Blogging and tweeting

Please share your idea for what message to print on our T-shirts on our Facebook page or by sending an e-mail to info@arkansasdiamondmineadventure.com. We hope to choose the winner next week, then we hope to start selling the T-shirts on our Facebook page and website shortly after that.

We jumped into the blogging world at the encouragement of our new friend from church, Frank Turk, one of the most popular bloggers in the world. Our hope is that people will want to read about our efforts to establish this business dream, learn from us and share with us their business knowledge.

Frank suggested that we also link this blog to our Facebook page. He e-mailed instructions to us, and we followed them as best we could. We're not sure how to know if we succeeded; we never found anything listed on our Facebook page saying "here's our blog." If you can verify this, please let us know.

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that we know nothing about "tweeting," so we have not jumped into that world, though Frank says we should. Speaking of tweeting, did you see the news about McDonald's recent Twitter episode? As parents of five children, we are big fans of McDs, but we had to laugh when we saw this.

McDonald's began (perhaps unleashed) a Twitter campaign Jan. 19 with the "hashtag" #MeetTheFarmers to coincide with their current advertising drawing attention to their guarantee of fresh produce. (Is a hashtag a breakfast item?) Their plans backfired later that day when people started trashing McDs. The tweets were pretty funny. One person tweeted: "PETA and McDonalds got into it today on Twitter. I was surprised, I didn't know there was actual meat at McDonalds." Ouch.

McDonald's social media director, Rick Wion, in a story on LinkedIn, said, "We quickly pulled #McDstories and it was promoted for less than two hours. Within an hour of pulling it the number of conversations about it fell off from a peak of 1,600 to a few dozen. There were 72,788 mentions of McDonald's overall that day so the traction of #McDstories was a tiny percentage (2%) of that. With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned. The ability to change midstream helped this small blip from becoming something larger."

We're not sure what all that means, but based on what happened, we're guessing that Rick is about our age and tried to handle social media by himself or with other adults. Take our advice, Rick, you should hire teenagers to handle that effort.