Ohme, Oh My!

I have been asked to speak to the 2009 Leadership Pendleton Class as a part of the “Past, Present, and Future Module”. I will be one of the two people to speak on the future. I consider this a big honor and I am really looking forward to tomorrow night March 16, 2009 at Historic Woodburn Plantation.

2 Handouts:
-My Business Card with my Pendleton Squidoo links as well as my FaceBook and Twitter Identifications. I had ordered these from Zazzle.
-I am printing out the results from the Cluster Map on my Pendleton Old Photos Lens to show the number of single hits and the country that it came from. I will also have the link to my Pendleton Directory on this paper.

Visual Aide:
-I am printing out the Pendleton Happenings Lens which will be several pages and taping it to a paper roll that can be scrolled up. I will tie with a ribbon and then open it and show how you navigate through a lens by scrolling.

Hello, My name is Nancy Hellams aka Ohme aka Sarge aka D— Nancy and I am a SAPP. A Self Appointed Pendleton Promoter. I was so honored when Jean asked me to speak to this class. I asked her to send me a list of the class members and could not believe it when I saw the names. This is a very impressive class and I hope that all of you have gotten as much out of Leadership Pendleton as my husband and I did in 2005.

No matter what field you are in, we all have to be concerned about how to most effectively communicate with our customers or our volunteers, or constituents, tourists, teachers, students, or fellow workers. The way we communicate has and is changing drastically. The image of my dad sitting at the Breakfast table reading the morning paper while watching the Today’s Show is an image that is already hard for this generation to conjure up. Communication is being text, emailed, faxed, Face Booked, Twittered, Blogged, and even Squidooed. If you are not familiar with all of these terms I hope to give you a better understanding. If you are already on Face Book and Twitter and already have a Blog, you still might learn something new.

I recently read an article entitled “Employers Should Encourage Use Of Facebook and Twitter” written by Kat Baker for Personnel Today. I followed the link to this article from Twitter and found it very interesting. She states that a lot of companies are now using these sites to help them learn about each other and share knowledge, ideas, and promote discussion. Bill Murphy, managing director at BT Business, said many employers were “missing out” on the opportunity to help employees communicate in an easy and cost-effective manner. These technologies are FREE so it is FREE advertising, FREE promotion, FREE EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION and can be very empowering, educational, and exciting. Many of our schools and public libraries are denying access to these sites because they seem to think there is something wrong with Social Networking. If you are not already on Facebook and Twitter, I strongly urge you to consider it.

I am not an entrepreneur and am not even a Granny Geek, I am still very new at all of this but I am here to tell you that I am impressed. I read all the time about businesses whose customers have increased after promoting on Twitter and Facebook. Politicians are beginning to use these new technologies more and more as a way to communicate their concerns and plans. Professionals from all over the world are sharing ideas. I presently have 5 Blogs, 27 Squidoo Lenses, 2 Internet Shops and am involved in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, and Delicious. These technologies are here to stay and will continue to grow. It is going to be important to adhere to a Balance in order to preserve our speaking and social skills. If we aren’t careful we will have a whole generation suffering from Carpal Tunnel, Strained Eyes, and Fat Butts from spending too much time on the computer. So with keeping “Balance” in mind, I feel that this is something that each of us needs to be involved in to help our local businesses, our schools, our children, our leaders, and ourselves.

Let’s talk about these terms:
(I went onto the Squidoo Forum to get some help with these descriptions so would like to take this opportunity in this blog to thank Adez7, TribalDancer, rms, Celeste_Stewart, Spirtuality, Joan4, and Michey for their responses and help with this section)

According to Wikipedia:
A website (or “web site”) is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are hosted on one web server, usually accessible via the Internet. You have to pay for your website.

A web page is a document, typically written in (X)HTML, that is almost always accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the web server to display in the user’s web browser.

These are terms used most commonly for the Traditional Website like the ones done by Lynne Parker of Pendleton Graphic Designs. Lynne is much smarter than I am because to build a Website you have to know HTML and CSS coding and lots of other real technical stuff that I don’t have much knowledge about at all.

Now FaceBook and Twitter, for example, are each a Website with tons of web pages or accounts.
From Wikipedia:

Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

It took me awhile to really get into Facebook. I joined and then did not come back to it for a couple of months. My first two friends on FaceBook were both Baptist Preachers. One was my cousin in Louisianna and the other was Courtney Krueger from First Baptist Church of Pendleton. My friendship list has grown to 745 friends. Over half of these friends are from the Pendleton area and are young people. I wanted to try to get them interested in our Friends of the Park organization and many of them had young children who were involved in activities at the Park. Why in the world would these young folks want this old grandma as their friend. Well, I asked them to be my friend and they accepted and I think it is because they are genuinely interested in Pendleton and noticed that I was posting information about Happenings, History and Places in Pendleton. I also have renewed some old friendships from college and other places I have lived and worked.

Wikipedia says:

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

I could not get into Twitter for the longest time and kept telling my sister that I just didn’t get it. Now I actually prefer Twitter over FaceBook because I have been exposed to so much information from well known Affiliate Marketers, Politicians, and Business People. I am presently following 1,043 people and have 696 following me.I got a grade of 98.3/100 on Twitter grader. How do you Tweet? You just type in a short sentence as 140 characters doesn’t go far and usually add a link to your blog, website, or lens. It is really quite amazing. I recently ordered some free “Shop Local” stickers from Discover SC after following their Tweet.

Anderson Chamber of Commerce is having a Social Media Workshop on Wednesday, April 1, 2009 (8:30 AM TO 10:30 AM). Cost:
$25.00 for Anderson Area Chamber Members & $35.00 for Non-Members

A Blog is usually shorter than a Squidoo lens and is usually dated. Blog Posts are more like Diary entries and people publish blogs to promote their websites or Squidoo lenses as well as another forum to write about things they are passionate about.

Wikipedia describes a Blog as:

A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

Now for the fun part – Squidoo. I have really enjoyed being a part of the Squidoo Community. My sister got me started when she made a lens about Pendleton and started getting comments from local people. I knew then that it was the perfect forum for me to promote Pendleton. Pendleton has become my niche and I now have a directory of all my Pendleton Lenses Pendleton Goes Squidoo

Wikipedia describes Squidoo as:

Squidoo is a community website based in Irvington, N.Y. that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Lenses are interactive, and can contain Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Squidoo is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world, and in the top 250 most viewed in the United States.[1] It has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity.

I describe a lens is a scroll down web page belonging to the website of Squidoo. There are now over 900,000 lenses on Squidoo. I am going to demonstrate how to navigate through a lens with my paper scroll and I hope this clears up some of the confusion.

Following the demonstration, I will make this closing comment.

On your handout you will see the number of visitors to my Pendleton Old Photos lens and what country they are from. I think these cluster maps are so interesting especially this one. It is a small world, Indeed and I am proud to be living in this little speck of the world called Pendleton.

Thank you for having me tonight. I sure enjoyed being here and look forward to seeing you at your Graduation Dinner on the Village Green!