May 3, 2008

Twitter offers Get out of Jail Free with its Service

An employee sent me an email with this link - fascinating!

Freedom, A Twitter Away For UC Berkeley Student Arrested In Egypt

"As surreal as it may sound, Twitter can get you out of jail! The catch...send the right message to as many people as possible as fast as you can and voila!

UC Berkeley journalism graduate student James Karl Buck (29), former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, was arrested during a demonstration in Mahalla El-Kobra, an industrial city in the Nile Delta.

What the Egyptian authorities didn't probably expect was the prompt reaction of a large circle of friends in the United States and the anti-government bloggers in Egypt, who were sent an instant text message from his cellular phone: "ARRESTED," the San Jose Mercury News reports.

The micro-blogging service allows users to send text messages up to 140 characters long, and the message Buck sent had the desired outcome: his friends called the University, the American Embassy, as well as the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and other media.

The result: he was released the next day, although according to his affirmations, the Egyptian authorities told him just hours after his arrest, in the middle of the night, that he was a free man."

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 2:34 PM | Permalink

April 20, 2008

Email Overload? Try Social Media Overload

In today's New York Times Business section, there was an astute article on "The Daily Struggle to Avoid Burial by E-Mail" by Randall Stross. At eROI, we have been covered in the press on multiple occasions for Email Addiction or Email Overload, but it was the combination of today's "burial by email" article AND a recent eMarketing speech where a friend of mine talked of maintaining 40 social media site profiles, where I felt compelled to write this blog post (slightly ironic given that a blog is a basic form of social media).

Stross mentioned in the NY Times article that both Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Mark Cuban of Mark Cuban get upwards of 2,000 emails every day and 700 messages daily in Facebook, and both of these executive process all of these emails themselves. I get about 400 emails per day and usually reply to and send 60 emails/day if I'm not booked in meetings all day.

While email is the killer app and where I spend most of my time "online," I also occasionally blog, use LinkedIn sporadically, barely use Facebook, and Twitter when I'm distracted at a conference. Basically, this blog post is my first online admission of becoming an old man - with so many distractions, I wonder if technology company entrepreneurs and executives will evolve into communicating in truncated sentence grunts with very little deep strategic thinking, planning and writing.

I have clients asking frequently, "how will I have time to do everything I do now, AND blog AND engage in all of these conversations about my brand in every single online community?" I've adapted my answer to a more definitive "You can't do it all single-handedly." Let me get back to my 35-year old friend who has 40 profiles - LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Answers, Lockergnome, digg, del.icio.us, and on and on and on. The new generation and grandpa-old 35 year olds playing the new generation's world, attention deficit disorder is a requirement, not a condition.

So, what's my advice in this cultural change in expectations of keeping up in the online marketing world? Experiment with all of the social networking sites and tools, and find 3 sites/tools that generate the most value to you individually and/or your company (as an entrepreneur, individual benefit/company benefit is often the same). Thankfully, there is a new protocal, OpenID, where one username/password will carry all your info with you for every online community you join, because in the future, we will all be participants in hundreds of these broad social communities or niche branded communities.

With the acceleration of online communication, it relieves anxiety just to admit that "yes, I too, feel completely overwhelmed and overloaded by using every social site and tool that comes along." I've said it and those words shall set me free. Now, if I could just leave my Blackberry locked in my office desk on a weekend. Fat chance.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 2:00 PM | Permalink

April 9, 2008

Very Psyched about being Highlighted in The Oregonian Business Section

Thank you thank you, Jonathan Brinckman. You did a great job talking about how "something very different is going on in Portland, where a cluster of software firms have set up shop in and around Old Town:

Two crucial factors are driving the trend: Software companies -- particularly those focusing on social networking, online advertising and finance -- are thriving. And a hip office in a central location can be a competitive edge in attracting top-notch staff."

To check out the OregonLive blog entry, go here to see the full monty >>

The Oregonian article really needs the images to accompany it, so see those below.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 9:43 PM | Permalink