Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

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Believe and Win $25!

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

This giveaway is now over.  The winner is Jessica!  Congrats!

This holiday season, Macy’s BELIEVE campaign builds on the great success of last year’s holiday effort to support the Make-A-Wish Foundation®.  Due to my cousin having taken part in the Make-A-Wish Foundation (she had a wish granted), I personally am a huge supporter of it.  This year,  Macy’s is adding to the spirit of “Believe” with a national Santa Tour, an honorary National Believe Day, a “Yes, Virginia” animated special, and a new TV commercial featuring Queen Latifah.  If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the commercial:

On Friday, December 11th, Macy’s will celebrate the first National Believe Day to recognize and reward acts of kindness and generosity from coast to coast. Also that day, CBS will premiere a new original animated special called, “Yes, Virginia.”  at 8 p.m. ET.

How can you win a $25 gift card?  I want to know what acts of kindness you are participating in this holiday season.  Let me know if it’s something you are doing now or something you plan on doing (like serving Christmas dinner for homeless).

Each of these gives you one additional entry:

1. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify. Or use something like this:

Win $25 gift card from @blm03 and Macy’s!   Enter here:  http://mythoughtsideasandramblings.com/2009/12/06/believe-and-win-25/

2. Stumble this post and add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc. (1 entry for each social network).

Each of these gives you 5 additional entries:

1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.

2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.

3. Comment on another post on this blog. Let me know which one, so I can give you credit.

4. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed

5. Add blm03 to any of your lists on Twitter.

6. Add my badge to your sidebar:

If this isn’t working, please let me know. For some reason, Wordpress seems to be eating the code up when I post.

This contest will end at December 16th at noon CST! Good Luck!

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/2

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Posted in contests | 363 Comments »

Sick and Sicker

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I didn’t drop off the face of the earth.  I swear.  Instead, everyone in my house has decided to get sick including me.  Seriously.  I started with Will and his nasty cough that was keeping him up all night.  He still has the nasty cough a week later, but it’s not keeping him up.  Then we had me and my runny nose/sore throat.  Mine is off and on and more annoying than anything else.  Lastly, we have Madison.  Oh my Madison.  If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know what happened.  She threw up.  Now, if you read my blog regularly, you’ll know what happens when Madison throws up.  We end up in the hospital.  That’s been our life when this happens.  However, remember, we met with her geneticist, and we had a game plan.  Guess what?  The game plan worked!  We kept her hydrated with the special concoction we had to make for her.  She already has went back to school and no hospital visit!  Now, we have to manage to not get the flu again.  To make up for my blogging delay, here’s a picture of Bill and I on Halloween:

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Ringling Brothers Circus Giveaway!

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

This giveaway is now over. Dawn is the winner. Congrats!

ringling250I recently posted about our awesome trip to Disney On Ice.  I now have another great event that we are going to and I’d love to have a local blogger (or non blogger for that matter) join us!  My kids have never been to the circus, so we are so excited that we get to go this year!  After seeing their reaction to Disney On Ice, I know that they are going to love it.  They love animals — I’m just worried about how many souvenirs we’ll end up walking out with!  :)

Now, I have 4 tickets for one family to attend the Ringling Brothers Circus here in Chicago.  The winner will have the option of choosing to attend one of the following opening-night shows:

November 5th @ 7pm in Rosement at the All-State Arena
November 18th @ 7pm in Chicago at the United Center

Exciting, right?  Here’s what you need to do:

Leave a comment on this post. I’d want to know which show you want to attend and why.

Each of these gives you one additional entry:

1. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify. Or use something like this:

Win 4 Ringling Brothers Circus tickets from @blm03! Enter here: http://mythoughtsideasandramblings.com/2009/10/17/ringling-brothers-circus-giveaway/

2. Stumble this post and add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc. (1 entry for each social network).

Each of these gives you 5 additional entries:

1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.

2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.

3.  Comment on another post on this blog.  Let me know which one, so I can give you credit.

4. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed

5. Add my badge to your sidebar:

If this isn’t working, please let me know. For some reason, Wordpress seems to be eating the code up when I post.

Each of these will give you 10 additional entries:

1. Join my Spark E Crew at Social Spark. Click here to find out how to sign up. If you are on my crew, please leave your social spark ID, so I can verify it.

This contest will end at October 28th at noon CST! Good Luck!! Now, if you don’t want to wait, look for the box marked “MC Promotion” when purchasing your tickets and you can use these codes to get some great offers:

* Offer #1: Get 4 tickets for just $44 by entering the code “MOM” at select ticketing channels. Offer good on all weekday performances, which includes all weekday evening and Friday matinee performances; minimum purchase of 4 tickets required; additional tickets above 4 can be purchased at $11 each.

* Offer #2: All weekend performance tickets will be $4 off the original price.

* Offer #3: Get the best Circus Celebrity, Front Row and VIP seats available – We have reserved seats in these sections just for you! Enter the code MOM. No discounts available on these sections.

The above offers are good in the following cities:

* Denver: September 30 – October 11, 2009
* Boston: October 14-18, 2009
* St. Louis: October 15-18, 2009
* Cleveland: October 21-26, 2009
* Rosemont/Chicago: November 5 – 29, 2009 *available for purchase on Sept. 8. 2009
* Auburn Hills: November 18-22, 2009
* Charlotte: January 27-31, 2010 *available for purchase on Sept. 12, 2009
* Atlanta: February 12-21, 2010 *available for purchase on Sept. 12, 2009
* Cincinnati: March 10-14, 2010 *available for purchase on Sept. 21, 2009
* Dayton: April 29 – May 2, 2010 *available for purchase on Sept. 21, 2009

Hope to see you there!

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Izeafest ‘09 Day 1

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I’ve been trying to get this post up for a while, but real life seems to get in the way.  How would I describe Izeafest?  Awesome comes to mind.  The best one yet does too (and I’ve been to every single one of these).  It was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended.  Nothing irritates me more when I know more than the speakers on panels (which is one of my beefs about BlogHer).  I pay a lot of money to go to conferences, and I want to learn — not just be told what I already know (or be given bad information). *off soap box*

Izeafest started off with a trip to Busch Gardens for Howl-O-Scream.  Interesting is the best word I can use for it.  We got to go through some haunted houses and ride some awesome roller coasters.  I even got to do my souvenir shopping (which is so much better than airport shopping).  We got back pretty late and went to bed.

Day one of Izeafest started off with me handing out Crocs and T-shirts and helping out the Izea crew.  I missed the beginning of Ted’s keynote speech, but what I caught was good.  It was about personal branding, and how you need to carefully pick your image. Next, there was 5 minutes of fame with Murray Newlands.  This was about how he has gotten where he is.  I’ll be honest — I could listen to him talk all day long (I’m a sucker for an accent.  Also, on a sidenote, I got to hang out with Murray quite a bit and he’s one of the nicest people I’ve met).  Brian Clark was our next speaker.  His talk was about how design and content really do matter.  Next, we had lunch.  I have to admit that this was some of the best conference food too.  Granted you don’t pick a conference based on what they serve for food, but the food was yummy.  The afternoon started with Sarah Austin and Julia Roy for a session called Screen Gems.  If you watched Twitter during this session, it was brutal.  I basically got out of this session that you need to be 23, have perky boobs, and be cute  if you want to do video.  It was so bad that I actually walked out early and got a cookie.  The sad thing is that I’ve heard how smart these two women are, and they just did a terrible  job (Though I think Julia did see the twitter stream, because she started to try and answer things towards the end).  I actually dubbed this session “2 girls and a video” and sadly everyone knew which session I was referring to.  Next, another 5 minutes of fame with Xshot which is a product I love.  The next session was on SEO and I loved it. Michael Gray and Rae Hoffman were the speakers, and they took sites from the audience to dissect. I was a chicken. There was no way I was submitting my site. Rae gave us ladies a good show of how a woman can give a great presentation. My only complaint is that they did a ton of business sites and no personal blogs. As a mom blogger, am I even shooting for SEO? Sarah Evans was next with Twitter and businesses, and why they need to be on Twitter. We closed out the first day with Lucretia Pruitt, David Binkowski, Chris Heuer, Wendy Piersall, and Warren Whitlock. This, by far, was one of the best panels I’ve ever seen. I could have listened to them all day. They really brought everything down to where most bloggers are right now and gave us some concrete ways to get better.

After the first day, we were able to all meet up at the IceBar and hang. It was very cool. Pun intended. LOL

Some karaoke took place too (no, I didn’t do it).  This is Ted Murphy and Jeremy Wright singing the Backstreet Boys.  The sad thing is that they knew most of the words without watching the screen:

We closed out the night in my friend Heather’s room with a little afterparty:

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The Muddy Fractured Web

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

This is a sponsored guest post written by Chris Brogan on behalf of Trust Agents. Post powered by Sponzai

mud This is a jumble of techie thoughts, and won’t necessarily appeal to everyone. Just the same, it’s on my mind.

I was thinking about an old article that quoted Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, where he talked about how he organized his site to have obvious syntax. He said, that once you get the hang of it, it became very easy to use the site, even from a browser window. Example: If I want to read any pages saved with the tag “chrisbrogan”, I can search http://delicious.com/tag/chrisbrogan . Now, replace my name with whatever else you want to search up on the address bar of your browser, and you pretty much know how to surf through Delicious without any effort.

For the record, Craigslist.org is like this. I can navigate it simply and from the address bar, and I understand what I’m searching out.

The entire concept of the URL, the uniform resource LOCATOR, was that we’d have a way to find resources (or web pages, or files, or whatever information) by way of coordinates that wouldn’t change.

Twitter introduced the need for URL shortening services. They were around before, but Twitter made them necessary. Now, they’re practically a business unto themselves.

And I’m thinking about projects like Glue and now Sidewiki (Google’s little “stick a wiki against any website but only if you’re using this application to see it” project). They’ve obfuscated the clarity of web pages. Okay, I get the notion of annotating the web. I understand the premise behind having ways to see things in our own way out in the wild web, but I think it messes up the point.

People had some real mixed emotions about Seth Godin’s Brands in Public project, but I couldn’t see the fuss. Seth just organized a bunch of information that was out there, and gave brands the opportunity to buy into his effort. The brands could’ve done all the work themselves. Seth saved them a step. The project, however, doesn’t create two webs. It just revisits this information in another format.

The splintering of commentary and conversations problem (how services like FriendFeed and Twitter and Facebook scatter our conversations all over the web instead of consolidating them) is real, and yet, it’s a matter of views. We’re interacting with data where we consume it, which is sensible enough. The missing tech, actually, is just the ability to get those comments all corralled and easy to respond to in some way (and many companies are trying to make that easier).

So where does this take us?

First, I think abstraction is here to stay. I don’t think we’ll have simple URLs to remember for all things (wish it were, but it’s not). I think the trend of shorteners that supposedly add value is here for a while, too. I think the fractured conversation is here to stay.

Now, will this impact business? Not exactly. Instead, it will require us to pick our battles, to determine just how splintered and muddy we want to get to catch up every drop of conversational/business goodness, and it will require us to keep futurists and sages on speed dial (how quaint a term is that?).

Funny thing is: many will never even know this war is even being waged.

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