WordCamp Fayetteville 2011

Kiwi-colored tees are ordered and on their way

Green is a great color.

It represents a lot of the environmental ethic we hope to instill in the WordCamp Fayetteville conference, from our exclusive reliance on reusable water bottles, to our recyclable swag bags from Habitotes, and our emphasis on campers bringing their own coffee cups to the event.

It’s also the color of our T-shirts for WordCamp Fayetteville. Well, technically it is kiwi, but close enough.

It works well with the blue and we look forward to seeing you rock this eye-catching color and brilliant logo work by Blue Zoo Creative.

We have many great speakers contributing their time for WordCamp Fayetteville 2011! We’ve asked each of them to share a bit about their topic and presentation to let you know just what you’ll have in store. Lela Davidson is a book author, a writer for several publications and is a popular speaker on a ton of topics-including social media! We all know social media is a good way of getting word about your blog or other type of WordPress site out there. Let’s see what Lela has to say about her presentation for WordCamp Fayetteville.

5 Rules of Social Media

Lela Davidson

What is social media? Just tools, people, just tools. Remember that the latest gadgets like Facebook and Twitter are only here to serve you and your business – not drive it. They are simply one way we communicate today. They only help us create and nurture our relationships, but are not the entire relationship. Keep in mind the human being on the end of your tweet or status update, and these five rules.

Show Up

Just do it, they said. Go through the workout. Step on the treadmill. Toss out the chips. Forget all your excuses and just do it. Do you like exercising? Who cares? You will probably be more effective in social media if you Like it. But even if you don’t, you still have to show up to some degree. Just because social media is “on” 24/7 that doesn’t mean you have to be. There are ways to show up without really showing up each and every day.

Be Nice

When I’m having a bad day I get whiney. This is the last thing I want pasted all over the Internet – my personal complaints about a life that’s easier than what 98 percent of the planet is living. Some people get really mean online, probably because they are cowards, but maybe it’s their bad day mode. Do yourself a favor and make it a personal policy to be nice in social media. Can you give me a single reason not to?

Be Real

We’re not computers interacting with one another. We’re people. So be one. Granted, I just told you to be nice all the time and that may not be super-real, but do give something of yourself. Let your friends and followers (and prospects?) know that you are in fact a human being and not just a commercial enterprise. We crave connection. Satisfy some people’s cravings.

Detach from Results

Yes, you want to track some metrics, but social media is no way to get-rich-quick in networks. Just like real life networking it takes time to build relationships. I love the term coined by Ted Rubin – Return on Relationship #ROR. Forget about the results of your social media initiatives and commit to actions instead. Control what you can and forget the rest. Just do it.

Show Up

Did I mention show up? Because you really, really, really have to get in the game and create some consistency. You don’t have to post pictures of your meals on Facebook (like I sometimes do), or Tweet your location or your favorite brand of diaper wipes. Everyone has to find their own social media groove. It’s not one size fits all and the best part – there are no experts! Let’s figure this thing out together.

Come to my session at WordCamp Fayetteville on July 30th. We’re going to create concrete work plans for getting on top of your social media goals! See you there 🙂 (<– Smiley faces are Super Important in social media.)

We have many great speakers contributing their time for WordCamp Fayetteville 2011! We’ve asked each of them to share a bit about their topic and presentation to let you know just what you’ll have in store. This blog entry is from Tom Hapgood, a professor at the University of Arkansas and is a repost from his own blog. Hapgood will also be presenting with fellow professor Bret Schulte about the U of A’s student publication Arkansas Angle.

Tom Hapgood

I’ll be speaking at WordCampFayetteville 2011 at the end of July, organized by Christopher Spencer of Ozarks Unbound and some others. The title of my presentation hearkens back to the “heady” days of the 80s hair styles: “Embrace the Mullet: CSS is the Party in the Back (a CSS ‘how-to’)” that I alluded to very briefly last year during my presentation at this same event.

The jist is that a web page many times is made up of a structural HTML document (the more business-like/boring part that comprises the structural markup code) and a CSS document (the “party in the back” that provides the page with the fun stuff: color, layout, fonts, drop shadows, etc.) In the HTML you can wrap some text in a paragraph tag. Then, in the CSS you can tell the text in that paragraph tag, or all paragraph tags, to be bold, red with the “Homemade Apple” font, for instance.

I’m very familiar with both concepts, having been in the web design business since the boom of the mid-to-late 90s and having had a mullet during the mullet-boom of the early-to-mid 80s.

During the presentation, I’ll deal with the basics of Cascading Style Sheets in WordPress, such as structure vs. presentation, the box model, basic selectors, a simple page layout and some new/upcoming features of CSS3 such as basic responsive animation.