POMA Donation: Social Media Marketing Crash Course

One day of consultation from Sherry Kerr of Outdoor Media Resources for initiating or enhancing your social media marketing program.

Social media marketing is no longer optional, and having a Facebook page is not the same as having a marketing program. We will work with the winning bidder to:

• evaluate existing marketing efforts and assets
• determine what you need to accomplish through social media
• create a strategy
• plan tactics for engaging an online community and “getting found” online
• create accounts/pages and/or enhance existing pages.

We’ll also show you many tips for marketing your brand online, along with do’s and don’ts and how to conduct promotions while remaining in compliance with online platforms’ Terms of Service. We’ll include such platforms as blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube and other video sites, LinkedIn, social bookmarking, etc. As time permits, we will also address other inbound marketing activities with which social media is integrated, such as search engine optimization (SEO), content development, email marketing, websites, landing pages, and more.

Your one-day crash course will save you months of trial and error and significantly advance your social media marketing efforts.

Available to individuals, businesses, and organizations. (No agencies, please.)

Consultation can be by phone and web or in OMR’s office in Anniston, Alabama.

Sherry Kerr is an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional with over 21 years of experience doing Public Relations and Marketing Communications exclusively for the outdoors industry.

Get Back to Basics

Sometimes as a hunter I have to wonder what a new guy must think when he decides to try to break into the hunting game. He has to wonder how successful he will be if he doesn’t have all those new gadgets on the market today. You and I started we hunted in hand me down clothes, with grandpas second generation gun, a box of cartridges from three different manufacturers with different grain bullets and an Old Timer pocket knife. But these days we have to have the newest and best, it seems like these days our passion runs through our wallets and not our veins.

Before you jump out of your chair, pump your arm and say “hell yes”, understand it’s not that simple. We can blame the TV shows that only show the biggest bucks and magazines that talk about the new-fangled gadgets that make us better hunters, but the newest and biggest sells, so that is what they market. When is the last time you bought a copy of “Small Buck” magazine or bought a new bow that makes you shoot like a beginner. Newer and bigger sells.

Should we be happy shooting something other than the biggest buck with the best bow or fanciest rifle? In the last few years I have seen some really strange things come on the market that they say you have to have if you want to harvest biggest bucks. Things like rear view mirrors for our tree stand or little plastic butt hole extractors that we have to have to be great hunters. Your probably saying “Come on Doak, that’s a ridiculous analogy”, but there have been some really good hunters in the past that never dreamed about spending $100 on a pair of scent lock pants or $10 on a lighted arrow noc. Our hunting numbers have dropped over the past several years. Could it be because any potential new hunter feels he has to spend thousands of dollars to get into the sport?

I am writing this blog while my Son-In-Law is driving my grandchildren and me to Texas so my 12 and 13 year old grandsons can shoot a sheep. They are going after a Corisican Ram with a 30 year old 308 rifle. Yesterday while preparing for the hunt I nearly panicked. I realized that my Swarovski Binoculars were at the factory for a bit of a tune up and I didn’t think it would be possible to hunt without them. Then I realized I have hunted a lot of animals without a $1,200 pair of binoculars. I just grabbed a 20 year old pair of Bushnell binoculars and I was good to go. You don’t have to have the best of the best to be a good hunter and have fun.

So grab your children, your grandchildren, your friends and their children and all that 30 year old hunting and camping equipment and go out and enjoy the great outdoors. If our hunting numbers continue to decrease we will loose our sport to the tree-huggers God made the Great Outdoors to be enjoyed and his renewable resources to be harvested and eaten. So through a back strap on the grill and indoctrinate a new hunter to the wonderful sport of hunting.

by Outdoors International

Dolly Varden

A really fishy dude and a really chrome Dolly.
Photo: Cameron Miller

Besides the salmon and the leopard rainbows that are usually targeted while fishing in Alaska, we have a whole lot of fun fishing for Dolly Varden.

Dolly Varden and Arctic Char are really closely related in this part of Alaska. So closely related, in fact, that the Alaska Fish and Game biologist responsible for them thinks we’ve got both in our river. They have complex life histories and in our neck of the woods =they’re indistinguishable without a genetic test…we tend to call them all ‘dollies’ regardless but we know for sure they’re a ton of fun to catch.

Most of these dollies spawn multiple times. They run up the Kanektok pretty much all summer long, with a number of noticeable ’sub runs’ overlapping and containing fish of different shapes, sizes and colors. In general they’re chrome with a slight green tint when they enter the river, and some in their spawning phases turn the wacky circus colors that led to dollies near the spawn being called ‘clowned up’.

Dolly the Clown.
Photo: Cameron Miller

They sometimes eat flesh and streamers, but most of our time spent targeting dollies involves fishing beads. Fishing your 5 weight on a productive dolly flat is a whole heck of a lot of fun. Some sections of river have an almost uncountable number of fish. The action is fun, fast-paced and easy!

If you find yourself on the Kanektok one of these years, make sure to spend some time fishing lightweight gear for dollies. You’ll be glad you did.

by Outdoors International

A Few Tips For Training a New Pup

It isn’t easy and it is going to take time! Start with the basics. Sit, stay and come, and make him understand that a command given is to be obeyed. This is done through repetition but keep the sessions short. You must also understand that dog training isn’t a democracy, the pup has to understand that he has no say in what takes place. If the pup gets the idea that he can obey only when he feels like it, you are going to have problems.

There are lots of good books on dog training out there but my favorites are Gun Dog, Game Dog and Family Dog all by Richard Walters and have been in publication for over 30 years. These three great books will help you train your new pup without making lots of mistakes that will create consequences that you might have to live with for years. By avoiding a few common fundamental mistakes, you can help your pup achieve a high level of performance that you will enjoy for years.

Here are a few things in my opinion that you should not do with a new pup.

1. Don’t ever play tug-of-war if you want your pup to retrieve. That teaches him to play keep-away and teaches him he doesn’t have to give up the training dummies. Don’t let him chew or mouth training dummies either if you ever want an edible bird retrieved.
2. Don’t verbally or physically discipline a pup for picking up or carrying something you don’t want him to have. You might send him the message that retrieving is bad. Simply take it away from him.
3. Don’t use different terms for a command. For example, “Here” and “Come” mean the same thing so just pick one and stick with it.
4. Don’t chase a pup because you might scare him, or he might just see it as a game and you will have a harder time teaching him to come on your command.
5. Don’t ignore the small things like occasionally barking in the crate or kennel. Once these behaviors become ingrained, the more difficult they are to break.
6. Don’t let the pup get away with anything like sleeping on the sofa, stealing food, or eating birds that you don’t want him to do for life.
7. Don’t get stuck in a rut. Training in the same place at the same time with drills in the same order doesn’t allow him to think on his own. Teach him to adapt by varying his training grounds and routines.
8. Don’t discipline a dog randomly. Be careful that the pup can connect the discipline directly to his behavior. The same thinking applies to his rewards.

These simple don’ts will help turn you pup into the hunting dog that will give you more pleasure and pride that could possibly be explained in words. Please let me know your thoughts.

by Outdoors International

Another Wolf Bagged in Salmon, Idaho

An Idaho wolf hunter shot this wolf just outside her home near Salmon, Idaho. While waiting for the pack to make their rounds and come near their home again, they looked in the woods below them and there was this wolf. He weighed 127 lbs. He was a collared wolf and by the time they checked it in (1.5 hours later), Fish & Game already knew about the wolf and said they had been hunting for him as this wolf pack had been terrorizing campers lately. They had a couple of guys “treed” in the cab of their pickup all night at a campground a few days earlier. The wolf is now skinned and hanging at their place.

Tags: collared-wolf, Facebook, hunting, idaho-while, linkedin, time, upon-something, wolf