Rhythms Of The World with The Turner Brothers

This weekend was all about Rhythms Of The World and the Turner Brothers...

I started the morning customising my Turner Brothers tee, I didn't like the high neckline in the photos from the last festival so I slashed it up and sewed on a sparkly bow from one of my Lucky Dip Club boxes and I'm pretty pleased with how it looks now, I'm planning to do a black one for the next gig, I'll try and do a little DIY on my blog.

Rhythms of the World is a two-day festival held annually in Hitchin. I absolutely love the ethos of the event, which is all about bringing together local people through music and the arts. There were so many great acts over the two days as well as a ridiculous array of beautiful food and fun activities for children and adults.

I didn't know what to expect from this festival. I knew it was going to be much bigger than the previous gigs I'd joined The Turner Brothers on and that they were playing on the BBC Introducing stage. I was still pretty surprised when we arrived at the site and finally got through the rather stringent security. I wish I'd taken a shot of the place later in the day because by late afternoon every spare patch of ground was filled with people dancing and having a great time!

You can tell from these photos that we were not as lucky with the weather as we were at Rumbellion!

One of my favourite things about these festivals is all the amazing food options. ROTW had pretty much ever food you could ever want, and I did my best to shovel as much into my mouth as possible.

The band were fantastic, I absolutely love seeing them live anyway, but they really rocked it. At the start there was a lot of rain and the field was looking a little bare but they the end there was a huge crowd going right up the hill and everyone was having a great time!

Can you spot me having a dance?

Here are a few of my very favourite shots from the boys performance, you can see a lot more on the Facebook page for the band as well as updates, gig dates and videos of their performances at this and other festivals.

And then we celebrated! If I had one criticism about ROTW, it would be that considering there was a £15 entrance fee, everything was very, very expensive. It was almost impossible to get food for under a fiver, even doughnuts were £4.50 for six. It makes it pretty expensive for families with more than one child to attend these kind of events which is a real shame because there was an incredible selection of food, music and stalls to enjoy. We hung about backstage for a bit...

This is actually the next VIP area to us. We pounced immediately on our snacks and water and left a trail of carnage behind. This seemed better for a photo!

And then we found a bar where they sold buckets of Pina Colada...well that was pretty much it for me after that :)

Next gig is a smaller one down in Suffolk, details here. Oh yeah...and that's Goatboy. He has his own Facebook page here. He likes festivals and rock climbing and going feral.

The day ended with a beautiful curry at Turner Towers washed down with some ice cold beer (Thank you Mrs. Turner!!) and I fell into bed extremely tired and happy, coated in glitter and Pina Colada...

I'm so super lucky to able to go along to these things, we really have a brilliant time at every single one ♥♥♥

Thank you also to my lovely boyfriend Jay for being the most amazing impromptu photographer for the band!!

(I'm looking to take on a a new social media client - if you are an individual or small business whose social media could do with a boost, get in touch for a chat, email me here)

3 Cross Platform Promotion Ideas

One of the things I love  most about the internet is just how many different ways there are to access content about things I am interested in.

Cross promotion is all about using one platform or social network to promote another, and back again. The benefits being, if you can get fans or followers to promote you by retweeting/posting/sharing your content on more than one platform, you are instantly increasing your audience and reach.

Here are three easy ways you can cross-promote your small business, brand or product. Please don't forget to leave a comment if you found these tips useful.

I have a problem with my twitter username. When I decided to change my internet name to Katy Clouds, I was pretty confident I had found a name that noone else was using in the way I wanted to use it. I left twitter to last because it was the only one that was going to allow me to change my username rather than setting up a new account or profile.

The username I wanted was taken, so I am @katyclouds on instagram and @katy_clouds on twitter.

It doesn't matter much, and I don't think it's lost me any followers. However, it's important you are cohesive across all platforms if you are trying to build a brand.

Having the same profile picture helps, and similiar cover photos for twitter & Facebook also give a strong branded image and let potential followers coming over from one platform know that they have found the right you.

Here's an example from The Turner Brothers Facebook and Twitter pages.

You can find dimensions out for all the social networks profile images here.

(I'd be interested in linking a smaller blog here, if you have provided this information in some way on your blog or webpage, please let me know, I would prefer to support a small blogger!)

You could also use Picmonkey if you want to create your own cover photo collages or make sure your images are sized right with their templates. It's free, and possibly the best image editor available online for free at the moment,

So, you want your Instagram followers to check out your brand's Facebook page. You are putting the link in your photo descriptions and in your bio but you don't seem to be picking up many followers.

Think about it. How often do YOU bother looking at peoples bios to find their links and follow them? The internet is making us increasingly lazy, and the shorter number of clicks the better to gain followers, fact.

So I use a little tactic that has proved really successful. It involves creating an image to share your information. An image which can then be posted across ALL platforms, including instagram. I'd like to share a quick tutorial for doing this using Picmonkey (I just can't get enough, it really does rock)

1. Select a suitable image.

I'm going to use Picmonkey's collage option to create a 3 x 3 collage of images for my sharable picture. You can skip this and just use one but I want a high impact, exciting image as my backdrop and I have enough pictures stored to do this super easily.

2. Turn it into a backdrop

Chose 'Edit' at the top to convert your collage into one image and make it available for editing. You can skip making it black and white if you want. In this case, because some of the photos I chose are not full colour, I thought it would look better if they were all black and white. The option to do this is under the little wand symbol on the far left of the Edit screen.

Now we are going to put a screen over the image to make the text stand out against it.

Use the 'overlays' option to cover your whole picture in a big black square.

Then, change Colour 1 to white (in fact, it doesn't have to be white, if a pink or blue screen would work for your brand, give it a shot!) and turn the fade slider up to 50.

The result should look something like this:

3. Add info.

The aim of this image I am creating is to tell the bands growing instagram following how they can find The Turner Brothers on facebook. You could easily use the same tactic on twitter to tell followers how to find you on Pinterest, or even include multiple ways to get in contact.

And it's ready to share :) I'll be posting this on the band's instagram feed later today. This only took me ten minutes and I was writing this tutorial at the same time. Let me know if you give this idea a go.

So you've got your cohesive branding sorted and you've been creating images to share across multiple platforms. How can you keep the momentum going? 

Make sure you save everything you create to post. The image above obviously wouldn't be useful to post on twitter, but as well as instagram it could be used to promote the band on Facebook as a post on it's own and a photo comment, Pinterest, Google+....

Some other ways you could recycle content in this way to increase your content cross promotion:

• Whilst editing images, create a few variations. Change the text to promote your insta feed and use the image a few weeks later on Twitter.
• Repost/retweet previously posted content on a different social network with a cheeky "Did you see this shot of our studio/performance/merchandise yet?"
• Create a collage as an image to post using images you have already shared (a great tactic for dull weeks when you haven't got much new content to share, and creating collages takes only a few seconds in most image editing programs) Save them to use as a backdrop for future info sharing posts too, now that's multi-tasking!

DON'T FORGET:

• Spread things out. Don't post the same image on three networks in the same day. 
• Don't over saturate your followers. Most people won't want to see seven or eight posts a day of the same sort of thing.
• Make cross-promotion only 10% of your content. The industry standard is 70% lifestyle, 20% direct promotion (this would encompass the types of posts we have discussed here as well as direct links to products) and 10% promotion of similar or aligned products or brands.

Let me know if you have any questions, I hope this was helpful!

Katy x

Rumbellion Festival with The Turner Brothers, Theydon Bois

I'm writing this sat in bed because my body hasn't quite recovered from the weekend yet, I think I might possibly have ingested way too much rum...


I've been hanging out with The Turner Brothers recently, an eleven-piece band from Watford whose style is difficult to catagorise (you get a different answer depending on which Turner Brother you speak to) but their website says "their sound is sprinkled with Ska, Indie, Folk, alternative and Rap..." so that probably covers it. Check them out below...

This weekend I headed over to Theydon Bois (much of the journey was spent working on our pronunciation of that...we have been pretty much convinced it's Theydon Boys now though...)

This was the first year of a little festival in the countryside just outside London, called Rumbellion. It was run Pirates Grog, who make rum and Green Yurts who provided tents and yurts at festivals. We didn't know what to expect, but we had an amazing time and I can't wait to go back next year!

We arrived on the Saturday, quite a few people had started the party on Friday night and were already completely covered in glitter...

The Turner Brothers were playing to close the festival on Sunday afternoon, so there was plenty of time for testing out the rum and dancing to the great selection of music. I was especially excited about seeing Craig Charles (Lister from Red Dwarf!) do a funk and soul set, which was incredible, he played Heard It Through The Grapevine and the whole yurt was absolutely loving it, climbing up shoulders into the rafters and crowd surfing...

After a night partying under the stars, followed by being squashed around a campfire (thanks to the photobooth guy for letting me eat his last Tracker bar - if anyone knows who the photobooth van thing was provided by, please let me know in the comments) Sunday dawned with the most perfect weather for sinking as much rum and eating as much great food as possible! We started the day off with crispy bacon and herby mayo rolls with brandy coffees...

Still going to #bringbackcosmic by wearing cosmic clothes and saying cosmic a lot!

And then played ping-pong, danced, ran about wearing a goat mask, watched an impromptu brass band procession and generally just rolled around in a field, drowning in rum and sunshine...

Beating Patrick Turner from The Turner Brothers at ping pong

Would love to give these guys a shout out if anyone managed to catch their name...

... then they realised, ten minutes before The Turner Brothers set, that the equipment the band needed to perform live wasn't there and the guys were not going to be able to perform. The festival organizers were extremely apologetic but said that the equipment had already left.

It would have been a fantastic way to close their brilliant little festival, but we all drank some more rum and ate some lime & chilli corn and it didn't seem so bad after all :)

Getting the organiser guys wearing band shirts!

What a brill weekend, I hope TTB get invited to play next year at Rumbellion (and that there is ever-so-slightly MORE glitter). Thanks for having us to Beth, Gaz, Phil, Alex, Jamie...and whoever else was involved in putting on such an amazing little oasis of music, glitter and love...

I'm off to detox now!

If you want to catch The Turner Brothers performing this summer, a list of their gigs is available on their webpage here. The next one is Rhythms Of The World festival in Hitchin, 20th June. See you there?

** Please check out my Linkedin page if you are a band, small business or organisation and are looking for a Social Media person, I can help :) **

#BRINGBACKCOSMIC

When did you last hear the word COSMIC?

If you are one of my friends, or in fact have met me in the last few weeks, you may have heard it from me. I've started a little project to try and get COSMIC said a little more. It's a great word.

So, #bringbackcosmic is a thing now. Well, I'm trying to make it a thing. So far, I've asked everyone I have met in the last week to try and find an opportunity to use it and spread the word!

You might hear some especially cosmic music, see a particularly cosmic film, or even be standing under the night sky and suddenly feel a little cosmic. If you see an opportunity to  describe something as cosmic, please use it, and let me know using the hashtag #bringbackcosmic on Instagram or twitter 

Saw these two at a festival recently and told them both they were extremely COSMIC.

5 Things You Should Already Know About Staying Safe Online

I wish I had known how important The Internet was going to be when I was 14 and first got it in my bedroom. I was pretty lucky at the time and the only one of my friends that had the Holy Grail of technology at the time, an uninterrupted ADSL internet connection in my actual bedroom. To myself. I have a vague memory of an initial half-hour limit but I don't think that stuck and I was soon browsing all day and night, sucking up everything the internet at the time had to offer. Which was mostly forums, porn and Tampax themed chat rooms. I briefly had an online romance with someone who, in retrospect, was probably a 56 year old man from Utah. No offense, Krypto69....it was the username that finally gave it away.

Now I'm much more internet savvy. I don't post pictures of my boobs online (hello, annoying ebay incident that won't go away), I don't talk to anyone who isn't verifiable. I have a list of things in my mind to look out for before I download or even click unfamiliar links. I delete my cookies.

Here are five things you should DEFINITELY already be doing, and if not, do them right away. 

1. Sort out your passwords.

So lame! How many times have you heard this? You might think you are safe with your first ever password plus a combination of one capital and the number '1' on the end, but you aren't. I have actual real life friends who have their passwords written next to their computer. You can tell it's their passwords because some of them have a '1' at the end. Here's an easy tip for thinking up a new password if you are really stuck.

• Look around the room, pick something slightly odd. 
• Capitalise one letter (not the first) If you think you might struggle to remember which one, you could always capitalise the second letter in every password. Or use your birthday, so I would capitalise the 8th letter (I don't)
• Add the days date on the end.
• I'm pretty confident noone will be able to guess "scHoolnewsletter1/2/15"

This works well because a) you will usually have a visual reminder of your password (extra points if you are able to locate an object that appears in more than one place you use a computer, i.e work and home) b) if you forget it, many sites will say things like "You changed your password on 1/2/15" Another little clue!

2. Log the hell out of Google.

Sorry, fellow internet-savvy preachers, but I know this one won't go down well. I'm probably belong to a slightly more paranoid class of person than you, but I will tell you a story about a situation that made me deeply uncomfortable this week. Whilst browsing a blog at work, I came across a link to a pasta maker. I have been interested in what pasta makers actually do (just buy some pasta, you foodie weirdos). I clicked the link. I looked at the pasta maker for all of thirty seconds, came to my conclusion that some people have too much time on their hands, and left the webpage.

Maybe someone could explain to me then, why three months later and on a total different computer, what do I see popping up in the Facebook ad bar? A little ad for the very same pasta maker. The same thing happened with an M&S mirror the very same week. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my internet browsing to NOT be used as a way of targeting me to buy pasta makers and mirrors that I simply do not need and cannot afford anyway. What a waste of an algorithm - I'll be logging out before I start my browsing sessions from now on.

3. Update all your information

Here's an amusing (read - depressing) story. My mobile recently stopped working. I use my mobile to verify access to my hotmail account from a different computer than usual. I recently sold my laptop and replaced it with a PC. Now I can't get into my email, because the alternative email address that I used was a work email from a role I haven't worked in for over two years. I saw that address come up every single day when I logged in "Is this email still right?" yes yes, get lost annoying pop-up, I want to see if I have been accepted for Deal or No Deal. 

How I wish I had updated that information to an email I actually have access to, as I now have to wait 30 freakin' days before I can get back into my account. Plus, as I can't remember my password to a certain job site where I stored my most recent CV, I now have no access to that either. What a dumb-dumb.

4. Check your old accounts privacy settings. Especially Image Hosting.

I use Photobucket, as many children of the 90's (Is that right? I mean, I was a child IN the nineties, but I was actually born in the 80's.) to store my images that I wanted to share on forums. Little did I know, Photobucket and many other image hosting sites, expect you to notice there is a tiny option to have your account 'private' or 'public'. What this means is, PEOPLE CAN LOOK AT YOUR SHIT. Okay, so not many people wanted to look at my self-created Neopets fan art. But a few (weird) people DID want to look at the 20 alternative shots I took the one time I decided to post my boobs online. 

I'd like to thank a certain weirdo for bringing this to my attention recently. Thankfully, no one will ever believe those boobs are mine since I subsequently breastfeed a child for 8 months. Still, I've gone back over everything I can remember and made sure it isn't public access.

5. Be conscience.

15 years ago during those first explorations of the net, I didn't realise how absolutely everything the internet would be. I wish I had. There are some pretty outrageous comments I have made, things I have posted, sites I have joined that I kind of wish didn't make up my digital history. I made a promise to myself to be as mindful as possible about what I post. You think things are bad now? Who knows how much further the net and everything you have ever done on it will be integrated into our lives in the future? I'm going to be very careful of my cyber trail from now on, and while I don't think it's sensible to be overly paranoid (even though I am the type of person who won't have a loyalty card because I don't want shops to be collecting all that data on what I buy and when, it's not your business when I have period, Tesco.) it's certainly worth being mindful of what you are adding to your personal digital trail.

Stay safe online!!