Sunday, December 7, 2014

The Latest On Fast Solutions In Social Media



Establish a presence on Facebook, Twitter, blog, or any other sites that shape the world of social media, it costs nothing but time on the most basic level. This will include choosing the right social media platforms, deciding the investment required, and hiring the right people who can help implement these strategies. That's because these websites are perfect ways to meet new people and get your company name well known. So it is imperative to keep them updated about different brands and products you are promoting and for this SMM and its optimization is the best tool in advancing the services. If you're new to social media marketing, let your current customers know that they can now find you on these sites.

There are a number of steps that can be taken in order to avoid the aforementioned social media disasters that occur frequently in today. Conduct polls, discussions and games where you get a chance to know what they expect from you, what they think of you. Auto-responders are very obvious and often will give you a bad reputation online. In turn this will create a valuable community of relationships around the business in which it can utilize. They mostly emphasis on the benefits of product or service to make sure awareness is raised.

They offer a vast stack of vita and intuitive Facebook marketing to help you make the most of your business. You need to beat out your competition too, its not enough to simply be there. Several companies try their hands in social networking activities without proper training and that can be dangerous. Generate awareness an buzz around your company and brand. When you have finished give yourself the night off and hit the town or catch up with your friends, you deserve it.


Now we see that because of Social Media the former Tunisian president is exiled out of his country, the former Egyptian president is in jail and the reason why Muammar Gaddafi is dead. It's also a great was to get people to interact as users can share updates from businesses, meaning that social media marketing is made all that much easier. In addition, USB and Bluetooth, both of which are version 2. She could have chosen any media form she desired, any marketing platform, with a potentially huge price tag attached. Hit it hard, be aggressive, and find the job you want fast.

Keep an eye on what content your competitors are posting. It is true that the initial startup with social media may be a bit on the slow side. Once this occurs, your information is delivered directly to the desktop of each consumer who has chosen to network with your organization in an online environment. When you have just about any concerns relating to wherever along with the way to utilize tsu invite code, you possibly can email us in the page. Social networks allow for these connections to prevail. Getting clients online that are already searching for social media experts is the easiest way of starting up.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Brand Building Basics for Beginners




According to Marty Neumeier, "the main purpose of branding is to get more people to buy more stuff for more years at a higher price." For beginning entrepreneurs, brand building is an important part of firmly establishing your business within the market. If your business has poor brand recognition, or if you promote an inconsistent brand, you may lose or even alienate some of your best customers. Here are a few basics to help you get your brand off the ground if you are starting from scratch.

CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL CAT BUNGLON LOVEGIRL

What is a Brand?
To put it simply, a brand is an abstract idea that represents what your company stands for. This idea manifests itself in the business actions that you take and are expressed in the way in which you take those actions. Consider for instance, two World-Famous brands in a similar market, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. When you think of The Beatles, you picture four guys with goofy haircuts, that are generally warm, lovable, and safe. On the other hand, when you think of The Rolling Stones, you picture a group of rude, dangerous, unwashed ruffians. Two bands with completely different brands.
Where to Begin
The most successful brands begin by focusing on the company's strengths. Start by thinking about what you are good at, relative to your competition, as well as your core values or what you believe in. For instance, do your products feature a better design? Are your operations more environmentally-friendly than your competitors? Branding is all about finding those differentiating factors in your products or services that really make a difference to your customers.
Building the Brand
Once you have a good idea of what differentiates your business from others in your marketplace, it is time to start consistently promoting it. To do this, you need to focus on serving what your customers desire most, and guaranteeing your ability to deliver that benefit to them. However, promoting an inconsistent brand at times can be as bad as not having a brand at all. Every point of contact you have with your customers, from phone calls, to in-store visits, to letters, to emails, need to consistently promote your brand.
This may mean crafting graphics and ad copy for a variety of media, such as television, radio, online, and mobile. However it should also include creating elevator pitches for your salespeople and training the entire organization in basic public relations and consistent brand promotion.
Managing the Brand
Once your brand has firmly been established, your job is nowhere near over. Consistently monitoring your brand strategy, or hiring a qualified branding agency to do it, has several benefits. For one, you are guaranteed to not have any lapses in your brand, secondly, hiring a branding agency can help you stay ahead of trends, developments, and current events that relate to your business, allowing you to capitalize on each as an opportunity to further promote and strengthen your brand.




Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Bicycle artist

Rat, Michael Wallace, 2013. The pictures are by necessity crude, and the charming wobble comes from the accuracy of GPS, which records changes of a few feet.
Michael Wallace draws pictures using his bicycle, his Samsung Galaxy smartphone, two GPS apps, and the streets of Southeast Baltimore. It’s a simple concept: his phone records his rides (the double apps are in case of crashes). In five years, he has completed nearly 500 drawing-rides.

Wallace prints out Google maps and sketches his route over them. Then he consults Google Maps Satellite View to verify that the route he’s planned actually exists. In an online interview, Wallace said he doesn’t climb or jump fences. When obstacles require changes on the fly, Wallace consults the printed map he's carrying.

Downtown Crab, Michael Wallace, 2013.
Wallace isn’t blindly following his GPS; the act of mapping out the pictures makes him memorize the route. This is analogous to what happens when an artist draws a subject before painting; he can draw it again, much faster and more expressively, because he has memorized the subject. In some way, Wallace is duplicating this drawing process, but while using his whole body.

Sailboat, Michael Wallace, 2013.
I have the same phone and a bicycle. I’m going to try this when I get back to the Duchy.

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Smart kids

 
“The smartest kid in class, by contrast, is not an expensive problem. A boy or girl who finishes an assignment early can be handed a book and told to read quietly while the teacher works on getting other children caught up. What would clearly be neglect if it happened to a special-needs child tends to look different if the child is gifted: Being left alone might even feel like a reward, an acknowledgment of being a fast learner.”

When I came across that in a recent Boston Globe pieceon educating gifted kids, I had to laugh. Having once been the smartest kid in my public school class, I was anything but a cheap problem to fix; in fact, my parents ended up sending me to a private school to finish high school. I’m a great example of high intellect swamped by low expectations.

Fast-forward a generation to my own kids’ educations. You would think it would be better, but it’s not. Gifted and talented programs—all the rage before No Child Left Behind—have (if they still exist at all) become shock troops in the military boarding school approach to education we’ve adopted. More seat work, more homework, no time for things like art and music.

Busy work is the bane of the bright child’s existence. It teaches him to blow off his homework and rely on test-taking skills to get by. Moreover, it ignores developing the synthetic, intuitive parts of his brain, which are developedby studying art and music, and, yes, by daydreaming.


I have a friend who’s a classicist, living in penury as an adjunct professor. I’ve often thought that our school district should send three kids to her and pay her the roughly $65,000 it gets for educating them for a year. After four years, they would know history, music, the arts, Greek and Latin.

And before you tell me that’s not enough, America was built by people with exactly that education.


Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

Monday, September 29, 2014

Will your neighborhood art historian be replaced by a robot?

The most expensive painting on record is currently Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players, which sold for an estimated $259 million in 2011. (The exact price is unknown.)
In a paper entitled Toward Automated Discovery Of Artistic Influence, Babak Saleh and his Rutgers team claim to have used imaging software and ‘classification systems’ to automate the process of identifying artistic influences.

Last week, Apollo Magazine askedwhether robots can indeed replace art historians. They reached the same conclusions as did I—nope—but for different reasons.

The second most expensive painting on record is currently Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948, which sold for $140 million in 2006.
The international art market moved $66 billion last year, so the experts in authenticating and analyzing paintings are valuable. And when they work at museums and galleries, art history majors are not badly paid. In 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, museum curators and archivists made slightly more than $45,000 a year.

But the rub is when art historians enter the academic stream. While post-secondary teaching jobs are expected to growin the next decade, even the BLS admits that many of these jobs will be for adjuncts, or part-timers. In fact, more than ¾ of college professors are adjuncts, and their wages are abysmal: between $1000 and $5000 per course. As Salon pointed out this month, that leads to professors with PhDs earning the same amount as the average full-time barista—who’s not expected to do curriculum development or grade papers on his own time.

The third most expensive painting on record is currently Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, which sold for $137.5 million in 2006.
Why does the United States tolerate a system where university educations are obscenely expensive at the same time as they’re being provided by slave labor? Beats me. But there is no reason to automate intellectual disciplines when we pay them atrociously. Your art history degree is safe for now.


Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

Friday, September 26, 2014

Creativity

Maternity, Mary Cassatt, 1890. Cassatt never married nor had children. It would have been impossible in her era to mix her career and a family.
Sorry about the delayed post. I was busy caring for a baby.

Actually, I’m not all that sorry. After all, all other creativity derives from this fundamental beginning of life. The word “create” derives from the Latin creare: ‘to make, bring forth, produce, beget,’ and is related to crescere: ‘arise, grow.’ My etymology dictionary also links the latter to the Greek kouros (boy), and kore (girl), but I’ll take that with a grain of salt.

Most of the artists I know are childless, and the ones who do have children struggle to resolve the demands of their careers with the demands of parenting. Not that this isn’t true of all careers, but there’s something about the creative impulse that seems to channel in one direction or another. I’m an outlier because not only do I have kids, I have a lot of them.

Breakfast in Bed, Mary Cassatt, 1897. 
My daughter had a difficult delivery and I’m back in Pittsfield helping her until I’m sure she’s recovered.

We Americans have a weird attitude toward parenting. In trying to give women equal access to the marketplace, we’ve relegated parenting to the status of a hobby or a part-time job. Done right, it’s difficult work, demanding high levels of organization, energy, intelligence and time. My daughter is a well-paid professional, and I don’t want to see her dump her career to stay home. But having worked through my own parenting years, I also don’t want to see her wandering around in a fog of exhaustion, either.

But enough of this. Junior needs changing and his mom needs her meds before we start the round of doctor’s office, visiting nurse, visiting specialist. This baby stuff is a lot of work.

Baby Reaching For An Apple, Mary Cassatt, 1893
Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

New drug boosts creativity, cures hypertension, depression, and diabetes... and it's free!

A young walker in the Duchy.
A Stanford studyearlier this year found that walking boosts creativity. This is a real-time effect, and it lasts during the time you’re walking and for a short while thereafter. It gives legs to the idea that we get our best ideas while walking.

This will come as no surprise to people who walk regularly. I have no idea how it motivates the circuitry of one’s brain (any more than I understand how it massages the gut or how it strengthens back muscles) but as a lifelong walker, I’m convinced it works. It certainly reduces anxiety. I’m finding myself walking upwards of six miles a day this month, and it’s done much to assuage my grief and worry over the upheavals in my personal life.

Walking every day has the perverse effect of making me like winter more, although I'm not always keen on the way sidewalks are maintained here in Rochester.
Although I’ve been a dedicated walker/runner/hiker my whole adult life, about five years ago my doctor started making noises at me about cholesterol and high blood pressure. I realized that I needed to ramp up the pace. Now it’s the first thing I do every day, and I’m willing to spend at least two hours a day exercising.

The biggest objection people make to walking is, “I don’t have the time.” On the other hand, the average American watches five hours of television a day.

I’m self-employed, so I can set my own schedule. I walk my husband to work every morning. Most married couples have very little time to talk to each other; we are guaranteed the better part of an hour together. (Since the average car in the US costs more than $9000 a year to own and operate, we save a lot of money, too.)

Later in the morning, I walk with a small posse. Who shows up varies by the day, but we’re all self-employed or telecommuters.

Walking is gentle on the environment. This is the annual salt collection at the side of our street after the snow melts. It's a miracle anything grows here.
It’s paid off: I’m apparently the only middle-aged American who isn’t takingsome kind of prescription drug. Nearly 70 percent of Americans of all ages are on at least one medication, and more than half take two or more. Among women in my age cohort, a stunning one in four are taking antidepressants.

Walking is cheap. It makes you creative, it makes you happy, it gives you great gams, and it mitigates many diseases of aging like diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol. Why doesn’t everyone do it?

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Philistines, everywhere

Graffiti on the Colby Street pedestrian bridge in Rochester. I trudge over it daily, so I can certainly relate to these two flipper men doing endless laps on the bridge.
Being a believer in private property rights, I’m generally not amused by graffiti, but last Friday when I came across two swimmers on the Colby Street pedestrian bridge, I genuinely LOLed. The pedestrian bridge does kind of look like a 50-meter lap lane, and because it’s a regular part of my route, I often feel like I’m swimming mindlessly back and forth across it.

Meh. Not as witty as the first graffiti-artist, but at least he was trying.
Periodically, people commit acts of art on the pedestrian bridge (usually involving arrangements of found objects). They seldom last more than 24 hours before some Philistine knocks them apart. So I wasn’t surprised to walk by on Monday and see the poor swimmers defaced with a second layer of graffiti. It wasn’t nearly as witty, but at least the poor anonymous second writer tried.

But then comes the inevitable and predictable impulse to destruction. Really makes you despair for the human race.
Tuesday, the whole thing was scrubbed out by a third graffiti artist, whose only goal was to deface the message that preceded him.

It’s a great metaphor for the forces of creation and destruction that coexist in the human heart. In my current bleak mood, it makes me wonder why artists even try.

My young friend Serina Mo reminded me of this recently by mentioning the aged enfants terrible of the British art scene, Jake and Dinos Chapman. In their massive work of destruction, Insult to Injury, they defaced a rare folio of Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War.
From Insult to Injury, 2003, by Jake and Dinos Chapman. The Chapman brothers added nothing to Goya's work. I hope they fade into obscurity, taking their micron pens with them.
In the short run, it made them famous. It tore at notions of preciousness and art. In the long run, it made the tremendous presumption that modern sensibilities and intellectualism are superior to the pain and suffering drawn by Goya. If nothing else, the world should know by now that rich, silly ninnies are transient, but war and death are eternal verities.

 
Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.