Caroling on the Circle, Mon, Dec 6th. at 6:30 Food Drive and #Tweetup #SussexDe #NetDe #EVcarol1206

MONDAY, DECEMBER 6th. at 6:30pm

Join us for Caroling on the Circle in Georgetown.

I would also like to invite all Sussex County Twitterati and facebook friends to join us for a Tweetup on the Circle.  Meet in front of The Brick Hotel right on the circle.  Bring a friend and lets just have a great time together !

This year, El Centro Cultural will collaborate with the Sussex County Council to celebrate the annual Caroling on the Circle. The children’s choir from St. Michael’s Catholic Church and the local marimba band Lyra Marquense will perform Christmas Carols in English and Spanish.

This event is also, one of Sussex County’s biggest food drive.  Food collected will be donated to various churches and organizations in the county.  So please bring non-perishable food items to donate.

The hashtag for this event is #EVcarol1206

 

Dream, Believe, Dare and Do applied #DeHappyHour #NetDe #SussexDe

Just a few months ago, I attended the Social Media Network Train….Well I jumped on board the train.  So many interesting people, so many people interested in Social Networking.  I have come across so many interesting people since then and have enjoyed talking and tweeting with you all.

It seemed like most of the networking was going on in New Castle County, and well it’s a little hard for me and probably many of us in Lower Delaware to make it to those social events.  

My DREAM:  Though the use of #NetDe brings us all closer, my Dream is to make Delaware ONE from New Castle County to Kent and Sussex Counties.  Through the use of Social Media we are ONE and the First State Rocks when it come to using social media to unite us all.

But I wanted to see more participation from lower Delaware.  And I wanted to see a more regular events that gets us all together.

Enter #DeHappyHour.  Lets make it State Wide.  Lets have some #DeHappyHour’s downstate.  Rodney Jordan was my inspiration.  It’s hard enough for Rodney to keep up with the #DeHappyHour’s upstate, so I’m pitching in to help.

I BELIEVE:  That #DeHappyHour could work in Lower Delaware.  Maybe not as often as once a week, but maybe start out once a month.  I BELIEVE I can do this, and I BELIEVE there are others out there who are also interested.

The DARE:  So I took a dare and Flipped it out there.  I tweeted it and got responses of interest.  With the help of Elizabeth Purcell, I got a contact and venue that was interested in doing this.  After contact Chrissy from Abbott’s Grill, I found that she was excited to help me out and host our first downstate even.  What a perfect place, beautiful Downtown Milford.  What a cool place, Abbott’s Grill.  Big enough to accommodate a crowd.

DO:  Half the battle of getting something new started is stepping over the thresh hold and making it happen.  Well I did just that. I’m on the DO !  It’s starting to come together and I’m excited to be able to share this with all of you.  Lets all be Doers and help make this a success !

So to anyone, from New Castle, Kent or Sussex County.  If your into Social Media or NOT.  If you want to meet the best people in Delaware, I’d like to invite you to our first #DeHappyHour in Southern Delaware, Thursday June 3rd. from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at Abbott’s Grill in Downtown Milford.

You can get tickets (FREE) and directions by going to http://sdehappyhour.eventbrite.com

Lets all be Doer’s and come out to #DeHappyHour on June 3rd.

Thanks to Rodney Jordan, Elizabeth Purcell and Abbott’s Grill and to ALL of You who are my inspiration.

Anyone wishing to help out in future events, or in hosting or sponsoring a #DeHappyHour please contact me at sdehappyhour@comcast.net

Thanks and See you all there.

Social Media Experiment – If you tweet it they will come #NetDe #SussexDe

Over the past year I have hooked up our Campground, Tall Pines Campground ( @tallpines_del ), to Facebook then to Twitter.  I noticed toward the end of the 2009 season that if I tweeted something about the campground, the phones would ring off the hook.  Most times it was simply that we had tent or RV sites available for a particular weekend.   

NO it couldn’t be so.  Twitter didn’t do that.  But yet the pattern was consistent. This year we added cabins to our campground and I wanted to get the word out.  So this winter, in the middle of the blizzards, I created our cabins web page, then sent the word out on Twitter, BAM!  Within a half hour of tweeting that we now had cabins, the phone started to ring with enquiries about our cabins.  In fact I took 3 calls before the office even opened.  Every person I spoke to said they got the info from Twitter.  NO it couldn’t be so !

So this time I did a little experiment.  I intentionally didn’t tweet anything for several days, then yesterday morning, I tweeted it up, in fact, lots of our followers re-tweeted for me, Thank You very much !  Using carefully chosen hashtags I sent out several tweets about our cabins, about camping in general and also, very important I used #NetDe.  

BAM !  The phone rang off the hook yesterday like crazy.  Our online reservations were coming in like crazy and my middle of the week staff of ONE plus the manager was hopping all day.  Reservations and inquiries about our cabins and overnight sites came in like crazy.

Was this just a fluke ?  Maybe.  Was it because the weather was so nice, Maybe.  Our web stats show that we get the most hits on Sunday and Monday, most likely people are planning for the next weekend on these days, but never in the middle of the week do we get that many hits or phone calls.  Our cabins are booking up.  Our Deluxe cabins are almost totally rented for July and August and now the primitive cabins are booking up.

Toward the end of the day, I read Ken Grant’s ( @kengrantde ) blog piece on Laurie Gelb’s Brilliant Plan To Promote Delaware  http://ow.ly/1vI4w .  It seems that I’ve done most of the things suggested in the article, and if my little experiment actually proved something, using social media in various forms can be an asset not only to a business trying to attract new people, but also, it should work at attracting people to Delaware.

Dream, Believe, Dare and DO