Category Archives: Social Media

Gardner White Tweet Team!

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So this week you may be seeing a lot of Tweets from me about Gardner White …. wait, you do follow me on Twitter, right? Anyway, this week I excited to work on a TweetTeam™ (a service by Hay There Social Media) for their client, Gardner-White Furniture!

Gardner White Furniture is a 100-year-old furniture store that is family-owned and Michigan based! To make this even better they have teamed up with Best Buy and are opening new Gardner White locations inside two Best Buy stores! One in Bloomfield Hills and the other in Novi… it’s the store within a store concept! You can shop for your entire living room or family room all in one store and know that you’re going to get a great deal!

All this week I will be helping promote the grand opening events with several other great ladies here in Michigan and then I will be taking part in a live, on-site event!

Oh, speaking of the on-site events if you’re in the area you MUST check them out! Come on by to enter to win one of several awesome prizes such as a new TV, furniture, a Kindle Fire, or even a new mattress! Of course there is no purchase required to win but you do have to be there.

If you want to know more just follow the hashtags #GWinBB and #GWGrand

Without social media I…

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Without social media where would I be…. that is a good question. Probably sitting on my couch watching horrible reality based TV shows with a box of bon-bons in my lap. Okay… that’s a lie because we all know that I don’t like reality shows. It’s more likely that I’d have my face buried in a book!

Without social media I would be left behind the times and not part of the cool crowd.

cool crowd

The Cool Crowd

Without social media I would have never known that someone could karaoke Ice, Ice, Baby so well! I mean Elena can belt it out like no other…. and she can do it all by memory!

Gleek Retreat Karaoke

Gleek Retreat Karaoke

Without social media I wouldn’t have started on a my journey to a new career for myself. My eyes wouldn’t have been opened to all the incredible opportunities that are out there in the world, all that there is to learn, and all the great people who are willing to help you out.

Without social media I wouldn’t have met an incredible woman. One who is exactly the same online as she is in person. One who is sweet, open, honest, and downright hilarious. I mean have you read her blog???

Empress and I

The Empress and I

Without social media I’d probably be really bored.

Without social media I would have never found Pinterest. Life without Pinterest… I shudder to think of it!

Without social media I would have never found wonderful recipes and been able to share them with everyone.

Without social media I wouldn’t have met some incredible women from right here in the state of Michigan.

BBC Michigan Bloggers

Awesome Michigan Bloggers

Without social media I wouldn’t have been able to state my case and then get an iPhone as a result!

Without social media I wouldn’t have started writing fiction again or have known about #NaNoWriMo.

Without social media I would not have met some of the best friends ever. Even though I haven’t met the majority of them in person I am honored to call them friends. When you need a shoulder to cry on, someone to vent to, or help with a fashion crisis they’re always there for you. And once in a while you meet that one person that you really connect with and you become fast friends. Someone you trust and look forward to talking to. Someone who has earned the title of a best friend.

What about you? What would you been doing without social media? How would your life be different?


 Mama’s Losin’ It

The End is Near ~ Save Our Subscriptions

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As you may have heard Google Friend Connect is going away for all of us using WordPress. Now, if you’re using Blogger there is no need to worry… you can still use it. But the rest of us need to Save our Subscriptions!

Save our Subscriptions

Back in November Google announced that they were discontinuing several of their products, Google Friend Connect being one of them.

Google Friend Connect—Friend Connect allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. We’re retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.

The end is near…. March 1, 2012 as a matter of fact and for many of us that means that we’ll be losing hundreds of followers and that we need to find other ways for them to follow our blogs.

So what are your options?

RSS – This is my favorite option because then all of your favorite blogs will be in your reader and you can read right from there. You can click on a link and it will take you to the post you were reading and then you can leave wonderful, heartfelt comments. Subscribe to With Just a Bit of Magic here.

Facebook -This is another good option where you can follow all of the blog updates as well as see some other great posts that I share from other bloggers. Like me here!

Google+ -This is Google’s preferred method for following blogs. With Just a Bit of Magic does have it’s own Google+ page but it’s not updated with every post but please feel free to add me to your circles! This is where you can find me…. right here.

Twitter -Now who doesn’t love Twitter? It’s one of the best ways to engage with your friends, meeting new ones, and share information. You can find me there just about every day. Follow me.

Email – You can find me in your email inbox a few times a week! Now wouldn’t that be great! Fill out the form below and you will get posts from With Just a Bit of Magic delivered to you…. almost like magic!

Enter your email address:

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Oh… you can also find me on another addiction, Pinterest. Or even Instagram.

I also have a Tumblr blog too where you can check out a day in my life! Follow that here!

Please make sure to pick one of the many choices to follow your favorite blogs before March 1st. You wouldn’t want to miss out on anything great!

Have you subscribed to your favorite blogs yet?

I broke up with Klout

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I tweeted, retweeted, engaged, and so on.

Every day I would check the numbers…. Were they higher, lower, or was I maintaining the status quo?

I’d check for awesome perks and see what I qualified for (we all did/do it).

And then it all changed. A simple algorithm (alright… algorithms aren’t simple I know that) to make it so that the scores were more accurate and it was said that scores would stay the same of go up. Ahhh…. Not so simple my friends… not at all.

In fact, the truth is that most of us saw a huge drop, upwards of 10 -12 points. And some even saw two of their accounts move to within a number or two of each other.

This is what I did. I broke up with Klout. I kicked them to the curb.

Why? Well, here’s the thing. Blogging isn’t about numbers, keeping up with the Jones’, or what cool stuff you can get for free. At least it isn’t for me. I write because I want to share, learn, grow, because I like writing, and well… it connected me to a large group of people that I consider friends.

I’m not a power blogger or tweeter and while I engage with my friends (community) daily I do it because I want to not because I need to increase a score or anything like that.

I love chatting with everyone, sharing information with them and learning from what they share with me. We are all friends and we are there to support one another, cheer each other on, and be there when a shoulder to cry on is needed. That is what engaging with my community is all about.

I am happy to say that I have not looked at my Klout score since the end of October and honestly…. I don’t care what it is.

I do however like the idea of giving out the +K because if you do something that influences me then it’s kind of cool that I can let you and others know about that. So, I will continue to do that but it will be in the form of #ImaginaryKlout.

#ImaginaryKlout is more fun because I can pick and choose the topic where as Klout only lets me pick from what they think you’re influential about. How silly is that?

Imaginary Klout

Want some #ImaginaryKlout? Just let me know and you can snag my awesome image!

Do you check your Klout score still? What do you think about the new changes that Klout has implemented?

How to unplug from social media…. or why I didn’t post Monday.

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Every so often it’s nice to unplug from social media, blogging, and the internet in general. Then there are the times that we are forced to disconnect whether we want to or not and this is exactly what happened to me this past weekend.

Every so often throughout the summer we head up to the thumb region of Michigan where my parents spend their summer and we camp for the weekend with them. I love spending time up there with them relaxing and watching them interact with my kids (it’s amazing what they let them get away with). It really is a relaxing place to go since there isn’t a lot to do there and the closest city is about 45 minutes away.

I bet you’re wondering what this has to do with unplugging from social media and the internet. Well, this area of Michigan does not have 3G service and the service that I do get on my iPhone is so bad that I can barely use Tweetdeck, email, Instagram, or anything that requires data connection. Let me put it this way…. I posted 2 pictures on Instagram this weekend and one of them took me 2 days to successfully post! 2 days people! Checking my email was a challenge and half the time it wouldn’t pull in the new messages.

So because of the horrible service up there I didn’t post on Monday. I actually pondered it and was thinking that I could do it through my phone. But then as the weekend progressed and I fought to post a picture on Instagram I quickly lost faith that I’d be able to write a post with pictures and have it actually work for me.

What I did instead was use my phone as a camera for the rest of the weekend and was able to capture a few moments that are those that fond memories are made of.

Storm coming in off of Saginaw Bay

There was a storm coming in off of Saginaw Bay & Lake Huron that you could hear for at least an hour before the rain actually reached us. As a matter of fact Andrew and I were heading down to the channel to check it out and my step mom told me to not get caught by the rain and to hurry. So as you can guess we got caught in the rain the moment we got down there.

Playing with grandma

In between down pours Andrew and grandma played in the puddles.

Making cookies with grandma

And when the rain got really bad we went inside and the kids made chocolate chip cookies with grandma. This was the first time that Andrew got to help bake and he loved rolling the cookies into the ball shape with help from his sister.

riding his broom

Andrew has this new fascination with brooms and loves to play with them. So he quickly set aside his toys and grabbed the broom that my parents keep outside to sweep off the deck with and claimed it for his own. It became his new ride around the campground after he swept the road.

Meeting Ronald McDonald

Then we met a new friend, Ronald McDonald, and an old dear one, free wifi. I don’t know who enjoyed breakfast more… Andrew or I! I was over the top with joy with the fact that I could quickly check Instagram (I think I have a slight addiction)!

So if you’re in need of unplugging and really getting away for a while then find a place where there is crappy cell phone signal and no internet access. It’ll be hard that first day or so as you beg your phone to just let you upload one picture or send one tweet but eventually you’ll come to terms with it and sit back and enjoy the simple things.

How do you unplug? Do you ever do it?

I’m also linking up with Taming Insanity for iPhone Photo Phun since I took all these pics with my awesome iPhone!

Taming Insanity