“You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, So… get on your way!”
Dr. Seuss
Bullying Sucks!
We already know the horrifying stories of kids being bullied at school and have witnessed the tragic consequences. Now bullying has moved into the social and digital space in a BIG way, thanks to young peoples 24/7 engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and one of the biggest daily activities for teens, texting! This is both a lesson in awareness, how we can do something to help, and in seeing the HUGE shift the future generation has made towards the social and digital web.
While the stats below are disturbing, there are several organizations that are available to help kids hang on through the toughest and darkest of days. We love Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, Its Gets Better, The Trevor Project, and Boo2Bullying.org just to name a few. We can all help, by creating awareness and stepping up when and where we can to put a STOP to BULLYING, both online and off.
(shared with LOVE from your passionistas Nina + Gordon)
YELP…Yikes or Yay?
“A happy customer is the greatest advertisement.”
Andy Sernovitz, Author of Word of Mouth Marketing
According to the US Census Bureau, 14% of Americans move every year (that’s close to 50 million last year alone). Every year, 12+ million move out of state and another 12 million move to another county in the same state. That’s a lot of people moving around and many will be in search of “happy customers” to help them find their next great haircut and more.
Enter YELP, “the fun and easy way to find and talk about great (and not so great) local businesses”.
With over 54 million unique visitors each month, it’s the place where savvy salons go to tap into online word of mouth and take advantage of this growing (and FREE) source of real world referrals and traffic. In fact, salons are the 4th most searched for business on YELP, after shopping, home services and restaurants. WOW.
Check out The Power of Yelp, our newest Social Beauty Intelligence Webinar on the Why’s, What, and How’s of YELP. Our hope is that you gain insight into this powerful referral platform and begin to use it to help attract new clients to your salon, YAY!
http://youtu.be/PCIXyhODf2w
(shared with LOVE from your passionistas Nina + Gordon)
The Promise, Kept
“One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises that one makes.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Brian Solis is one of our digital heroes. He speaks the truth. He understands the digital space like no other, and the opportunities it provides to businesses and people if its used in the right way. Brian Solis is the best selling author of Engage, and The End of Business as Usual, two books we highly recommend if you are seeking a deeper understanding of the social and digital revolution. He is a disruptor, and we heart disruptors that push to make things better.
While we read his blog daily, this one jumped out at both of us at the same time, without even knowing, and therefore, worth sharing. “Dear (insert business name here), what is Your Promise”. Many companies have mission statements and vision statements, many times written in a boardroom somewhere, but what is your Promise?
In today’s VERY NOISY social and digital space, people want to know you, what you stand for, what your promise to them is, and be ready, because today, you will, we all will, be held accountable thanks to Facebook, YELP, Foursquare, Twitter and all the other social spaces that people can speak their mind.
We hope you take the time to read this blog from Brian Solis, you will be very happy you did, as will your team and your customers.
(shared with LOVE from your passionistas Nina + Gordon)
Find + Love + Share = Curation
“There is no delight in owning anything unshared”
Seneca
Curate: to pull together, sift through and select for presentation, as music or Web site content. Dictionary.com
Before there was the social and digital web, most of what we saw as news and inspiration was the result of choices made by a limited number of professional “editors”. Today, that number has increased exponentially as platforms like Facebook have given us all the ability to become “editors” by simply curating (sharing the content that we find and love) for our online friends and fans.
A great example of this shift can be found on YouTube -a social platform featuring “gazillions” (48 hours of content uploaded every minute) of videos that run the gamut from impossibly amateur and uninteresting to highly polished productions (and everything in between).
One of our recent fave video finds is “1950’s Womens Beauty Salon” from Glamour Daze, a YouTube channel with 2.5 million views! We found it while searching beauty salons on YouTube, were hooked from the opening line, “To women, a beauty salon is more than a feminine barber shop”, and immediately knew we to had to share…curation at its best!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfFvJVRcVaE&feature=youtu.be
We also found this super juicy video on “curation” from devour.com (awesome video curation site) that simply and beautifully describes what curation really means and why it’s important.
PS: This blog was inspired by our passion of curating; finding engaging and empowering content that we love and feel compelled share.
(shared with LOVE from your curating passionistas Nina + Gordon)