Red Cedar Music Blog

Connecting the Dots: Practical Applications and Lessons Learned Through Working With Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program is the fourth and final in a series of four blogs I have written about Red Cedar Chamber Music’s experience working with social media experts Greg Epstein and Andrew Nicholas through Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program (see previous blogs on April 4th, May 24th & June 21st). Note that Qwest is now CenturyLink and the name change will be finalized starting in August.

A quick word about how we got involved with this program. Back in February 2011 we needed a new internet service provider & signed up for Qwest’s Core Connect program for small businesses, which by the way has been a very reliable & cost effective program for our needs. Shortly thereafter, we got a call from Greg Epstein inviting us to participate in Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program, which is designed to help small businesses launch or enhance their internet marketing presence. We first worked with Greg who specializes in setting up social media sites like a blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts etc. We then switched to working with Andrew who has mentored us on how to write an effective blog, how to draw traffic to the blog and how to analyze the impact of the blog to see if we are getting a significant enough number of meaningful hits to warrant the time spent blogging. (To find out more specifics of what we have accomplished with Greg & Andrew, please read my first 3 Qwest blogs.)

We have been very satisfied with Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program and have really enjoyed working with Greg & Andrew who have gone out of their way to help us with all aspects of our internet presence and have truly helped us launch a more comprehensive and effective web presence. So here are some of the practical applications about which we feel really good!

Practical Applications:

• The Blog & its connection to other social media– Blogging has been the focus of our work with Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program and we are really pleased with its functionality (easy to use) and the fact that our blog posts automatically post on Twitter and Facebook as well using dlvr.it.
• Audio/Video presence – As a performing arts organization, Red Cedar Chamber Music is particularly interested in having a strong web presence that provides a high-quality and up-to-date representation of our product, which is the audio and video of our most recent performances. Through our Concert Series and Rural Outreach programs we premiere new music Red Cedar Chamber Music has commissioning, as well as reintroducing little-know early nineteenth century music to our audiences, and we want our Iowa audiences and the rest of the world to have access to this literature as soon as possible following our live performances.  To facilitate this goal Greg helped us:

1. 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.
2. Showed us how to post audio as a Facebook post – Because Facebook only accepts mp3 files for audio, we can’t use our bandcamp site as an internet source for posting audio on Facebook, so Greg showed us how to  upload our audio in mp3 format to our blog site. Our blog site then stores our mp3 audio and we can embed the link from our blog in our Facebook to create an audio post! See our Facebook posts of Stephen Foster tunes on 19th-c. period instruments from June 21st.
3. Helped us embed audio & video clips on our homepage – We can now embed audio clips from our bandcamp site and video clips from our YouTube site onto the homepage of our website so visitors to our website can hear & view our music immediately!

• Use Google Analytics to Track Activity of our Blog – see my June 21st blog post Is Anybody Reading My Blog? How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog & Track the Results Using Google Analytics

What now? Okay, so now we can connect the dots! We have the sites – website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, bandcamp and YouTube, we have the ability to interconnect them and we have the tools to create effective blog posts, analyze traffic patterns to our blog & website and get up-to-date audio & video clips posted on our home page, our blog & our Facebook page.  It is now up to us to keep our sites active by doing weekly blog posts and frequent Facebook posts. We also need to drive traffic to our blog and our other social media sites by actively seeking out and interacting with other social media sites that are thematically connected to our site. This is a way of getting to know our social media neighbors who are then likely to come calling at our sites due to the common interests we share.

What is really great for us is that while our 3-months of mentoring with Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program is officially over with this post (we’ve graduated), Andrew & Greg will still be available to answer our questions & offer advice. Wish us luck and we in turn hope our blogs have been of some help & inspiration in your quest (pun intended) to establish a more effective and broad based internet presence.

I invite you to return for my next blog on Iowa as a recording mecca for classical chamber music!

John Dowdall

Artistic Director

Is Anybody Reading My Blog? How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog & Track the Results Using Google Analytics is the third in a series of four blogs I am writing about Red Cedar Chamber Music‘s experience working with social media experts Greg Epstein and Andrew Nicholas through Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program (see previous blogs on April 4th & May 24th). Note that Qwest is now CenturyLink.

Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program is being offered to select small businesses like Red Cedar Chamber Music to help them launch blogs and optimize their ability to effectively use social media to enhance marketing and drive traffic to their websites. The ultimate business goal of blogging and effectively using social media is to reach new customers and increase sales. So, how can those of us devoting valuable business time to posting blogs ensure that our blog posts are attracting traffic AND how do we get detailed feedback on our blog’s traffic patterns, who is reading our blogs and what referrals are directing them to our blog?

Ensuring that your blog posts are attracting traffic:

• Key Words – First and foremost are the key words you incorporate into the text of your blog, which are likely to drive people interested in your blog topic to the blog. These keywords like chamber music and chamber music blog should appear numerous times throughout the blog so that search engines like Google will be able to accurately identify the content of your blog and pull up your blog site when people search the internet for these key words. The more effective you are at using key words, the greater the likelihood your site will show up high on the list of websites selected by a search engine. NOTE: Keywords should be incorporated into the natural flow of the blog test and each keyword should not comprise over circa 5% of the blog text so that Google or other search engines do not avoid listing your blog site because they feel you are keyword stuffing.  Use Google’s Keyword Tool to discover search volume for specific search terms (keywords). This allows you to incorporate keywords into your blog that people are using frequently when they do web searches.
  

• Post Tags – Next are the post tags that you assign to each of your blogs. At the bottom of this blog you will see Tags: followed by tags words that I have attached to this specific blog post. Listing  tag words that are important to the content of the blog will also help search engines correctly locate your blog for inclusion in a listing resulting from a web search.
  

• Comments on FaceBook- Find FaceBook sites that relate to your topic of interest and indicate that you like these sites. You can then leave comments about their FaceBook posts that will make visitors aware of your FaceBook page and increase the chances that they will visit your FaceBook page and become aware of your blog. NOTE: Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad program has helped us using dlvr.it to integrate our social media sites so that each time I post a blog, it also posts on our Twitter and FaceBook pages. You can set this up to happen with your blog posts as well at dlvr.it.

Detailed feedback on our blog’s traffic patterns through Google Analytics:

• Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program also has helped us add Google Analytics to our WordPress Dashboard so that we can see traffic patterns related to our blog site. This tell us how many hits we have every day and if people are staying to read the blog or leaving within 30 seconds. We can also sign into Google Analytics and get more detailed information about the geographic location of those visiting the site, where they were referred from ie Google search, FaceBook, newspaper article with a listing of the blog etc. and  key words or phrases that drove them to our blog. This is invaluable information for us to verify the effectiveness of the blog and to help us modify future blogs for maximum exposure and impact.

Well, time to go and have my weekly personal consult with Andrew of Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program. He will help me review this post and make sure it is accurate. I have had a great experience with Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program and will give you a wrap up about Red Cedar Chamber Music‘s experience working with Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program in my final Qwest blog in July.

John Dowdall

Artistic Director

Red Cedar Chamber Music

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

Red Cedar Chamber Music

We just spent a terrific hour on the phone with Greg Epstein from Qwest who is setting up a blog for us through Qwest’s social media training program for small businesses. Working with Qwest and its team of social media experts is a fantastic opportunity for us to learn how to really optimize our marketing through the impact of social media by linking all our social media outlets ie Twitter, Facebook, Blog, Website, YouTube, Vimeo etc. together.

Linking our sites will ensure that whatever we post once is accessible from any of our social media outlets – Qwest is creating a Blog page and a Twitter account for Red Cedar Chamber Music and then providing us with personal one-on-one consulting with their social media experts for 3 months to ensure that we optimize our ability to use our social media sites and feel comfortable moving forward on our own.  In return, Red Cedar Chamber Music will be blogging on four separate occasions about our honest opinion of Qwest services. As of now we are very happy to have this opportunity and Greg has been great to work with and has offered us lots of useful advice!

In the fast-paced world of social media Qwest’s social media training program is an invaluable service! We are just starting this process, and will be blogging about our experience with the Qwest social media training program in the months ahead. Hope you can follow our progress and glean some good social media “nuggets” along the way. This is exciting!!

Oh – we will also be blogging about our very exciting new commission Perhaps Gilead by Iowa composer Harvey Sollberger. Stay tuned for the next blog.

John Dowdall

Artistic Director

Red Cedar Chamber Music