I have been working hard on a personal project for the last 3 months or so that I wanted to share with all of you. This summer I was feeling a little burnt-out and decided that I needed to put some time and effort into something that could incorporate many of the things that I love in life. This ended up becoming a blog called “One Bowl Parenting“.

The whole idea behind the blog is sharing what we do as parents anyway with the rest of the parent world. I wanted to create a fun, useful resource for other people and in order to do that I called upon some of my friends to share their expertise as well. I have really been enjoying combining my photography, graphic design, crafting, and day-to-day parenting stories in a creative way.

I mention this blog to you for two reasons. The first reason is that I feel we all need to find ways to further explore the things that make us happy in our personal lives. And if you can find a way to tie that into your professional life – go for it! The more passion you have for your job, the more people are going to be drawn to you and your work. Please, if you are a parent and/or would like to see what I am passionate about, go check out my blog.

The second reason that I mention the blog is that we are doing our first giveaway and I want to share it with as many people as possible! My good friend and talented artist, Jessica Buickerood is giving away one of her amazing Recipe Calendars for 2012. For the all of the details and info on how to enter to win, just go here.

I would love to hear from you. How do you feed your soul and stay inspired? Do you have side projects that you work on or is work your main passion in life?

This weekend is arguably the busiest, craziest, jam-packed weekend of the year for Livingston.  We have the parade on the 2nd, rodeo on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th, and what seems like all of Bozeman, and then some, descending upon our tiny little town for the entire three days!  This year we are really excited to be participating in the parade as representatives for Livingston Buy Local.

Being the social media geeks that we are we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to include Twitter – one of our favorite tools – in our plans!  Twitter is not something that has caught on completely in this area but we are trying little by little to get people on board.  One of the great things about Twitter is the use of hashtags.  For those of you who don’t know, hashtags are simply the “#” symbol followed by a single word or phrase and they are great for searching and organizing data.  They work really well for events such as the Livingston Roundup weekend.

We plan on tweeting using #LivingstonRoundup to keep people informed about everything that is going on here in town.  We will be tweeting live from the parade and the rodeo and are hoping that others will join in the fun!  We fully realize that not everyone has a Twitter account so we have set up multiple locations where people can view the feed of all tweets that include #LivingstonRoundup.  If you are a self proclaimed tweetard but still want to see what is being said on Twitter about the Roundup events you can check out the widget on the right hand side of our blog page, the widget on the left hand side of the home page of Livingston Buy Local, or the special tab we have set up on our Facebook page called “#LivingstonRoundup Events 2011″.  Be sure to keep an eye out for the Murray Hotel as well as the City of Livingston who will be using the hashtag too.  And if you are already a hashtag ninja please help us out and spread the word.  We think it’s time we all put Livingston on the Twitter map, don’t you?

Happy April Fools’ Day everyone!  We had a really wonderful “Social Media Socializing” session this morning.  What a great way to start off the month of April.

Naturally, with the recent news of Facebook allowing profile to page migrations, that was one of the first topics discussed.  There is a link to an article that details everything you need to know for migration on our Facebook page, but the most important thing to remember is to download all of the information from your personal profile before you make the switch.  We also talked about how great it is that you can now download your entire Facebook profile, including photos and wall posts just to have as a backup.  Many of us upload photos to Facebook that we might not keep copies of elsewhere and now we can archive all of that.

Hootsuite and Twitter were the next big topics of discussion with questions about how to keep track of posts that have already gone out.  One person was using a Word document of all scheduled posts in order to periodically cycle back through some of the really important information going out.  We then got into downloading Twitter updates.  This was important for two reasons: to keep track of what has already been tweeted, and in order to have a record of tweets.  The City of Livingston is getting ready to get on Twitter and one of their big concerns is that they must have a record of everything that they tweet.  We found several options for archiving Twitter info and there are probably many more out there.  This article outlines various options and talks about why archiving is important.  One that we tried out this morning was Tweetscan.

What we found was:
- html version is easier to read
- csv file could provide you with a lot of user data, i.e. when people are replying most often and therefore when you should send your tweets

For the City of Livingston we also discussed using hashtags to get people organized around important local events and really utilizing #LivingstonMT.  Be on the lookout for the City of Livingston on Twitter soon.

Jamie from Reclaim MT was at our meeting this morning and would love to get more followers on Twitter: @reclaimMT (recycling pickup in Livingston – Jamie posts great information regularly).

We also talked about changing Facebook settings so that you can see everyone in your news feed.  To do that scroll down to the bottom of your newsfeed and click “edit options” then choose “all of your friends and pages”.  Also, very important are Account Security Settings.  You can go into these and make it so that Facebook sends you an email anytime your Facebook account is logged into from a new computer.

Lastly, I shared the new custom iPhone cover that I designed using one of my photos and ordered from http://www.getuncommon.com/.  We discussed how this could be a great promotional tool and possible give away when bigger ticket items are purchased.  This company also has a large selection of pre-designed cases for those of you who want something different but are not artistically inclined.

If you have any questions about any of the topics discussed feel free to email us or post them in the comments.

Thanks to everyone who joined us!  Looking forward to more next week. Have a great weekend.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us, advised us, done business with us, and believed in us!!  We look forward to seeing what the new year brings our way.  We hope you are enjoying this time in the company of loved ones and wish all of you the very best this holiday season!

- Angela & Chieko

For all of you dying to know what we finally came up with for our Halloween costumes “avec wings”, here they are:

Angela went as a “Social Media Butterfly” sporting an adorable pettiskirt, wings, and social media icons that she ironed on to her shirt.  It was a simple, fairly easy costume to assemble that turned out really cute.

I, of course, had to go a much more complicated and difficult route.  I decided last year that I wanted to be a fly fishing fly for this year’s Halloween and had set my heart on a totally different costume than what I ended up making.  At almost the last minute, I came up with the idea to be a Blue-Winged Olive.  Using chicken wire, plastic refrigerator tubing, batting and a fleece blanket I constructed a stuffed olive costume onto which I sewed blue wings.  I topped it all off with a red crocheted hat to signify the pimento!

Thank you to Wholesale Girls/Little Girl Mart for the lovely wings and the inspiration for this year’s costumes.  Now, what are we going to be next year?

And can you blame us?  Today we visited with an amazing new client of ours – Wholesale Girls/Little Girl Mart.  They are an online business here in Livingston, Montana that basically started out of one woman’s home and has now grown large enough to be housed in a warehouse on the outskirts of town.  Angela and I went to take some photos for their social media marketing and were in heaven!  Imagine rows and rows of fluffy tutus, butterfly wings in every color imaginable, flowers, feather boas, headbands, and on and on.  Naturally we had to test out the products ourselves and incredibly they even had wings that matched my sweater.  If I could get away with it I might wear wings like these with every outfit.

Halloween seems like the perfect excuse to sport a pair of wings so we have been racking our brains trying to figure out clever costumes for ourselves that include them.  Pretty much any compound word that has “fly” in it was on our list.  If you can figure out a way to work them into your Halloween costume let us know.  And send us a picture!

Yes, here at H&H Web we are women and yes we do love shoes.  There’s just no getting around it.  And as a photographer, I happen to be slightly obsessed at times with photos of shoes.  Which is funny because I really do not like feet at all…

Thanks to Lindsay Wells of LW Photography for humoring my obsession and taking a photo of Angela’s and my feet along with some other great photos that she took of us.

We just finished helping Megan from Eubank Creative switch her website from a completely flash based site to a WordPress website that Megan will be able to update herself.  The theme that Megan decided on has a nice portfolio section to really highlight her work and her husband Charlie’s photography.  Megan’s amazing graphic design work and great taste combined to create a website that we really love.  And Megan was the dream client to work with, always organized and timely with content.  Be sure to go look at all of the pages on her site and bookmark it for any time when you might need a graphic designer!

For a short time we are offering a $50 Facebook special to new clients.  We want to help you get your Facebook business page set up the right way the first time!  No one wants to spend precious time doing something incorrectly only to have to redo it, so let us help you right from the start.

The details: We will spend an hour with you setting up your business page on Facebook and giving you a tutorial on the basics of running the page.  We will gladly answer simple functionality questions that come up after our initial tutorial either by phone or email.  If you would also like a customized consultation regarding content strategy that is an additional $25/hr.  Give us a call or email us to take advantage of this offer today!

Yesterday I spent the afternoon consulting with Eric Adams of Montana Fly Fishing Guides.  Eric is extremely tech savvy, he even built his own website and has already set his business up on Facebook and Twitter.  His main concern was that he is about to enter his really busy season and will not have time to keep up with what he has going.  He also wanted to make sure that he had a good understanding of what he should be doing to fully utilize all of the tools that he already has in place.  Here are just a few of the suggestions that I made to help him streamline his social media marketing and keep it all simple.

•  I set him up on Hootsuite.  Hootsuite is a wonderful tool where you can access all of your Twitter and Facebook (profile and pages) accounts.  You can post updates to multiple accounts at the same time or just one, you can schedule posts to be sent out later and you can follow all of your news feeds.  This will be especially helpful to Eric during the summer months when he has less time to be on the computer and he can plan a week’s worth of updates at one time.

• We looked at his Twitter account and got him going following more people instead of just letting them follow him.  It is always a good idea to reciprocate and follow some of the people who have found you.  It will also benefit Eric to be following more people because he can then pass on any interesting information that they tweet and not always have to come up with original content.

• Eric has a built in source of content in his clients so I suggested that he share their stories periodically on his Facebook page.  This will help with getting people to his page, especially if he posts photos, and it will encourage interaction.

• Finally, Eric is interested in learning more about social media so I recommended that he start reading Mashable.com and follow Chris Brogan’s blog.

Eric is definitely on the right track and hopefully our meeting yesterday will make things easier for him.  He has already done a great job of implementing some of what we talked about.  He also knows that if he gets too busy this summer to handle it all by himself, we are there to help him.

If you are interested in fly fishing you should check out his website and be sure to become a fan of Montana Fly Fishing Guides on Facebook to see what he’s up to.