Sin on a Plate is a delicious dessert that was inspired by a photo on tumblr last weekend. It turned out so well that we are totally adding it to our family cookbook. Enjoy :)
1. Melt the vanilla baking chips - I use a pot of boiling water with a stainless steel mixing bowl nestled on top of, but not touching the water - you can also use a double broiler or bain marie.
2. Spray your glass baking dish with non-stick cooking spray
3. Press the cookie dough mix into the dish in an even layer
4. Spread the vanilla chips over the entire cookie dough mixture
5. Pour the brownie mix over the vanilla layer
6. Bake at 375 degrees on the middle rack until butter knife or toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
7. Serve with vanilla ice cream on top.
simply sinfully delicious!
suggested additions: coconut shavings, crushed pecans or peanuts, caramel sauce: added as layers before baking or as toppings to the completed dish
Because of the fast pace of social media, we are constantly bombarded with distractions from one social network or another.
You have to participate and engage consistently, Facebook seems to change something on a weekly basis, Google has all of these animal-named announcements, new social networks pop up all the time…it’s exhausting to keep up with everything!
I recently asked on our Facebook page, “If you had only 20 minutes a day to spend on social media, what would you focus on?”
OK, so not everyone took the question seriously. In any event, 20 minutes a day isn’t much time when you’re implementing a social media marketing plan. You can easily spend hours, if not days, on social sites!
I’ve been managing online communities for the past few years and I thought I’d share some of my best practices for saving time and being more efficient with your social media endeavors.
Time Management
To avoid wasting time, begin by prioritizing your week. Yes, unexpected issues arise, but start planning for the best AND the worst. Proper planning will lead to improved productivity and efficiency.
Determine how much time per day and/or per week you (or your team) will devote to your social media efforts. Having a set amount of time will help you balance time, effort, and results.
Give yourself time throughout the day to check on your social networks. For example, maybe you check in around lunchtime and before you leave work, or when you get home from work. Choose a routine that works for you. Social media is “social” after all, so make sure you’re checking on your social networks and responding to comments and questions.
Compose your updates in advance. I know: The dreaded social media automation. Yes I schedule tweets, however I’m also online to respond to any comments, questions, and/or concerns throughout the day. I schedule them to be efficient. I do all of my reading in the morning so if I tweeted everything I wanted to at the start of my day, my followers would be inundated with updates.
Identify your top distractions are and eliminate them. Creating a daily schedule can significantly improve your productivity. But keep in mind the best times of day and days of the week for engaging in social media activity.In May, bit.ly examined how the day and time something is posted affects the potential “virality” of the content. I won’t go into the details here, but read the linked article for some interesting data.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for social media so take the time to figure out what works best for you and/or your brand.
Create a Plan…or an Editorial Calendar
I LOVE editorial calendars! Why? Because they bridge content and themes to social media and beyond. Plus, they save time and stress, your content makes more sense, and it’s much easier to remain relevant and consistent for your community.
Create a repository. The more content you create, the harder it is to track. In that editorial calendar, make a tab of promotions you are running. Now, when you’re looking for a promotion to tweet, you have a collection at your fingertips. (Don’t forget to include an expiration date!) You don’t want to retweet a contest you already chose a winner for or a webinar that has already occurred.
Use the Tools
There are so many free tools to help you avoid the social media time suck. This isn’t an entire list…there are a TON out there. However, the following are all FREE.
Social aggregators and management dashboards allow you to follow and engage with multiple platforms. They pull in tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn updates. Some *ahem* Hootsuite *ahem* pull in Google+ updates. You can create searches around keywords you’re targeting and engage with your network.
Monitoring tools allow you to keep tabs on your industry. You can choose a targeted keyword, your industry, your competitors’ names, or your own. They tip you off to people talking about your company or your clients on different websites and blogs.
7 Deadly Social Media Posting Sins You Need To Avoid
via socialmediatoday dot com
A lot of businesses are posting day after day, with absolutely no idea that they are publishing the worst kinds of posts on their social pages. These posts make people cringe, drive fans away or worse – they bore people to death.
If your business is guilty of one of these 7 deadly sins of social media posting, then you need to correct it now!
#1: Lusting To Sell More To Your Fans
If nearly all of your posts try to sell your fans something, then you’re guilty of lusting after their money. You’re also guilty of making the #1 mistake in social media – direct selling, instead of letting your reputation, knowledge and community sell for you. If your Facebook, Twitter and blog pages are strewn with sales talk, get rid of it all right now!
#2: Being Gluttonous About Information
Most social marketers spend their days working to collect or encourage interaction on their pages. This could involve all sorts of marketing tricks, in a desperate attempt to get some comments, likes or shares. Don’t be gluttonous about information – the more you give, the more you’ll receive. Help people, teach people, comment lots and lots!
#3: Having a Greedy Attitude About Who You Are
You must have noticed that the businesses that do really well with social media, are the ones that highlight the people that run their platforms. It’s far more interesting listening to Greg than it is reading something from a stationary company. Don’t be greedy about who you are, you are your business – so share your personality with your fans.
#4: Moving Like a Sloth on Your Posting Plan
A torrid sin in social media posting, is posting too little. Fans like to visit your page each day and see something new there, even if it’s something small. If you’re like a sloth when it comes to strategies and plan implementation, then you need to change your ways – or your social media sites will go one way – down.
#5: The Wrath of The Online Business Guru
It’s nice to be respected in your field, but don’t forget to be humble about it. Being overtly negative in your posts, or overly hostile to an incredibly angry commenter – is not going to elevate you in the eyes of your fans. Settle disputes by email, or at least calm the person down with promises of free samples, incentives and customer service.
#6: Envious of Other Pages Resulting in Copycat Syndrome
If your competitor is doing something great and you feel compelled to copy them all the time, keep in mind that it takes a lot of resources to make an idea work. You could be driving away the fans you have, for the sake of posting something you ‘think’ will work. Find what works for you, use your analytics systems and test out your own campaign.
#7: Too Proud to Ask For Help
No business is an island – I say it all the time. In social media, it takes a community to make a page work, so don’t be too proud to ask them for help. After all, they use your page as well. Get ideas, knowledge and help from your pool of fans, and improve your pages the old fashioned way.
San Francisco (CNN) -- Apple on Wednesday announced the latest version of the
iPhone.
The iPhone 5 looks similar to previous models but has a larger screen and is
lighter and thinner than the iPhone 4S. The company says the larger screen will
make it easier to check and send e-mails and to view Web pages with the phone in
your hand.
The phone also comes with a new, faster processor called the Apple A6; and it
connects to mobile carriers with a 4G LTE connection, making for speedier
Internet browsing.
"It just screams," said Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller, in introducing the
device.
The iPhone 5 starts at $200 with a two-year mobile contract and will be
available on September 21 in the United States. Pre-orders for the device begin
on Friday.
The iPhone 5 is 18% thinner and 20% lighter than the current version, the iPhone
4S. It has a 4-inch screen, measured diagonally, compared to a 3.5-inch screen
on previous versions of the phone. It is the same width as the iPhone 4S, but is
taller than that phone; and the iPhone 5 is made entirely of glass and aluminum.
Those features are likely to be popular with consumers. Another, however, may
cause some backlash. The new iPhone comes with a different-sized charging cord,
meaning speakers and radios designed to work with the old iPhone cord won't
function seamlessly with the new iPhone. The company did create an adapter,
however, so that the old devices aren't useless.
Apple calls this new cord "lightning," and says it is 80% smaller than the
previous iPhone cord.
During a press conference in San Francisco, Apple also announced an update to
its mobile operating system, iOS 6, which accommodates the larger iPhone 5
screen.
The new operating system adds another row of icons to the phone's home screen;
includes a new, 3-D version of digital maps; and has a feature called Passbook,
which lets people pull up airline tickets or payment apps from the locked home
screen.
Apple also unveiled a new line of iPods, including an iPod nano with a 2.5-inch
touchscreen. That device, which starts at $150, is able to pause live radio. And
Apple updated its headphones, now called Earpods, to have better audio quality
and a new look.
Read our live blog from the event here.
For many tech fans, the fall Apple press event is the highlight of a season
filled with gadget announcements and releases. Last week, Amazon unveiled its
latest Kindle Fire tablets, and Nokia and Motorola announced new smartphones.
HTC has an announcement scheduled for later in the month.
The companies are rushing to get their products our in time for the holiday
season, where they will battle it out for consumer dollars in an increasingly
crowded mobile-device market.
This is Apple's sixth iPhone model. Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone six
years ago on a stage just one block away in the Moscone Center.
Since then the iPhone has taken off, selling around 244 million units around the
world. According to research firm IDC, the iPhone and it's iOS operating system
makes up 16.9% of the worldwide smartphone market, coming in behind all phones
running the Android operating system, which accounts for 68.1% of the world's
smartphones.
The winning streak has carried over to Apple's stock price, which hit an all
time high of $683.29 a share last Friday.
Some people weren't impressed with the new device, however.
"Apple doesn't innovate anymore," one commenter wrote on CNN's live blog from
the event. "They got where they are today by taking bold risks, but they are
afraid to change anything that would affect their No. 1 product. Who could blame
them?"
'Sons Of Anarchy' Season Premiere: Dawn Breaks For Kim Coates
"It was a pretty tough place to go to in my head," the actor tells MTV News about the FX biker drama's fiery season premiere.
By Josh Wigler
The fifth season of "Sons of Anarchy" premiered on Tuesday (September 11) in bloody fashion, with one of the lingering plot threads from season four — badass biker Tig Trager's accidental killing of a powerful criminal's daughter — immediately heightened in an even gorier fashion than fans have come to expect from the FX biker drama.
Towards the end of the premiere (titled "Sovereign"), SAMCRO's former Sergeant at Arms, Tig, came face to face with the father of the innocent girl he accidentally killed in the season four finale — Damon Pope, a ruthless gangster played by "Lost" and "Oz" actor Harold Perrineau. No amends were made between the two. Quite the opposite in fact: Tig, handcuffed to a chain, was helpless to watch as his own daughter, Dawn, was burned to death by Pope.
"It was a pretty tough place to go to in my head," actor Kim Coates, who plays Tig, told MTV News about shooting the gut-wrenching scene. "What happens to him and his daughter, I can't even imagine. Kurt told me [about it] back in March. We were in New York together, and when he told me, I actually got the chills. I didn't break down or anything, but I did tear up. I can't even imagine that happening."
The death of Dawn was shot over the course of two brutal nights, Coates said. The actor credits his performance to "Sons" director Paris Barclay, writer and creator Kurt Sutter, as well as the show's props department.
"They built this device where they saved my wrists from being ripped off by the shackles," Coates said of the props work in that scene. "Those were real handcuffs and that was a real chain. Without this propped, leather, rubberized thing underneath my shirt, I wouldn't have been able to do that scene without ripping my hands off. What they were able to let me do was to be in it, be real, and pulling at those chains constantly without ripping my hands off. That saved my entire performance."
"In some ways, it was the easiest acting I've ever had to do," he added. "It was so real. So violent. The tears didn't stop flowing for two nights. When I went home after that second night, I just poured myself a big drink. It was about seven in the morning, and my wife just left me alone. I still have a hard time talking about it now. It's what we do this business for, to be given [material] like that."
Tig has had no shortage of enemies to go up against over the past several seasons of "Sons," but with one flick of a cigar, Damon Pope is now at the top of the list.
"Harold did such a great job. I think he smoked about 40 cigars that night. He was frightening," Coates said about Perrineau's performance. "Pope is the kind of guy that Tig has never been up against before in his life. This is the kind of mobster who is so svelte, money and stealth that you don't even know he's around, but you feel him, always. You could be shot coming out of a bakery at any second. He has that kind of fear factor in him."
Even if Pope delivered the killing blow, there's a strong argument to be made Clay Morrow is also responsible for Dawn's death. Clay was shot by a fellow club member at the end of season four, but rather than outing his fellow Son (and himself), he blamed the shooting on rival gang the One-Niners. That led Tig to seek immediate vengeance, which directly resulted in the death of Pope's daughter. If Clay hadn't lied, Tig wouldn't have gone after the Niners, and Dawn would still be alive. That connection is very much not lost on the grieving, vengeful father.
"Last season, [Ron Perlman's character, Clay] was turned into a monster. Things got out of control," said Coates. "Tig and Clay have been on the outs for a couple of seasons now. But that lie was the gravest mistake for me to hear, for what I ended up doing, for what happens to me. You gotta see what happens between Clay and Tig this year, man."
No matter who's to blame for what, one thing is clear: Tig is at an all-time low. Not only is his daughter dead as a consequence of his own actions, but he's not even the Sergeant at Arms of SAMCRO anymore. Key parts of Tig's identity have already fallen away, and to hear Coates tell it, the turbulent ride is far from over.
"Tig doesn't know where he fits anymore. He's so lost," said the actor. "He's completely off the leash ... his world is free-falling for sure. I think people are going to be absolutely shocked and saddened. Wait until you see what happens."
Here’s a first look at the unlikely casting but uncanny resemblance of Jane Fonda as former First Lady Nancy Reagan. Alan Rickman plays President Ronald Reagan in The Butler, currently filming in New Orleans. Fonda reportedly appears in just a few scenes. The pic stars Forest Whitaker as White House butler Eugene Allen whose career spanned 34 years there. Director Lee Daniels adapted the screenplay with Danny Strong from a Washington Post article.
