First Dance Mom 'fight'

Well I did say I had never experienced anything like on that Abby Lee Dance show ... I swear I totally jinxed myself by saying that.  Sure enough on Monday it happened to me.  Listen to my link below to hear what happened:

Listen to my podcast

So what do you think ... do you feel that all kids under the age of 12 should always have direct adult supervision or do you have other views on the topic.  As I am sure you can tell I am pretty open and feel that each parent should decide for themselves in a situation like what I experienced.

On the topic of dance we are in the throws of fundraising and are now raffling off 2 season tickets to the London Lightning basketball.

On the topic of microblogging if you follow either my personal twitter @courtincanada or my work account @westernureg you will notice I tend to post quite a bit.  I like to engage and love responding to people.  One of my favourite things to do is watch my klout score ... it usually goes up or down one point each week.  The highest I have gotten would be 63 last year during So You Think You Can Dance.  I normally live tweet and even got a follow a few years ago thanks to the show from @TheEllenShow ... my claim to fame lol!

What is your favourite microblogging site?

Money, money, money

Dance is expensive ... ok I said it. Today we are going to talk about money. The costume deposits are due soon ... cue the music. With my son dancing 7 numbers each competition my deposit total is $525. On top of that they just convinced him to join the competitive jazz class on Friday nights bringing my monthly total to $400 to the studio for his classes and comp fees. Yup being a dance mom is quite expensive. I often marvel at how my mom managed to pay these fees for me. My husband and I are much better off than my parents ever were. I know that things cost more now but still back then there was a standard living too.

With money comes fundraising. The more we raise the less our fees for the competitions are in the Spring. Our first adventure is called Blue Jean Bingo Bash on November 9th at the Lambeth Legion. Single tickets are $25/ couples $45. We figure if all parents come and then bring one other couple we will hit our target. I am hoping to convince my girlfriends to all come for a fun night out.

Work is crazy frustrating right now. The campus paper is continuously printing incorrect information and it is killing me. Due to the nature of our business I can’t correct them outright and have to go through the proper channels which usually end up getting so complicated they don’t correct the problem. First the paper ran a story on the new Opt Out process ... oops they misquoted and flooded the Helpline, Counter and email with poor misguided students. Next they ran a story on how the big bad University over charges students. I fully understand why they are upset however they ran all the wrong information. The tuition due date was wrong, amount of a late fee wrong, reason a student would be charged a deferral fee wrong, they even got the request for deferral wrong. When students contact our office to complain about this and we correct them they get super annoyed. If the information was correctly reported initially we wouldn’t be in this situation.

With my social media class I am working on analytics. I was super excited to find that my sprout social actually kept all these stats. I learned that 32% of our twitter followers are between 18 & 20 and 33% 21 & 24. Recently our biggest engagement on Facebook has been our message about the preliminary exam schedule from Friday.

Bring It On ... no really

We are on the run to Thanksgiving weekend and a much needed break from the studio life we’ve been living. My son has now picked up an extra 2 classes a week out of pure interest. He has decided he wants to try his hand at Acro (mix of dance and gymnastics) and then another jazz class just for the kids on the competitive team. Means my leaving work by 4pm on Friday and then bring him along to his sister’s dance on Saturday so that he is at the studio in time for his new class.

'Spirit Fingers'

I almost forgot my ‘Bring It On’ moment! So if you have seen the old movie about the cheerleading team who go to a competition only to find many other teams using ‘spirit fingers’. I’ll give you some background. My niece is on the precompetitive dance team at another London dance studio. Each Saturday her mom and I meet at my grandmother’s for tea while we bide time as both our kids dance. We were sitting there having a good chat when my sister in law remembered she hadn’t mentioned that my niece was going to be doing an Extended Musical Theatre number. That reminded me I forgot to tell her about Kian dancing in his Extended Musical Theatre number to a song from Mary Poppins. My sister in law LOVES Mary Poppins so I was excited to tell her. That was when she announced my niece was ALSO doing a number from Mary Poppins. I pulled the song up on my Dropbox and it was the same song! Wow ... I swear it was like living Bring It On lol!!!

After the dance day was done and we were all back home I posted this same story on my personal facebook. Very quickly the owner of our studio saw my message and commented on it. I was glad to be able to give her the heads up prior to meeting this other studio at a competition in May. When I was dancing this would have taken ages to communicate and many telephone games to get to the owner.

At work this week one of my employees came to me to ask why a student who attended Western in 1994 did not have a campus email address. I had to explain that before 2000 we didn’t have a need for a userid and that only since 2007 have we stored Western Identity information beyond graduation. He was floored. When I mentioned that I didn’t have an email when I attended Western he couldn’t get his mind around it. He was born in 1994 so his entire life email has been a main tool for communication. Thinking on this it is no wonder that students have an expectation for the university to be on social media. The idea that transcripts aren’t available electronic ally just doesn’t make sense to current students.

This leads me into our new assignment on analytics. My manager and I were just talking about this in relation to our budget proposal and accomplishments. This was the first year that we included social media in our accomplishments. For this assignment I will use the work accounts that I manage for the Office of the Registrar at Western University. We haven’t officially created a social media campaign or set goals yet. I think this exercise will benefit me at work and help quantify how we are doing in our current efforts.

One month down ...

So now that we are a month into the dance year let’s reflect on dance life. 9 hours of class work, 7 hours of competitive practice, 5 hours of driving to the studio and home ... my son’s smile when he dances = priceless.

It may seem crazy but honestly it is just normal to me. I also take 5 hours of dance myself and my daughter has an hour of dance and an hour of gymnastics a week.

I feel a little lost without any dance shows this week. I couldn’t find Dance Kids ATL this week and I missed Dance Moms last night.

On a non dance mom topic last weekend I ran in the ‘Fear the Purple Colour Run’ up at Western during homecoming. We were raising money for MADD Canada. This weekend I am running in the 5K ‘Run for the Cure’ to fight breast cancer. My husband’s Aunt is currently fighting breast cancer so this run means a lot to me.

At work we recently switched to a software called Sprout Social for managing our social media accounts. We used to use Hootesuite but found it was lacking as it only allowed an account to be associated with one userid so if you have multiple users it was hard to tell who had done what. We have a main 3 we use Facebook mainly to reach out to the parents of our students so they are aware what deadlines are happening, Twitter to reach our students and YouTube for instruction that can help both students and their parents.

An interesting test on how effective our Twitter is happened for us in June. First year registration opened on June 20th at 9:30am. We tweeted this and had @westernu retweet for us so that our reach was as broad as we could make it. There were some students sitting over in SAO who were texting with friends back home who saw our twitter feed and alerted them to the fact registration had already opened. They thought it was opening at 2pm when their schedule indicated they had class scheduling with SAO. Their parents left SAO to come over to Student Central to demand their students get into all the courses they want then and there instead of waiting for their appointment at 2pm. It was quite eye opening for those in management who for years had downplayed the significance of social media.

Two of my favourite brands that use social media are Lululemon and Apple. This week it was announced that the Apple brand is the most valuable brand in the world. You would think that the fact they are such a valuable brand they would have a great social media presence but Apple doesn’t. As it stands they operate a few different Twitter and Facebook accounts for things like @AppStore , @iTunes , @iBooks. They don’t engage their followers but spend the time pushing out messages to their followers. On the other hand Lululemon spends most of their time engaging and encouraging followers and fans to share experiences and things in their life with the company. They have @lululemon, @lululemonlive, and @lululemonteams. While Apple does a very good job of getting their products out there and sought after I feel Lululemon uses social media to their advantage. They engage their clients and make them feel special all the while also getting their products out there and sought.