with a contest? I don t see that anyone else has a question so I think that we will let you go early, and we will just give everyone on the phone a big push to use these tools more effectively and explore them, especially since they are visual and you are visual. Lori: I just had a really quick thought here at the very end, and it was spurred by Rebecca talking about the contest. One of the things that I have been doing in my workshops that are really about using images to make an impact, and Instagram is really a perfect thing for that, is using a has tag and inviting your customers to send images in of your work. I am thinking especially about one of my potter clients who created a hashtag for homemade or something and had people send pictures of her pottery with their favorite recipes on it and that kind of thing. That s a really nice way of using a hashtag and building a little community around your art work in use. I love it. Starbucks did something similar to that. Do you know how at Christmas time they have red cups? They were encouraging people to take pictures of their favorite drinks. At Christmas time you think about eggnog lattes and those kinds of things. They were encouraging people to take pictures of their Starbucks coffee and hashtag it with Red Cup. There was a lot of that stuff going on around Christmas time. It s a great idea. Lori: That s super. Thank you, Lori. You re welcome. Rebecca, before you go, you have a book that might help us out. I do. I was just literally looking at it and updating it yesterday. It is called The Guide to Getting Started With Social Media for Artists and Art Organizations. Sorry, it s a mouthful. I couldn t have come up with something snappier. There is a whole section in there on Instagram, how to use it, best practices and all of those kinds of things. 16

17 I think the most important thing about my book is that at the very end it has a fillin-the-blank social media marketing plan. It essentially helps you to create a social media marketing plan for your art business with what tools you should use, how you are going to use those tools and what your goals are for those tools. Then there is a calendar as well. That is the other thing that I really encourage you to do. I think you have talked about this as well on your blog, Alyson. It is creating an editorial calendar. It makes it like a no-brainer for you where every day when you sit down at your computer you can say, What do I need to do today? On Facebook I have to do this. On Twitter I have to do this. On my blog I have to do this, and that kind of thing. I have one of those in there as well. That sounds awesome. That is an ebook, right? Yes. You can update it, and you did just update it. We know how fast social media changes. It s ridiculous. People can find out at correct? Yes. If you go to my website, on the top menu there is one that says Author, but also if you go down the side bar, there is a little thing that says Check out my ebooks. If you click on that it will take you right there. That s great. Be sure to visit Rebecca a Follow her on and on Twitter and Become a fan on Everything is linked from my website too. By the way, my website is primarily a blog, and on my blog I constantly share social media tips, much like you, Alyson. For example, today I wrote a blog post about this new notification system on Facebook that just started happening. I wrote about what that looks like and how to manage it. That s super. I don t write about that stuff very much because I just decided to let people like you who know better write about that stuff and then I can link to you. I love that. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for sharing. This has been really helpful. I hope that everyone listening is excited to try some of Rebecca s ideas. Rebecca, we will see you online. 17

18 Yes, you will. This is Alyson Stanfield with Art Biz Coach. Goodbye, everyone. 18