Social Media and Blogging– Moving forward with help from Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program
Red Cedar Chamber Music has been working with social media experts Greg Epstein and Andrew Nicholas of Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad program for almost two months and we are making big strides in blogging and learning how to use the numerous social media resources available to us.
Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad program is helping Red Cedar Chamber Music optimize our ability to use social media. This is a win-win situation because we get 3 months of personal, one-on-one consulting with Qwest’s social media experts for free (how cool is that!) and Qwest develops an organic online presence because Red Cedar Chamber Music has agreed to blog on four separate occasions to give our honest opinion about our experience with Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad program. This is my second post about working with Qwest – see also April 4th blog.
We are very pleased with Qwest’s program and have found Greg and Andrew to be extremely professional, knowledgeable, personable and patient in explaining what to do and in walking us through the process. We have weekly phone meetings with them and they are also available to us via email or phone if we have questions in the interim.
Here is what we and Qwest have accomplished to date:
Greg from Qwest created several social media accounts for us and designed those social media sites to be similar in appearance to our existing website. He also linked these sites together so that any time we post a blog it posts to both our Twitter and Facebook accounts.
- Built a blog site – He built a blog site for us using WordPress shareware and showed us how to create a link on our website to access our blog .
- Created and designed a Twitter account
- Created and designed a bandcamp account – He recommended using bandcamp to upload our music at compact disc quality, opened an account and showed us how to create icons to allow visitors to play music from our bandcamp site directly on our website and blog.
Jan Boland, Red Cedar Chamber Music’s executive director and webmaster has modified our website to incorporate links to our blog and I have been active learning how to blog using WordPress. See my first posted blog (May 10) about our ongoing project with Perhaps Gilead, a newly commissioned work by Harvey Sollberger for flute, guitar and string quartet, that we just premiered on May 21st and May 22nd.
My next Red Cedar Chamber Music blog will be about recording Sollberger’s Perhaps Gilead at the end of May for our 10th compact disc on the Fleur de Son Classics label.
I have to sign off now as it is time for a phone meeting with Andrew from Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad program. He is going to help me connect to other chamber music organizations through Facebook and I hope to learn more about inviting my blog readers to leave comments on this site.
John Dowdall,
Artistic Director and Guitarist
