Social Media book for absolute beginners

By Tim Priebe on July 26, 2010 at 10:13 am in Reviews, Social Networking

The Social Media Marketing BookFrom time to time, people ask me where to find a good absolute beginner’s guide to social media and social networking. As you might imagine, those aren’t books I read, so it’s somewhat difficult for me to find one I can really recommend.

Recently Jerry Pournelle, a famous sci-fi author, wrote a succinct review about The Social Media Marketing Book (affiliate link warning), by Dan Zarrella. Although Pournelle’s review here (scroll down a bit after clicking) is fairly succinct, here’s his comment on who this book is good for:

That should give you an idea of who this book is meant for: people who want to promote products by using the new social media like Facebook and Twitter, but who don’t know the game: either because they’re just getting started, or they are old fogeys who haven’t kept up with the enormous explosions on the Internet. Incidentally, you may count me in the latter group.

Sounds like it’s probably good if you haven’t used social media at all and really need a primer.

Great Open House!

By Tim Priebe on July 19, 2010 at 6:00 am in General

Thanks to all fifty plus people who made it out to our open house. We’d especially like to thank our sponsors who supplied door prizes:

Below are some picture highlights of the event. You can check out tons more pictures on our Facebook album.







Websitepalooza: Websites for $595 in just an hour

By Tim Priebe on July 9, 2010 at 8:00 am in General, Workshops

Websitepalooza

talkingheadIt’s that time again. On July 22nd, just one hour can get you a website for hundreds of dollars less than it normally costs. Quick, easy and affordable.

Have the pros here at T&S set up a basic ten page website, select and register a domain name, and host your site for one year. The only cost after the initial year will be for continued hosting.

This is half the price of our starter sites! There are a limited number of time-slots available. Once the slots are filled, you’ll have to wait until the next Websitepalooza, and who knows when that will happen?

Check out all the Websitepalooza details.

Friend your favorite T&S employees

By Tim Priebe on July 5, 2010 at 8:22 am in General, Social Networking

T&S on FacebookWhile you probably know you can become a fan (or like, or whatever) T&S on Facebook, you might not know that we require all employees to have a Facebook account as well. Here, just for fun, are some of our more interesting Facebook statuses, with a link to our accounts.


timjpriebeTim Priebe Neighbor’s kid setting off fireworks at 6am: Extremely annoying, but effective alarm clock.

priebechickLeann Bailey Priebe Going crazy. Must eat ice cream….

emilyspirekEmily Spirek Jimmy Johns is playing Little Miss Sunshine music…of course now I want to watch it.

elyssadolingerElyssa Stork Dolinger I’m just grumpy ’cause you drive stupid.

seansandersSean Sanders 40 cop cars lined up in anticipation of post-game Lakers riot. None for E3. Now, which games promote violence?

adamboothAdam Booth Ψε watching TRON, made in 1982… Epic special effects!!!

chrisengstromChris Engstrom Ψε just got back from working 9am-2am. kinda exhausted right now.

scotttribbeyScott Tribbey What a great day. I do dishes, sweep and mop the kitchen floor, then the once-in-a-century hail storm decides to hit, kill a couple of north windows in the kitchen and living room, and make my car look like craters on the moon. The Village looks like a warzone.

Thursday, July 15th = cake, ribbon cutting and new office

By Emily Spirek on June 30, 2010 at 2:18 pm in General

screen-shot-2010-06-30-at-25428-pmSo, we would like to show off our new space…and feed you cake.

Here are the details:

When: Thursday July 15th, 2010 @ 4pm-7pm
Where: T&S Office - 2801 E. Memorial Suite 137 | Edmond, OK 73013
What: Reveal of new studio, cake and finger foods, ribbon cutting with OKC/Edmond Chamber. All combined….the best open house you’ve ever attended.

We know you want to see where the website magic happens. The ribbon cutting will be at 4pm, and food/fun will be throughout. We’d love to see you there!

Find us on Facebook to RSVP, we appreciate it!

Websitepalooza: Part Deux coming soon

By Tim Priebe on June 23, 2010 at 12:54 pm in General

Websitepalooza: Part Deux is coming on July 22. Websites while you wait. More info coming soon…

Websitepalooza: Part Deux

Fun Fridays in 2010

By Tim Priebe on June 19, 2010 at 10:50 am in General

It’s summertime again*, which has meant more Fun Fridays for us here at T&S. That means that everyone takes a couple hours for lunch (one paid), and partakes in some fun activity. And if they don’t have fun, they have to fake it.

Here’s the breakdown on what we’ve done so far this summer.

May 7

We kicked off the Fun Fridays of 2010 with an couple hours of playing Wii at my house. Bowling was the game of choice. I’m not sure who came in first, but I assume it was myself. Look at how professionally I’m sitting there.

Tim and Adam waiting for their turns at Wii bowling Emily's expert Wii bowling moves

May 14

For the second week, we ordered the setup from a local Mexican food place, Ted’s, and played cards. Or a dice game. Maybe both. I can’t remember for sure, and as near as I can tell, no photographic evidence of either exists, just of the food.

But I do remember that Ted’s was delicious.

Eating Ted's

May 21

Stock image of Emily playing Bocce, actually taken in 2009

Stock image of Emily playing Bocce, actually taken in 2009

Next up was Taco Bueno on a nearly abandoned Oklahoma Christian University campus, followed quickly by several games of Bocce Ball. We also invented a new version of Bocce Ball where everyone throws at once. It was all you are imagining it could be.

May 28

This week we hit up a bunch of garage sales. No great finds, unfortunately. Last year we had an employee find an iPod, and I found an old iMac my kiddos now use. No such luck this year.

June 4

This time we watched Twilight. Well, we watched it with the appropriate RiffTrax in place. Not sure we could have watched it by itself. I’d never heard of RiffTrax. What you do is start your movie, and sync up their audio file with the movie. Then Michael J. Nelson, star of Mystery Science Theater 3000, provides hilarious commentary on your movie.

Too funny!

June 11

We followed up last weeks viewing of Twilight with Twilight: New Moon. Again with RiffTrax, of course. Spoiler: It’s actually the same moon you’ve seen all your life. What a rip-off.

June 18

Adam in front of Toy Story 3 PosterHooray, Toy Story 3! Four of us were able to go see the great movie the day it came out. We also found out you can not take outside food or drinks into AMC.

Side story: I actually scored a free deluxe spicy chicken sandwich from Chik-fil-a in the food court at Quail Springs Mall. I ordered the cheaper sandwich, and they told me I could upgrade it for free, offer good that day only. I naturally accepted. Then the assistant marketing director tried to ring me up, a job which she apparently does not normally perform. Great confusion set in with operating the cash register, and she finally gave up and gave me my sandwich for free.

True story.

* While not technically summer, our college-age interns are on summer break. So there.

37 feet…continued

By Emily Spirek on June 9, 2010 at 4:40 pm in General

Here’s an update on the progress of the new office. If you compare the pictures to Elyssa’s post below, you’ll see quite the transformation.

Designer Corner
Programmer/Sales Corner
Hallway

Library/waiting room/kids room
Tim's Office

Elyssa and I will be doing some paintings this weekend for some of the decor, and we’re in the process of buying the rest. Still have a ways to go, but it’s definitely an improvement from the last post. If anyone has some awesome paintings they want us to hang, we’d love to take a look!

We’ll be having an open house next month for everyone to see our new space. Although it was mentioned in the last post, let me remind you: our office grew from 185 sq ft to 1100 sq ft. So yes, we want to show it off.

37 Feet…

By Elyssa Dolinger on May 28, 2010 at 4:18 pm in General

We’ve been all aflutter here at T&S because we are moving offices. We received our keys yesterday and even got the green light to start moving stuff in later today. It’s a pretty sweet deal. New paint, new carpet, a couple pieces of leftover furniture and the best of all—our new 1,100 sq.ft. office only 37 feet from our current 185sq.ft. office. We are gaining a LOT of space and keeping our AWESOME location (instead of three doors away from the Jimmy John’s east of OC, we are snuggled right up next to it. Mmmm. Free smells.)

Tim put a lot of in-progress pictures up on his facebook, but in case you’ve missed the awesomeness we’ve planned out our new space on paper and we’ve got the final photos from after the construction. So exciting! We just can’t wait to put all of our stuff in there.



Making Wordpress page headings different from the menu items

By Tim Priebe on May 17, 2010 at 7:48 am in Development, Technical

PHP and WordpressJust a quick Wordpress tip this time for theme developers, or people who just want to customize a Wordpress theme they’ve purchased.

Sometimes there are reasons to make a menu item slightly different from the title of the actual page. Perhaps your menu space is limited, but you have plenty of room in the content area. A typical example is using “FAQ” in the menu, but then the page heading actually shows “Frequently Asked Questions.”

A great way to accomplish this is the Custom Fields in Wordpress, combined with a bit of theme customization.

Normally, you would insert the title of a page like this:

<?php the_title(); ?>

Instead, you can create a custom field. We’ll call it “custompagetitle” for this example. On the FAQ page, you would enter ‘FAQ” as the title of the page, then a custom field called “custompagetitle” and enter “Frequently Asked Questions” there. Then, instead of the previously mentioned code, insert this code:

<?php

// See if there's a custom field custompagetitle,
// and if so, use it as the page's title

$realtitles = get_post_custom_values('custompagetitle');

if (is_array($realtitles)) {

$realtitle = implode($realtitles);

}

if ($realtitle)

echo $realtitle;

else

the_title();

?>

Not only does this code use your custom heading, but if there is no custom heading, it will default to the actual page title.

Older Posts »