What a gorgeous day to take a ride to Ojai, CA. After the rains, the hills are a deeper green, the ocean a bluer blue, and the fresh snow on the Topa Topa mountains a whiter white. I’m on my way to three free, or almost free, Ojai Wordfest workshops.
This is day 4 of a 9 day Wordfest throughout various places in Ojai. Writers could begin their day at breakfast writes at 8:00 a.m, but my day begins at 11:00 a.m at the Ojai Roasting Co. Cafe for a “Coffee Shop Talk,” with Jodi Womack of NoMoreNylons.com. “Communicating in the Digital Age,” was her topic. Okay, so the over 40 crowd has to attend a discussion on this topic, we don’t absorb this stuff through osmosis like our kids. In attendance was an artist, non-profit, small business owners, and me (the fledging writer) who wants to be in the know.
After a discussion of the various social networking sites (FB, Twitter, Linkedin, and four more) Ms. Womack talked about ‘customer relationship management.’ What’s that you say, come again? It’s a business term, and in digital media there is an app for that, of course, why wouldn’t there be? Hootsuite.com is a social media dashboard, which updates multiple networks in one step, including FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress and Ping. It helps organizations use the social web to launch marketing, identify and grow audiences, and connect across multiple channels. Why would we do that? If you have three social network sites that you post to, you write your post and click once to distribute to all three, or five, or seven.
The use of YouTube and it’s place in communicating in the digital age (I’d suggest that even stupid video’s are communication) was discussed. Authors, poets could use and are using YouTube to reach out and draw in listeners and potential purchasers. How well this works I don’t know, but it’s there to utilize.
So now it’s onto the next talk, “Simple Steps to Successful Authorship,” at the Ojai Library where I’m writing this blog. I’ll post on that tomorrow, maybe tonight if I don’t have too much wine at the 6:30 p.m. talk (at a wine tasting room, $5 for wine tasting and hor d’oeuvres) titled ” Working with the Media: Getting Free Publicity for your Writing.”
I promise that my free publicity will not involve drinking.
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