This is intended for the greater Roger Smith Community and is an open invitation to participate in our Culture. It is a training syllabus aimed to improve our community’s online awareness and impact.

To start we need to assess the platforms that we are building.  We have active engagement on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Tumblr and a couple of other Social Media platforms. To engage in a blog marketing strategy is the method that we gravitate to in an effort to reach larger audiences. Here are my notes on the path towards full community engagement in the Roger Smith Social Media program.

1. Get people on the same platforms. Everyone should have their own accounts and be advised on best practices.

• Facebook
• Youtube
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Other

2. Establish Best Practices

Commenting on youtube videos, facebook posts and blog posts are great ways to engage with people. It demonstrates to the community that you are reading, listening and looking to further engage. It is said that to increase the amount of comments on your blog you should post 10 comments on others.

Sharing is one of the most essential elements of a social media program. We aim to build a culture that actively shares content internally and to larger communities. To use blog platforms to format relevant media is a good way to organize content that can be shared effectively. We have our Social Media hub Roger Smith Life which is a great blog to share content from and a series of Tumblr blogs that are set up to be individualized sharing platforms. I like to describe tumblr accounts as bulletin boards.

Follow and Subscribe to the social media accounts that you like.

“If you like it, share it!” Make sure to share other people’s media more than your own. What goes around, comes around. If you share others’ work, they will share yours.

3. Keep it local, in abundance and be sure to engage offline! Being Social in person is the key to success. Face to face interactions are probably the most important ingredient in an effective Social Media Strategy. If you localize the objective so that the people you interact with online are the people that you see every day, know or are personally attached to, you will find yourself immersed in a well rounded social media experience.  Start small, start local and understand that your network will grow organically over time.

Assignment for those who look to be more engaged.

1. Subscribe to and post 10 Youtube video comments on any of the accounts below.

• http://www.youtube.com/user/rogersmithnews
• http://www.youtube.com/archingbridge
• http://www.youtube.com/panmanproductions
• http://www.youtube.com/ekrogersmith
• http://www.youtube.com/user/adamjwallace1

2. Share 3 of the videos that you commented on to your Tumblr account. If you don’t have a tumblr account yet, you should sign up for one.

3. On tumblr, reblog a post from someone that you know.

I plan to be persistent in my goal to increase and improve community engagement. I look to instigate activity internally so that we can be well versed in our future online engagements. Don’t be afraid to post questions on the blog.

Please Participate, Comment, Share and Engage.

Talk to you soon.

John

It is a military notion to centralize communication tools so that everyone within an organization, community or ecosystem is operating within a similar structure. With many blog platforms to choose from, I believe that tumblr is the right fit to increase our community engagement. John Birdsong has written a very thorough explanation of the platform and its functionality which will be able to help you understand how this system really works.

Click here to learn more about the platform.

What am I talking about?

Distribution!

In an effort to expand our internal communication, I look to have all of the participants within our broad community to utilize the same platform.

Here is a list of tumblr blogs to follow

John Knowles

Adam Wallace

Brian Simpson

James Knowles

Ek

Melissa Rodriquez

Lily’s nyc

John Birdsong

Aleks aka Freakcast

Abianne Prince

Others to follow

Julia Roy

Gary V

Frank Wallace

Panman Gallery

Panman Productions

To look internally and think locally is the objective. The people on this list are members of the greater Roger Smith Community who interact with you on a daily basis. It is my goal to broaden our community engagement and open the flood gates to the potential of our team as a whole.

I encourage you to sign up and follow anyone you know in an effort to increase internal awareness of our online presence. If you have any concerns of questions, please don’t be too shy to ask. It is a sharing platform that will allow for media to spread efficiently within our network.

What can you expect? When Panman Productions began its relationship with the Roger Smith Hotel we engaged in a series of dailies which were quick snapshots of the the work that were engaged in at the moment. It is my goal to re-instate the daily notion and open the interactions to all members of the Roger Smith Community. Know that you can be a simple observer or an active participant in content distribution. If you have any question on how to engage in the process I am happy to help facilitate you interests.

For Christmas I received the best present I have gotten in a really long time…

It was an awesome terra bite drive from the Panman Team. For those of you who don’t know, that’s a lot of space to put lots of media files.  What could make a girl happier? (O.K. flowers are cool. I love  flowers, but you get the point .)

Anyway, as a result of this really great gift, I was inspired to clean up my old storage drives, and during this process I started watching all the work I had shot and edited over the years. (Admittedly some pieces were better than others.) Nevertheless, as we approached a new year, I thought it was appropriate to take a look back …… not just on the last year, but the last ten.

This is a medley. Not just a year in review, but a cleansing of my drives and releasing of content I have been holding onto for years.  Hopefully it is a fond farewell. I like what I have done in the past, but as they say, your only as good as your last story… So alas, I must press on.

This year has been a huge period of change for me. I find myself in a completely different place than I was in January 2009, and I look around with amazement. The only constant in life is change, and therefore I must go with the flow and facilitate that momentum within my work.

I want to re-approach my traditional way of creating content and start the New Year off fresh, with a cleansed pallet.

I am not looking to banish the past, but rather release it. I want to evoke the storyteller inside me and really think about new ways to create and live, but first this process was necessary.

Oh one last thing…

There are a few shots I borrowed from other members of the Panman team, so thanks guys for making me look good….again.

The music is from the “IN C REMIXED” project. I highly recommend music lovers check it out.  Jad Abumrad, a composer and radio producer created the version I used. Among other things he’s one of the hosts and creators of RADIO LAB. I insist if you haven’t heard it, you must. It’s my lifeblood.  If you’re curious, start with THIS EPISODE, but listen to them all. You’ll Laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn something new. This is the direction I hope to take my story telling.
-Abianne Prince

It has been almost one full year since Phase II of Roger Smith Hotels’ on-line presence began. I say Phase II because Phase I started about three years ago with Roger Smith News, a video based website used to broadcast and share the inner community that makes Roger Smith special. Now that this type of communication has a name, social media, we find ourselves right in the middle of the movement.  As we look back over the last few months it is obvious how important all of our new friends and relationships have been in shaping our future. 

For the many of you who already know us and embrace our culture, there is a clear understanding that our satisfaction is in knowing you! We are in the people business ~ Roger Smith is not a person – Roger Smith is a community – we look to expand community everyday with new connections, new clients and most importantly new friends. 

In the new social internet it is important to engage in the discussion of social media in such a way that we can help others build and share information. We are excited to engage with people in the dialog and embrace the opportunity to interact face to face. 

We are excited to be part of the Social Internet and hope to learn more about others who have similar experiences. Please feel free to reach out through any of our social media platforms.  Thanks to everyone who has helped build the Roger Smith Community. Please Share, Comment and Engage!

In the links below you will find great blog posts, editorial articles and even a couple of thoughtful videos published by our guests ( who we like to call friends ). Enjoy. 

Some other interesting articles mentioning Social Media and the Roger Smith Hotel;

Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips

Life imitates Twitter at a hotel in midtown Manhattan (ragan.com subscription only)

Q&A: The marketing duo behind New York’s social media hotel

Secrets to Writing a Social Media Policy that Actually Means Something

Market Place: The Professional world and Art Communities

A professional is anyone who has logged 10,000 or more hours at their given profession and should have the qualities of a person who lives breaths whatever they do.  By working with professionals that belong to a community we will engage group interests in order to expand our brand. 

The Art Community

In an art community there are several micro-communities that function in a cross pollinating way. These micro- communities cannot exist without each others.  There are the artists (sculptors, painters, ceramicists, media artists, performance artists, instillation, architects, etc.) all of which again can break up into further smaller communities within a given medium/time period/school of thought. There are the dealers, curators, gallery owners, and collectors all of which have a high stake in the success of the above mentioned group of artists. There are also the academics (critics, art theorists, philosophers, anthropologists, demagogues, and students.) All of these types of professionals function in an interrelated way.  It is our goal is to draw these communities together and be a resource for information and network.