UsedEverywhere.com

What a Month It Has Been

Can you believe February is out the door all ready? Phew, it’s been a crazy month. Here’s what we were talking about…

1. We took our in-office discussion took to Twitter and Facebook for feedback. The result on Facebook was seven “likes” and 27 comments. Looks like we hit a nerve!

2. Of course, Valentine’s Day was a hot topic (or a not hot topic, depending on your view). We decided to spread some love with good deeds, a flash-mob and a helpful Top 10 of things your Valentine most likely didn’t want.

3. There was mayhem in the UsedEverywhere offices; many of us were distracted by our impending renovations, others had some peculiar wardrobe choices (ahem, definitely not me…).

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Seller's Lists

A new feature? Sounds kind of scary but don’t worry, it’s not.

We’ve added a new Seller’s List to our site! What is a Seller’s List? It’s a feature that allows sellers to group their ads together and present a neat storefront on the site.

Creating a seller’s list allows you to make a subdomain as well (for example, mine would probably something along the lines of eden.usedvictoria.com). You can also write a description for you seller’s list, which can include HTML code (if you’re computer savvy, unlike me, you can use this to ad a logo, for example).

This feature allows multiple people to participate in one mylist through the use of keywords (in this case, hashtags eg. #eden). The main idea behind this feature is to help people that are raising money for charity or working together for a common cause. Pretty cool, right?

So how do you make optimal use of this magnificent feature? When you’re creating an ad you can do the following three things:

1. Create a “tag” for this Seller’s List. This tag has to be unique (no other Seller’s List can have the same one!). The tag has to begin with the # symbol. For example, #eden or #alaska.
2. You can decide whether or not you want to display the total amount of money raised. This is the sum of all of the prices of this Seller’s List which have been marked as SOLD (this only goes back one year).
3. Then you can decide if you want to display the total amount of money pledged. This is the sum of all of the prices currently displayed in this Seller’s List.

If you’re an ad owner and you’d like to participate in a Seller’s List, here are three more steps:

1. Post or edit an ad including the tag (eg. #eden, #alaska) in the description field of the ad.
2. After posting the ad we will ask you if you want to link your ad to the Seller’s List that has that tag. If you confirm that you do want to link your ad, your ad will show your ad in their Seller’s List.
3. To remove this link, you simply need to remove the tag from the description of your ad. Easy peasy!

A social media success story. And books!

The other day I saw a perfectly good bookcase in the garbage. What a waste. It got me thinking. It may have outlived its usefulness for the owner, but it could have easily had a second life with someone else.

In September 2009 I saw a tweet that linked to a blog post about a community bookcase that someone had set up halfway around the world. I can’t even remember the details of the post, but, essentially, someone found a bookcase, put it in a public place, and stocked it with books. It operates, quite successfully, under a “take one, leave one” principle.

I adored this idea. In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately emailed the executive director of my neighbourhood community centre to see if we could do something similar.

The benefits of a free community book exchange are too numerous to count. Not only does it keep unwanted books from out of the landfill, save money and resources, but it promotes literacy for all kinds of people at all kinds of reading levels. And no library fines!

The response came quickly enough: “Good idea, let’s rock,” he wrote. “I will get the bookcase, you get the books. I will leave it to you to do the signage and to pay attention to its stock and state.”

Within a couple of days there was a new bookcase waiting to be filled. Signage was created by a creative member of the community centre. All we needed was some decent reading material. I got the ball rolling with a handful of books.

Our bookcase looked a little sad at first:

It wasn’t until we started to get the word out using different social media channels (my blog, Facebook and Twitter) that the books really started to pour in. It was filled to the brim in no time flat.

Every once in awhile I tweet out another request, or just to remind people that it’s there. We’ve had some amazing donations from local families.

Every once in awhile my daughters and I walk up there to add books to the shelf and make sure it’s tidy. The shelves are almost always are in good order. Other people in our community are taking care of it too.

It’s been an amazing experience. It was fairly cheap to set up and has many long term benefits, not just for the community, but for my family too. My daughters are immensely proud of the bookcase they helped set up.

If you have a bookcase and a stack of books you don’t know what to do with, perhaps this will inspire you to do the same in your own community. I’d love to hear about it if you.

And if you’re in Ottawa and you have some gently-used books to donate, consider dropping them off upstairs at the Dovercourt Recreation Centre. Thank you!