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.