Sounds like a song, doesn’t it?

So, with my, uh, vast knowledge of social media, I appear to have been promoted to the role of Social Media Marketing Director for my husband’s martial arts dojo.

(Fine. I did promote myself, but someone had to.)

One of our intentions, in light of recent changes we’ve decided on, is to begin rebuilding the dojo; to do this, we’ll be working to build up the sense of community spirit that has been missing at the dojo for the past few years. We live in suburbia, in a true “bedroom community”, so a sense of community isn’t always such an easy thing. People are often too tired after all their commuting to indulge in community spirit.

Anyway, whenever I think of “community”, my thoughts always turn online. I thought, well, why not put to good use all the things I already know (and have fun with daily), like blogging and Twitter and Facebook?

So I’ve been busy. And now – ta da! I present to you the fruit of my labors (all performed yesterday, some of it in the interests of procrastination. Today I’m going to write. Really. I promise.)

The new dojo blog. I decided to opt for a Wordpress.com blog instead of a self-hosted one because the server my husband’s using for the dojo’s website requires extreme technical prowess to install a blog. I don’t have anything even approaching technical prowess. I like to use a nice little something called Fantastico that works like magic a la presto. But it’s not something the dojo’s webhost offers.

So Wordpress.com it is. Also, the tags in a post show up at Wordpress.com’s tag pages, and perhaps people interested in the martial arts we specialize in might find us that way. Don’t want to waste any opportunities, right?

(I must say, though, that a blog on Wordpress.com is very limiting design-wise, when compared to a self-hosted blog, or even a blog on Blogger or Typepad. This seems to be so even if you choose to upgrade to the premium option. On the other hand, there are some nice little widgets and bits of shortcode – creating a contact form, for example, was a breeze.)

Renseikan is live on Twitter! We’ll be tweeting about martial arts stuff, so if you’re interested in karate, aikido or jodo, please do join us @renseikan. We’re looking mighty sparse right now in terms of followers …

And the pièce de résistance: the Renseikan Fan Page on Facebook! This one took me a while, because I didn’t have a clue how to set up a fan page on Facebook; it even took me a while to figure out how to upload a profile pic. But I did it! (I still actually don’t have a clue exactly how I did it – it took a fair bit of bumbling around and holding my breath.) I’m not too sure exactly what we’ll be posting to the fan page, though, not being one to join many fan pages myself (I think I’m following two, both of them fan pages of friends).

There are other bits of marketing we have to do, including a promotional flyer for physical distribution in the new neighborhood the dojo will be in. But one of our students is a real marketing whiz, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can get him to write up some dazzling and hypnotic copy for us.

But in terms of the social media side of things, I can’t think of anything else right now. Any suggestions? Have I missed out on anything? And if you’re interested in the martial arts (you all are, right? Right? It’s okay to fib to me and nod your head vaguely), what kinds of things would you like to see being tweeted/blogged/Facebooked?

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