Real Life Networking

For Day 3 of Armchair BEA, they would like us to talk about our experiences with real life networking. This is a tough topic for me, as I am not by nature an outgoing person. I have to force myself to strike up a conversation , let alone to approach someone to sell myself. Cold calls were the thing I hated most about my old job!  I often go months without telling people I have a blog, and I sometimes even hesitate to talk about the blog to family members, let alone strangers. Despite all this when we first moved to Pierre I knew I had to put myself out there if I didn't want my children to be friendless. In the 19 months we've been here I've managed to find a handful of local people and groups to socialize with, and I'm really proud of my boldness.

This doesn't address the blog, though, which was the question! I often think of things I'd love to do with the blog involving my community, but I haven't been bold enough yet to put much of it into action. I did start a feature called Picturing Pierre where I intend to feature different parts and facts of Pierre, SD. If you're unfamiliar with small town American, this post on just how small and isolated Pierre is might be interesting. I wrote a post on our flood last year that was really popular with search engines and I found a handful of local twitter friends that way.  In my imagination this becomes a terrific local resource, but obviously that won't happen on it's own, especially with my current record of posting about it.

This is a very small town though, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and we don't get many author signings. We don't have a chain bookstores, only one tiny little indie (though looking at other things on their website makes me think they might be open to some collaboration.) We have one very small library, which is very good, but very small and not very technologically advanced (I wrote about it here.) I have imagined myself approaching them and asking if they'd be open to starting a book club or help in utilizing Facebook or Twitter, but I just haven't gotten the gumption to go do it. With any luck reading all your wonderful posts today will inspire me to finally take that step!

Do you Twitter?

I blame this post on Bermudaonion.

Do you Twitter? I signed up a long time ago, but haven't really used it. I found that I didn't like having updates sent to gmail chat* and I don't have enough text messages a month to send them there. But recently, someone (ahem) asked if any of us used Twitter, so I went back over and found a bunch of YOU there! So I'm going to try to update more. I often have a tiny thing I want to say that isn't really much of a blog post, so I'll try to do it there instead. Feel free to follow me there.

*there is one person I follow who does all these tweets about where she is physically, like what store, and what street and that sort of thing. She lives across the country from me, and I don't know all these places, and it overwhelmed my google chat. So I disabled them. And now I don't see that I could enable them again anyway. I see that a lot of people use TwitterDeck. Is that a good thing?

Roughly the same day, I asked Ms. Onion how she got hooked up with all these awesome book giveaways, and she told me about Book Blogs. It's like Facebook! For Books! But without all those stupid Lil' Green plant things! So, I signed up there too.

If you no longer have any free time, blame the onion.