Tagged: meetings

March 17th, 2009

Blogaronis Don’t Disappoint, Lots of Ideas for Springfield Bloggers Association

At the end of yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I was going to the Blogaronis last night with my friend Teresa. Well, I went, and today I’m reporting back to you. In case you don’t know, the Blogaronis are local blogging awards given by the Springfield Bloggers Association, a loosely-organized group of bloggers in the Springfield area. I wasn’t nominated for A Fool of Myself (perhaps because I haven’t done much local blog networking), so I went to meet some new people and put some names to faces.

I had no idea what to expect. Honestly, I was a bit concerned that this “association” was just a group of geeks getting together to drink. Thankfully, I was wrong. The SBA is totally legitimate; essentially they’re a varied group of uber-blogging nerds like me. I’ve finally found my element.

Ten or so bloggers were there; I’d say about half were veteran SBAers and the other half were newbies, which put me at ease. We introduced ourselves, and Larry Litle of Simple Thoughts of a Complex Mind handed out the 14 category awards. After a photo, we split into separate conversations. I asked lots of questions. Found out that Larry’s wife is having a baby in a few weeks and that he needed someone to pick up the ball and schedule the next few meetings. So I became a ball picker-upper and volunteered to organize the next meeting. I am crazy.

Seriously, crazy. You know me. I’m an administrative, organizing freak of nature who is constantly thinking of ways to improve the things around her. I am an unstoppable monster. And as to be expected, I came away from Patton Alley Pub with a million and one ideas running through my head of how SBA can improve. I mentioned a few of them to Teresa. I told Chris about them. I woke up before my alarm this morning because I was thinking about them.

So if anyone from SBA reads the rest of this post, please understand that I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes or ruin the status quo of the organization. I’m a newbie; I don’t know how things work. At the same time, I want to get involved, spread the blogging love, and help the organization grow. So here are the ideas I’ve been chewing on since last night:

Blog

I think it’s a little silly that a blogging association doesn’t have a blog, and if SBA had a blog, it would be easier for local bloggers to stay up to date with the organization. Currently, meeting news, the blogroll, and the blogaronis are scattered across several different blogs, which doesn’t make it easy to learn about the group. I would propose a WordPress blog with pages for essential information about SBA and posts with news and announcements and such.

WordPress has a powerful blogroll (Links) function that allows blog owners to categorize their links, and the site could also allow bloggers to submit their blogs for the blogroll. The blogroll could be organized according to location (i.e. Springfield, Nixa, Ozark, etc.), genre (i.e. sports, technology, news, etc.), or by any other specifications.

Meetings

I’m in charge of scheduling the next meeting, and I have no idea what that entails other than selecting a meeting place. I’m going to ask around, but I’d like to see some “programs” at those meetings. You know, 20 minute (or so) lessons on any number of blogging topics or words from some “celebrity” bloggers. Maybe they already do this. I really don’t know. While it is fun to get together and have a beer (or Diet Coke, in my case), I think some people might be more inclined to come to meetings if there is a clear purpose.

Community Service

Not sure how this would shape up, but bloggers have some power with their pens, er, keyboards, and I’d like to see them put those skills to good use. Off the top of my head, we could adopt a non-profit organization to plug on our blogs for a specific period of time, we could adopt some local businesses and get them on the blogging train, we could teach senior citizens how to set up their own blogs. The sky is the limit.

Flair

Lastly, SBA needs some flair. I’m talking SBA badges and Blogaroni “trophies” for our sidebars. We would need a designer, but I happen to live with one who might be up for the job.

And those are my ideas. I’m so glad to get them out of my head because they were driving me crazy! I think SBA has great potential to grow a blogging community in Springfield; I just want to see it succeed. I’m definitely going to exchange some emails with some of the veterans last night about how I should go about scheduling the next meeting. I’ll keep you posted on how all this pans out. Scary!

Author’s Note

It totally didn’t occur to me yesterday to share some link love with the people I met Monday night. If you’re in Springfield, definitely check out these blogs:

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Posted in bloggersguide.net | 4 Comments »

February 26th, 2009

Frazzle Rock: My New TV Show

If I could create a TV show based on my day, I would call it “Frazzle Rock.” I have been frazzled all day long, and it would be a good day to live underground and eat radishes. My day has been insane since my first step into the office today, and on top of that, I had a cup of coffee this morning, so I’m jittery on top of everything else.

First, a quick update on my meeting with the youth guy last night: CB was totally onboard with Twitter, and he started getting the youth to sign up last night. Introduced him to HootSuite and TweetDeck and got the youth account set up. I’m excited to see how he’ll be using it to stay in touch with the students and their parents. On to my Thursday…

My first joy of the morning was a note from my boss to return some books that we had purchased for the resource wall. We’re in the middle of a sermon series about the family, so the wall is covered with books about marriage, sex, parenting, kids, teens, etc. To his dismay last night, the boss noticed that the book titled “How to Talk to Your Kids About Sexuality” was endorsed by Ted Haggard. Eek! Granted, the book was published long before the incident, but as a church, we simply can’t recommend books with that kind of endorsement.

And women’s Bible study was this morning, which was fine and I love having the moms and their kids in the building, but when you’re already frazzled, more activity is not what you need. Once the building cleared out, I was able to tackle my set of Thursday tasks. Then I got a series of phone calls from miscellaneous people asking a variety of different things of me, and I hadn’t had lunch, so I was not only jittery but getting grouchy.

Ate lunch, took 30 minutes to just sit and breathe, and then I had a meeting with Linden to discuss our Twitter project. I really didn’t think we had too much to discuss, but I have quite a few notes. We discussed the audience and scope of our project and nailed down some goals for it. Not sure when or where we’ll release it to the public, but we think it will be a good resource for those who are brand new to Twitter and haven’t figured it out, whether for personal or business use. It was awesome to talk to Linden (gotta love Google voice chat), but we both agreed it will be tons better when we’re both on the same continent.

After wrapping up some loose ends in the office, I took some notes and brainstormed for a creative communications meeting tonight. Web development falls under creative comm along with photography, design, video, and production at LifePoint, and the leaders of all those areas are meeting tonight for coffee. I have seven minutes to hit the highlights of web development, and my three main points are

  1. Twitter implementation
  2. Sermon archiving
  3. Redemption story writing

I’ll also be commenting on specific challenges I’m facing right now, which are training my volunteers to take some of my web development load and creating fresh content for the web site. And then we’re brainstorming for the next sermon series on Ruth; I have some ideas, but they’re in no way related to web development.

Now wouldn’t you all watch a TV show of me in my cave-office going about my day? Granted, I’d be a bit muppet-ish, but that’s part of the fun!

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Posted in church 2.0, personal | 1 Comment »

 

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