Home Field Advantage - A New Facebook Group for Bloggers!

When it comes to hobbies...I have a lot of them! I often find myself not sure how to spend my free time as I have several different things that all fight for my attention. I also like to share whats going with my different hobbies, thus this blog and others that can be found in the left hand side bar. While this blog has no problems attracting readers or finding people to interact with and make trades with, that couldn't be said for some of my other blogs.

Enter Facebook. I quickly started to find different themed groups where I could eventually share my blog posts and help spread the word. I've been doing that a lot lately for my newest blog on video games. I'm not sure why, but it never occurred to me to look for baseball card groups on Facebook until the other day. However once I started to look, all I could find was a plethora of B/S/T groups. While there is nothing wrong with those, I was hoping to find a group that was maybe more trade friendly or just somewhere would I could post links to my newest post. After a lot of searching I couldn't find anything so I decided to make my own group.

The group is called Home Field Advantage. I know there are others that operate blogs that also keep up a Facebook presence so I'm hoping to find others that will find the group beneficial for their blog and/or for trading and what not. If you are on Facebook, have a trading card blog and are looking for another outlet to get more exposure for said blog or just want to chat or post want lists, join the group. It's currently set to Public so it should be easy to find.

The Buzz - Charlotte Hornets on Social Media

Between Christmas and New Years, my wife and I spent a few nights in uptown Charlotte to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. Despite living just down I-77 in Rock Hill, SC now and growing up in Charlotte, I rarely find myself in uptown. It's always nice visiting, but with all the growth Charlotte has gone through I feel like I'm a visitor in my own town!

One of the evenings while uptown, we walked next door to the Time Warner Cable Arena and caught the Charlotte Hornets vs Milwaukee Bucks game. This was the first time I've been back to the arena since the Bobcats to Hornets transition. I haven't had the opportunity to tour any other NBA arenas, but I'm still amazed by the "cable box" each and every time I visit. I love the subtle changes that have been made in favor of the teal and purple returning. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me so I was only able to get a few pictures on my phone.

Just inside the arena, near a decent sized eating area I found these large 'Hornets Greats' pictures. I don't believe these were here before. The first group, far left is comprised of Muggsy Bogues, Dell Curry and Larry Johnson. The middle group is comprised of Kelly Tripuka, Alonzo Mourning and Kendall Gill. The group on the right is comprised of Glen Rice, Jamal Mashburn and Bobby Phills.

Just to the right of those Hornets pictures is the practice court for the team. You can grab a (incredibly over priced burger) and sit by the large window that separates the arena from the court. While we were strolling by, Hornets forward Marvin Williams was on the court taking a few shots.

We were staying next to the arena at the Hyatt House so we got to and inside fairly quick. This was my first look in person at the new court and looked great. I love the subtle honeycomb design on the court. Even the new arena is starting to grow on me. Even the scoreboard is really impressive. Did you catch the small Air Jordon logo underneath the screen?

While we were waiting for the game to start, I flipped through the program, The Buzz, we were handed as we walked in. Inside is your usual scouting report for that nights game, plenty of stats, advertisements and other little bits of info. Towards the back of the program was a section called Player Headshots. 

Listed beneath each player were their various social media handles. Outside of Facebook, I'm not all that active in social media, but I do find myself following certain athletes and getting a kick out of their status updates and tweets from time to time (Chipper Jones immediately comes to mind!). I don't think I knew many of the Hornets players were on social media to begin with so I found this kind of interesting.

Players of interest:

P.J. Hairston

Instagram: @kangaroo.jack

Gerald Henderson

Facebook: /GeraldHenderson

Twitter: @GhJr09

Al Jefferson
Facebook: /aljefferson25

Michael Kidd-Gilchrist
Facebook: /MKG14Official
Twitter: @MKG14
Instagram: @MKG14

Lance Stephenson

Facebook: /StephensonLance

Twitter: @StephensonLance

Instagram: @stephensonlance

Kemba Walker

Facebook: /KembaWalker

Twitter: @KembaWalker

Instagram: @_KW15

Cody Zeller

Facebook: /codyzeller40

Twitter: @CodyZeller

Charlotte Hornets

Facebook: /hornets

Twitter: @hornets

Instagram: @hornets

2nd attempt at integrating with Facebook

Earlier this year I successfully integrated my toy blog with Facebook and created a page.  I was told by some friends they like to keep up w/ what I do on the blog, yet don't have or want a Blogger / Google account.  So they can now simply 'like' the Facebook page and see all of my updates and blog posts.

I also tried the same thing using a different Facebook account for this very blog, but with it being under a different log in I found it very tiring to log in and out of the two Facebook accounts to post updates and such.  So I deleted the old page/account and started over this morning.  You can find the new page HERE.

I used to have photo albums full of trade bait, photo albums of different themes from my collection among other things.  It'll take me some time to re-create that content so for now there isn't much there.  I do plan on doing some Facebook exclusive stuff there (contests maybe?) so if you have a Facebook account and want to 'like' the page, go ahead.

This is just one more step I'm trying to take to get more people involved in the blog and hopefully unload some baseball, basketball and football cards!

Cardboard Collections is now on Facebook

I'm not the biggest social media user, but a week or so ago I was messing around on Facebook and I created a page for the blog.  My main reason for doing that was to draw more traffic to this blog, but also to share some things with family up in Red Sox nation who otherwise wouldn't check out the blog.

I hope to eventually create some exclusive content for the Facebook page, but for now it's mainly links to posts already published here.  If you are already on Facebook then why don't you LIKE the page.  I know you secretly hit that Like button for Starbucks so why not like my effort?