Facebook | Table for Five

I Really Need to Un-Complicate My Online Life

May 16, 2011 By Elizabeth

Webtreats 3d Glossy Blue Orbs Social Media Icons

Image by webtreats via Flickr

My online life is just way too complicated, people. I don’t know what made me think I could handle three blogs, three Facebook accounts, four Twitter streams, three email addresses. At first I thought I was “organizing” the information, but man, is it hard to keep with all of them!

The thing about social media for me is that it feels so…important. Meaning, I feel like if I delete a Twitter account, the 37 people who added me to a Twitter list will see that my account is gone and, I don’t know, dislike me? Obviously I understand the overall importance of social media, but I also am thinking that over-saturation is much less effective.

Is it really necessary, for example, to have four Twitter accounts? I started with one, @Table4Five, then decided MomReviews needed it’s own Twitter stream for tweets and retweets about reviews and giveaways. And then I decided that MomCooks needed IT’S own Twitter stream for tweets about the reviews and giveaways I was doing there.

Ask me how well I’m managing to keep those four Twitter streams up to date. I’ll give you a hint – I’m NOT. Besides the huge headache I gave myself last year just before BlogHer when I suddenly decided my old Twitter for Table4Five was too crowded and I needed a SECOND Table4Five twitter account where I could have more personal conversations. Now I have @Table4Five, the newly renamed @ElizabethT45 (used to be called @Table4Five2, and trust me, it confuses me too), @MomReviews and @mom_cooks. GAH.

Facebook is actually not that unmanageable. I have my main account for myself, then I have fan pages for Table for Five and MomReviews. MomCooks doesn’t have it’s own fan page, which is fine by me. I have RSS for each blog going to it’s respective fan page, and every once in a while I check in to see if there are messages or friend requests. Facebook is the least stressful of my online identities really.

A brand consultant I “met” through LinkedIn gave me a very interesting piece of advice, based only on looking at my three blogs. She said that what I should do is rename MomReviews to Table for Five Reviews and Giveaways (anyone see why that’s a problem?) and MomCooks to Table for Five Cooks. But here’s the thing – can a four year old blog really be renamed? What happens to all of the posts?

The problem is that the title of a blog is in the permalink to every one of it’s posts, categories, tags, and archives. Like this: http://momcooks.net/2011/04/25/ham-pasta-skillet-recipe/. If I changed the name of MomCooks to something like Table for Five Cooks, and someone copy/pasted an old momcooks link into Google, it would give them a 404 “page doesn’t exist” error. MomCooks has 467 published posts, so that’s a whole lot of errors.

And of course the problem with the suggestion for MomReviews is that there is already a blog titled Table for Five Reviews and Giveaways, as I discovered last year.

I love Table for Five, and I love MomReviews. I can’t see a logical way to combine them. MomCooks I really just use for a place to copy/paste recipes I find online rather than printing them out on paper, and the advertising pays for the annual domain name registration, so it’s not costing me anything out of pocket to keep it.

So what’s the solution? Do I keep everything I have and just try to update it the best I can, when I can? How are you handling multiple online accounts?

Filed Under: Born to Blog Tagged With: Born to Blog, Facebook, Twitter

Kraft Foods Gift Basket Giveaway

February 1, 2010 By Elizabeth

this giveaway is closed.

Kraft Foods, makers of products like Oreos, Ritz crackers, Stove Top stuffing, and Maxwell House coffee, have re-launched their Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube pages to make it even easier for busy cooks to find great recipes and cooking tips. On their terrific recipe site, Kraft has a Community forum where you can ask questions and share your favorite recipes. I’m not exactly a pro in the kitchen, and I subscribe to Kraft Food & Family magazine for dinner tips, and also rely heavily on the Budget Wi$e section of the Kraft website, especially their “1 Bag, 5 Dinners” menus. We also use a lot of Kraft Food products, so I’m thrilled to be helping them with this giveaway!

To help spread the word about all the ways you can interact with Kraft Foods, they sent me a gift basket full of products, and will send one to the winner of this giveaway.

The HUGE gift basket is packed with food and kitchen items including new varieties of Ritz crackers, Velveeta Rotini & Cheese, and Wheat Thins.

The products in the gift basket are NEW Ritz Brown Sugar & Cinnamon crackers, Oreos, Planters Cocktail Peanuts, Honey Maid Cinnamon Grahams, Stove Top Stuffing, NEW Wheat Thins Flatbread crackers, Maxwell House coffee, Planters Pecan halves, Baker’s Semi-Sweet chocolate, Kraft salad dressing, Jet-Puffed marshmallows, NEW Velveeta Whole Grain Rotini & Cheese, a garlic peeler, a wooden spoon, and recipe cards.

Wanna guess how long all of this lasted in my house? The only thing we haven’t finished is the can of coffee! Those Brown Sugar & Cinnamon Ritz crackers? I would have never in a million years guessed that I would love those as much as I did. I can’t wait for them to be available in stores!

Kraft Foods has generously donated another gift basket to a Table for Five reader to win in this giveaway. It’s got to be super-quick though, I need to end the giveaway this Friday so the sponsor can get the basket mailed out early next week. Here’s how to enter!

WIN IT: For your main entry, Kraft Foods would like your feedback on their Facebook page, Twitter page, and YouTube Channel. Please visit those sites and then come back here and tell me what you thought of them. What do you think it means to the consumer to be able to interact with Kraft Foods using social networking? Enter by this Friday, Feb. 05 at 1:00 PM EST.

BONUS ENTRIES: Since this is a super-quick giveaway, help me spread the word and earn yourself extra chances to win! Leave a separate comment for each of the following that you do or have done:

Follow @kraftfoods on Twitter and tweet this: Win a huge gift basket from @Table4Five & @kraftfoods! Enter by 2/05 at 1:00 PM EST, plz retweet! http://bit.ly/9BmP18 . You can tweet this once per day and leave a separate comment for each tweet.
Follow me on Twitter @Table4Five, I’ll follow back!
Become a fan of Kraft Foods on Facebook.
Post a link to the giveaway on your Facebook status. Become my fan on Facebook if you aren’t already, the link is at the top of the page!
Blog about this giveaway including a link back. Not a blogger? Not a problem! Earn an extra entry by adding the link to the giveaway to any blog’s giveaway round-up. Leave the URL to your post or to the site where you linked up the giveaway.

Thanks for entering and good luck everybody!

Filed Under: Contests and Giveaways Tagged With: Facebook, Kraft, Kraft Food, Twitter, youtube

Dona Nobis Pacem-2009 Blog Blast For Peace

November 5, 2009 By Elizabeth

It started in October 2006 when Mimi from Mimi Writes had an idea based on her memories of 9/11. What if on one day, the entire blogosphere posted the same thing, a call for peace? She posted a few backgrounds of our Earth against a blue background and said, see if you can’t make something from this. Something that will remind your readers that it is possible for there to be Peace on Earth. To say she was on to something would be a vast understatement.

Her idea spread like, well, wildfire. It spread across the blogosphere into nearly every one of the United States as well as 38 countries. It seems that even if for only one day, what bloggers would really like to think about is the idea of world peace. And that includes me. At the end of this post you see the Peace Globe I made last year, using Photobucket. If you would like to make one too, here’s how to start:

Visit Mimi’s blog and grab one of the four blank templates. After saving it to your computer, use Paint or Photoshop or Picnik or Photobucket or whatever you prefer to decorate it however you’d like. Email it to mimiwrites2005@yahoo.com so she can add it to the Peace Globe Gallery. Visit the BlogBlast for Peace page and sign the Linky so others can visit you and see your Peace Globe.

What I learned from browsing through the Peace Globe Gallery is that no matter what state or country someone is from, peace truly is a universal wish, a need, a hope. Help spread Peace today.