Baking with alcohol is fun.

I made some alcoholic cupcakes this past weekend.

More specifically, I made White Russian Cupcakes using Kahlua and Vodka!

A friend came over to make some brownies, and while they were in the oven, I went to Pinterest to find a cupcake recipe to whip together. I saw this recipe and just had to make it.

I love this recipe, and when I took them to class, everyone else also loved them, so I decided I should reshare this recipe with the world!

I got the recipe from the great blog Baked Perfection, which also has recipes for Pina Colada Cupcakes, Mint Julep Cupcakes, and Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes.

Now, before you get worried about my using alcohol in cupcakes, I will share what was noted alongside the original recipe: while Kahlua is 20% alcohol by volume, vanilla extract is 35% alcohol by volume.

Therefore, while I put alcohol in the frosting, it was actually less alcohol by volume than the normal vanilla buttercream frosting I make.

White Russian Cupcakes

This made 36 mini cupcakes and 8 regular cupcakes for me.

Oven temp: 350 degrees Fahrenheit

6 tbsp (3/4 stick) of butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/8 cup Vodka
1/8 cup Kahlua
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour


-> Cream the butter and sugar
-> Add the eggs
-> Mix in the vanilla, milk, Vodka and Kahlua.
-> Add the salt, baking powder and flour.

-> Bake in cupcake liners (approximately 10 minutes for mini cupcakes and 20 minutes for regular cupcakes, but this will vary between ovens and other variants, so keep an eye on them)

Now, you could eat these cupcakes alone, and they would be fine. However, this buttercream frosting is fantastic, so you shouldn't skip it.

The frosting would also probably taste great on top of fudge brownies. . . not that I would know. 

Kahlua Buttercream Frosting

1/2 cup (1 stick) of butter

3 cups powdered sugar

3 tbsp Kahlua

1 tbsp Vodka (optional, but recommended)

A pinch of salt

-> Beat the butter until it's creamy

-> Add salt and powdered sugar (slowly, so you don't get a cloud of sugar all over)

-> Add Vodka and Kahlua

-> Taste and adjust as you see fit.

The result:

These cupcakes are delicious and perfect for basically any occasion.

Planning to make these cupcakes again soon,

The Purple Writer

The Sam's Club approach to social media.

This post was written in collaboration with Lyndsey Walton.

We conducted a social media audit of the Sam’s Club brand in class recently. We looked at the platforms they are active on, the content they post, and how they interact with their audiences.

Platforms

Sam’s Club is active on Twitter, Facebook, Google + and Instagram, and have inactive accounts on YouTube and Pinterest.

The brand posts four to seven times a week on its active accounts but has not posted anything for several months on their inactive account.

Sam’s Club has a mobile app but only current members can use this app, so it does not engage with prospective consumers. 

We also don’t know if the app interacts with other platforms.

Content

Sam’s Club does an excellent job producing original content and cross-promoting it on their platforms. 

For example, when they had samples of Sea Cuisine’s fish tacos, they posted an enticing picture in their posts, mentioning the brand @SeaCuisine on applicable platforms.




We did notice that Sam’s Club posted a video about tailgating gear on Facebook but not on YouTube. 

This seems like a missed opportunity of easy cross-promotion.

Interactions

Each Sam’s Club post has a call to action (CTA), encouraging their audiences to engage with the brand. Most of the CTAs are to visit local Sam’s Club locations and try samples or buy products.

Instead of responding to individual posts or tweets, Sam’s Club generally asks those with questions or concerns to directly message the brand so they can respond privately and with personal answers.

Sam’s Club maintains a very professional and concise tone on social media. They use short sentences to convey clear messages, although the brand does use hashtags on Instagram to keep content relevant in current discussions.

Impressions

While Sam’s Club does a great job cross-promoting their original content, we would encourage the brand to utilize a more personal touch, like hashtags and more public engagement with their audience. 

Because Sam’s Club is a retailer and most of the brand’s posts are about products, we also think Pinterest would be an ideal platform for this brand to develop and be more active on.


Ready for us to present our analysis,
The Purple Writer

Why do brands post the same thing on different sites?

Have you ever followed one of your favorite actors, brands or musicians and then been annoyed because they post the same information on everything?

I’m talking about the same post showing up on every social media platform, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and email.

You might have a friend who posts the same picture on Instagram and Facebook every day. That can get old pretty quickly, right?

Thankfully, I follow enough people and brands that this really isn’t an issue for me.

My feeds are full of content and I’ll generally miss the repeated messages unless I’m actively looking for them.


But that’s exactly why cross-channel promotion exists.



What is that fancy term, you might ask?

Cross-channel promotion just means the same content or message is posted on multiple platforms.

The majority of people are interested in multiple brands and only check social media during short breaks in their busy schedules.

This means that it can be harder to get someone’s attention, so brands may need to have their content or message show up multiple times for their audience to actually see and engage with it.

There is a nice summary in the Retargeter Blog which explains that users interact with the different social media platforms in different ways.

It is important to understand the unique qualities of the different platforms you have a presence on, and tailor your message for each of those platforms, to create a “far-reaching strategy that users can truly engage with.”

Another important element of promoting your content on multiple channels is to include links. 

These links can be for your accounts on other social media platforms, back to your blog or other relevant blog posts, as long as they provide a way for your followers and audience to connect and engage with you.

As Lori Pendleton stated in her blog post about cross-promotion, “you have to push [your content] out to multiple channels so it's seen by as many people as possible.”


So if you have a message that you want your followers to see, go ahead and post the same content on all your sites.

Just make sure you tailor your content to fit the individual platforms you’re posting on and include links to your content and other platforms.

Make it easy for your audience to engage with you.


About to post on Facebook,
The Purple Writer

Review of The Killing Zone

Created in 1953 by Ian Fleming, James Bond has appeared in numerous books and movies.

He was too large of a character to disappear after Fleming's death, so several authors have been authorized to write continuation James Bond novels.

One man, however, decided to self-publish his fan fiction and pass it off as an official book in 1985.

Looking beyond the legal problems and expected oddities of a fan-fiction which was self-published and falsely claimed to be licensed by Glidrose Publications Ltd, The Killing Zone  does a good job of keeping in line with its official James Bond counterparts.

Jim Hatfield's The Killing Zone is now infamously known as the Unofficial James Bond Novel.

The Killing Zone starts with Bond's friend and colleague Bill Tanner being killed, followed by M.'s journey to the Carribean to pull Bond from retirement.

Bond travels to Mexico to take out Klaus Doberman, the drug lord who killed Tanner, and comes across several familiar faces.

• Felix Leiter, the American agent who has helped Bond on several cases
• Major Boothroyd, also known as Q, who provides Bond with plenty of guns and gadgets
• Paul Huggins, a former British Secret Service Agent who had turned and worked for SPECTRE before coming to Doberman
• Fuji Chen, a ninja hitman with a knack for customizing guns
• Anya Amasova, the KGB agent who alternates between hating and loving Bond in the film The Spy Who Loved Me

Bond's main love interest of this book is named Lotta Head, and while that name is worthy of one of Fleming's "Bond Girls," the prejudice and discrimination is greatly toned down from what would be found in an original Bond book.

James Bond is older in this book but is still faced with several action-packed scenes in The Killing Zone, including:

• Fighting with spear guns while scuba diving in Mexican waters
• Firing heat-seeking missiles which are built into Bond's Porsche
• Crawling through cacti in the dark to booby trap Russian soldiers
• Racing speedboats across the Mexican coast
• Wrestling on slippery clifftops
• Invading an impenetrable fortress
• Dangling from a helicopter in the sky

The Killing Zone definitely has enough action, sex, and death to fit in alongside official James Bond books. 

Hatfield' story is obviously a fan fiction, but it is still better written than some official James Bond novels I've read and heard about.

For a hurriedly written novel which was produced without support or funding, Hatfield's The Killing Zone does a good job of capturing the essence of James Bond and placing him in a new adventure while interacting with several favorite characters from his past. 

I think this book is definitely worth a short read, especially for Bond fans.

It's available online in several places, so why not check it out for yourself? 

Excited for SPECTRE to come out this fall,

The Purple Writer

* To get more information besides the thoughts in this short blog post, check out this summary by The Book Bond, who owns one of the remaining physical copies of The Killing Zone.

** You can also check out my Prezi version of this review.

*** Feel free to contact me and ask for my full review of this book. It's only 4 pages, but has quite a bit more detail than I could fit in one blog post.

Numbers can add up quickly.

Numbers are an important part of our lives and the internet.

We use numbers to keep track of items, assign value to items we produce, and much more, including measuring the effectiveness of a message on the internet.

Now, since you are reading this blog post, you probably know how to use the internet, and have watched videos on or from YouTube.

Did you know you contribute to a metric just by watching videos?

There are various metrics and numbers that are collected by websites and analyzed, but we'll focus on views of YouTube videos.


Each individual view of a video adds up to a tangible number that brands and individuals can use to gauge their success, popularity, reach, and other useful statistics.

Let's look at the video United Breaks Guitars.

Now, that may seem like a normal, kind of dorky song to find on YouTube. However, this was really the first video of its kind on the internet.

The main singer in the song is Dave Carroll. He was flying with United Airlines and his guitar was broken. 

United, which was used to one-way communication with its customers did not take Carroll's claims seriously and just ignored the whole situation.

After 9 months of this, Carroll created and uploaded this video in July 2006. After about a week, the video had over a million views. It was a viral sensation and was shared on Twitter, blogs, and even mainstream media.

Suddenly, United found itself with a problem. 

Instead of going away after some time, this customer's complaint and the way United handled it had exploded and was getting national attention.

Beyond having the vague idea that people around the world were watching this video, United was faced with a metric: the continually growing number of views highlighted just underneath the video on YouTube's website.

This number was a measurable guide showing how many times potential customers saw or replayed a reenactment of how United mishandled the baggage and consequent complaint. 

Today, over 15 million people have watched the United Break Guitars video and 85,000 individuals have liked it.

The number of views attached to a YouTube video is an important metric, especially when accompanied with shares, likes and dislikes, comments, and so on.

Don't underestimate the power of a number.

Off to contribute to YouTube metrics,

The Purple Writer

Why can't I use your content?

In a world where "google" is a verb and you can find just about anything on the internet, the line between using and misusing content can be difficult to understand.

Individuals and organizations around the world use access control technologies for digital rights management (DRM). 

To clarify, DRM allows owners to protect their content and keep other people from using it without permission.



This concept extends to everything from hardware developments and patents to intellectual property such as art and even jokes.

There are several different, widely-held opinions about DRM. 

-> Some say it is necessary and helps protect people's rights and creations.

-> Others say DRM doesn't actually work and only inconveniences the people who would follow the rules anyway.


I understand the frustration of wanting to use a piece of content, because it perfectly fits a presentation or blog post, but finding myself blocked by a huge watermark or pay wall.

However, I would say it is important to protect original content. 

Someone took the time to code a layout, take a picture, write down their thoughts, etc., and it wouldn't be fair to the original creator if everyone could take that product and claim it as their own.



Beyond being selfish and untrue, claiming other people's work as one's own devalues original creativity and hard work.

Why should people take the time to create something new if there was no reward or credit, and if they had no say in how their product would be used?

Yes, many people create unique things because they enjoy the process and want to share their creativity with other people, but if professional photographers were not able to charge for the use of their photos, they would soon need to look for another profession to pay the bills.

So, I say DRM is generally a good thing. 

It can be frustrating to work with and make using content more complicated, but DRM helps protect original content and maintain the value of genuine creativity and hard work.

Why should I listen to you?

In general, everyone has something they want to say or communicate.

People tend to think their comments are important, sometimes more important than what other people are saying.

But what's the point of talking if nobody listens?

Here are some simple, yet important, rules to follow when communicating with the people around you, whether face-to-face or through social media.

1. Listen

You need to understand the current thread(s) of conversation before you try to jump in with your own thoughts.




Not sure what to pay attention to when listening to a conversation?


My infographic here may help.



You don't want your contribution to be redundant, unnecessary, or maybe worst of all, a conversation-stopper.



Don't bee that person who keeps talking without having anything to add.




The other members of the audience will be more likely to appreciate your opinions if they seem well thought out and relevant.

2. Engage

Now that you have a good grasp of what the conversation is about, you can share your opinions, right?

Slow down!

You should never blurt out your opinions and then walk away from the conversation. 

To begin with, you spent the time to understand the conversation, so you should be interested in where it goes and what conclusions are arrived at.

Secondly, people will lose respect for you and your opinions if you don't respect them and what they have to say.

Give the other members of the conversation a reason to listen to you by listening to them, processing what they said, and responding thoughtfully.

A little common courtesy goes a long way here.

Let's look at an example: The McWhopper.

Burger King recently wanted to enter the conversation centering around Peace Day, which is the United Nations' declared day of ceasefire and non-violence.

Now, engaging with an event like this can often be costly for companies, especially if their products do not directly relate to the main theme of the event.


However, Burger King wanted to use its large presence to help increase global awareness for Peace Day, and proposed a day of peace between its own brand and the the competing brand of McDonalds.

[ The official proposal and design for the "McWhopper" burger can be seen on this beautiful Tumblr website -> http://mcwhopper.com/ ]

McDonalds turned down Burger King's proposal, and that could have very easily been the end of this campaign.

But Burger King listened to its audiences and where the conversation was going, and realized there was a huge base of support for this idea of peace between competing food brands on Peace Day.

They have since opened the invitation up to all restaurants and brands which are interested in joining the conversation.

Whether a Peace Day burger is created and sold, or remains an idea, Burger King did a great job of spreading awareness of Peace Day and opening the conversation up to more global brands who otherwise may not have even considered taking part.

Communicating is a two-way street.

Remember to listen actively so you understand how to best interact with the conversation, and then stay engaged until the end.


Hungry for a Peace Day Burger,
The Purple Writer