twitter questions from a hat -- waco social media breakfast

despite our awful weather this morning, we still had 10 people for the waco social media breakfast.  our topic was an open forum on twitter.  karla patterson did a great recap of the meeting on the social media breakfast blog!

how to be a social media butterfly

this past week I had the pleasure of giving my "how to be a social media butterfly" talk to another group of abwa women.  so, I figured I would share my presentation with you!

How To Be A Social Media Butterfly

View more presentations from carynbrown.

cartoonizing a picture in picasa

for the longest time, I thought you had to have expensive photo editing software to make a cartoonized picture, but I have discovered how to do it in picasa.  now, it might not be as good as the results from more expensive software, picasa is free and easy to use and that means a lot to me.

1. double-click on the picture you want to cartoonize in picasa
2. click on effects
3. click on saturation and drag the bar all the way to the right for the most saturation
4. click on apply
5. click on tuning
6. drag highlights and shadows until you get the picture to look the way you want it to
7. click on apply

see, wasn't that easy!

how to add a picasa slide show to your blog

one of the coolest things that you can do with picasa is add a slideshow of your pictures to your blog posts or website and it's really easy to do:

1. put all the photos you want in the slideshow in one folder.
2. in picasa, click on the sync button to sync your (folder) album to the web.
3. log into the picasa webpage.
4. click on the album with the pictures for the slideshow.
5. click on link to this album (in the menu pane on the right-hand side).
6. click on embed slideshow.
7. a window will then pop up for you to select your settings and give you the code to copy into your blog or website.

how to add top posts to your blog

one of the coolest things you can do on your show your readers what your top posts are.  for that I use post rank and here is how you set it up:

1. go to the post rank website at http://www.postrank.com/publishers and choose your blogging platform from the get widget drop down (for these instructions I used blogger).
2. enter your blog's URL in the website: field (sometime it may take a while for it to index your blog)
   
3. choose the color scheme and the number of posts that your want to display
4. you can then click on add to blogger or copy the code onto your website

see, wasn't that easy!!

does blogging increase your SEO?

so, this question was posed to me a few months ago and I have been thinking about it and trying to put it into words ever since. I have tried unsuccessfully to find some articles and blog posts on the subject (if you have one, please put a link to it in a comment on this post). here are links to the two that I did find:

SEO Benefits Blog to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

in my own words, this is how I understand it to work. blogging in and of itself does not increase your SEO, but blogging increases the number of words on your site and the frequency of updates to your site, both of which increase your SEO.

picasa 201 - sharing pictures on picasa

one of the greatest things about picasa is that you can easily share pictures from it.  here's how:

1. in picasa, on the folder you want to share, click share button beneath the folder's name.  (you will have to have a picasa on-line account to do this, but it will walk you through setting one up if you do not have one yet)
2. enter the user's e-mail address in the to field and click on send.

see, wasn't that easy!!