Carrot Creative Blog

**This post was originally a guest post on  SmartBlog on Social Media and can be viewed here.

In this landscape, where everyone talks about the need to “get” social media, a basic social media audit can help you save a great deal of time before rolling out a larger strategy.

Carrot Creative’s audit takes into account your current social media presence but also looks at what assets you have that can be leveraged across online channels. For example, while some people go down a checklist — Do I have a blog? Do we have a Twitter account? How about a Facebook page? — we look first at what you already have and then how you can push it out to the community.

Here at Carrot Creative, we obviously like social media.We live and breathe it. We also like charity and getting involved in the community. So when our nice friends who organized the successful Social Media For Social Change (SM4SC)last year in Boston asked us to participate in the New York version this year—we obviously said yes.We also loaned some of our skillful Carrot Crew members to help with some redesign work as well. (Don’t worry, we have them back and they look well-fed)

So, here’s the deal:

Photo courtesy of Kelly Samardak and Just an Online Minute.

Last night Carrot Creative co-hosted the second drinks gathering for Digital DUMBO. This was another hugely successful event with not only local DUMBO companies represented by HUGE, The Jar Group and Free Association but our friends from across the bridge. Tim Nolan, an extremely talented flash artist displayed his work on the flat screens kicking off a new trend of featuring an artist or display from the DUMBO scene.

Photo Courtesy of Style Coalition. More photos from the event here.

Last night I had the privilege of attending the Style Coalition’s Digital Moda event organized by Inside the Tents bringing together the fashion, media and technology elite. How was it? Well, besides AWESOME I don’t know how else I could describe it.

Photo Credit: Kelly Samardak, Just An Online Minute

Yesterday I attended the “When Social Media Becomes Unsociable” panel part of this week’s “Social Media Week” in New York. The panel, held at Fleishman Hillard’s New York office was full of people who engage/work in the new media space including:

• Constantine Basturea, Converseon
• Steve Coulson, The Advance Guard
• Peter Himler, Flatiron Communications
• Brad Mays, FH Digital Dallas
• Amber Naslund, Radian6
• David Bradfield (Moderator from FH Digital)

We hope you’re as excited as we are for today’s inaugural.

To make the most out of today’s historic celebrations we’ve compiled a list of social media websites dedicated to the inauguration.

Share My Inauguration

Follow 24 students from an inner-city Chicago school as they travel to Washington to experience national treasures and our election process firsthand. The site is enhanced with student created video and has a section where you too can share your inauguration experience.

Baratunde.com

Our good friend Baratunde Thurston will be live tweeting and blogging the inauguration. If mainstream TV is more your thing, he’ll also be on CNN.

My fellow Interwebians. In a little over four days our country will finally experience the change we’ve all been working so hard to initiate. The members of the >carrot crew have been staunch supporters of the Obama administration since day one and can’t wait to experience the most important inauguration in modern memory.

But let’s face it, after next Tuesday we’re going to be looking for our next big cause to rally behind. Luckily that day is already here.

The Twitter community is looking for the best of the best. Superhuman Twitterers who embody the spirit of the social web. Enter the Shorty Awards: aka the Internet People’s Choice Awards.

I just wanted to say thank you on behalf of the entire @CarrotCreative, for the positive feedback & numerous features of carrotcreative.com. We really had a blast putting together our site, and it was a great way to test out some ideas and technologies, creatively. We’ve been featured on numerous CSS sites (css WOW, cssimport, CSSclip, CSS Remix , to name a few) for inspiration to others. We’ve also been cited as an example for designing cityscapes (Lee Munroe) and wooden websites (FarStyle.com). We’ve even received feature for just general inspiration (The Best Designs), and even a nice nod to our name & brand (DesignO’Blog). Finally, we had some recognition for our use of jQuery (Build !nternet & another link I’ve misplaced), which powers the sliding navigation & the real icing (and sprinkles) on the experience of the site.