All fans considered

I’ve been following a blog called “All Cakes Considered” on AnnArbor.com for the past few weeks. Blogger Erin Mann’s got a plan: one cake baked for every week of the year. She posts her results—good or bad—online for us hungry readers to digest. Cool, eh? And, boy, Mann does it all: rum cakes, almond and sour cream pound cakes, Stewed Yard peach cakes, Spanish meringue cakes, tunnel fudge cakes, key lime cakes, coffee cakes…you name it.

Literally, the woman’s got it.

I’ve now got a sugar bent and penchant for bunt pants.

Mann’s blog got me thinking. She writes weekly, on the button, about food. About her experiences. About why the hell sour cream belongs in a cake (apparently, it makes the batter deliciously squishy and moist).

But, most importantly, Mann writes about her purpose, the reason at all that she schvitzes in an apron over a high-powered beater and bowl of congealing egg and sugar.

That should be any writer’s impetus: to communicate to readers a legit reason for reading and caring about a subject, a reason as tangible and spongy as (good) angel food.

I’m working on that, here, at Madonna. This week, I didn’t get as much done as I wanted. My supervisors have constantly been in meetings—or, otherwise, at the microwave while their Lean Cuisines nuke—and I haven’t had much of a chance to sit down and talk with them. I haven’t had the opportunity to share with them my only hesitation with this social media stuff.

Why, in the name of Merlin’s underpants, are we even working a Facebook if we don’t have any content to share, or any fans to share it with?

Monday, I did the research. I glued my face to Mashable, to Beth's Blog and to, my God, yes, even the Foursquare gurus. These pros all say the same thing: you need to have fans. You’ll want at least 1,000. That’s if you want to be credible.

We have a long way to go. The pros do recommend Facebook advertisements, which not only drive traffic to your Facebook fan page, but to your organization’s main site and other social media accounts. However, that costs money. Money Madonna doesn’t have (or want to fork over).

It’s a small school, I know. There isn’t a whole lot of room to wiggle financially. But, it’s incredibly essential that we get this thing up and running. Soon. Our prospective students will be swallowed up by competitors otherwise.

Mann dedicates herself to “All Cakes Considered” and has developed quite a following because of it. She’s weekly committed to posting purposeful content that we can’t get enough of (honestly, I’m pretty sure I’ve put on weight) and Madonna’s got to follow suit. We need relevant and engaging content, and her kind of readership.

We need, too, a honkin’ big piece of chocolate cake and a hearty kick in the ass.