Where:  West Tennessee Skydiving

Preliminary Agenda:

9 am:   Still under student status?  Class to be held to be able to get all non jumping requirements signed off on for your ‘A’ license

Noon:  Lunch – Free Hamburgers to all participating in Safety Day thanks to the Helffrich’s

6 pm:   10 – 15 minute sessions presented by AFF Instructors & Coaches

7:30 pm:   Pot Luck Dinner.  Bring a dish to share.  Not a cook and still want to participate, contact Jennifer Helffrich @ jahelffrich@yahoo.com for suggestions.

All Day Long:    Master Rigger Danny Hall will be doing free rig inspections or able to answer any rig / rigging questions you may have.

http://www.skydivememphis.com

I spent a little bit of time (and these days, “any” is tough to come by) putting together a response and I wanted to restate it here:

—-

If history repeats itself, we’ll see many deny their Social Successes for as long as they’re able to. This will keep their competition out of the space, allow them more penetration, and keep costs down. In my 14 years in the Web industry, we’ve seen it with classic websites, seo, ppc, and email marketing.

I say let’s quit trying to publicly quantify it all, allow those that BELIEVE in social (on pure faith) to make strides past traditional thinkers. Let’s have those that find the merits of social self-evident, those that believe this is how business should be done, leapfrog the naysayers and rock on… into the sunset, with their fans. Thus, seizing the days until the non-believers get a clue.

Seriously, would you rather work in an industry where a social media mindset prevails, or some mechanized Chaplin’esque existence that no longer belongs anywhere but the Twilight Zone. Let the good guys gain some ground!

—

Now back to getting ready for sx. I’m road tripping it this year and the morning’s winter weather advisory has me worried about staying on schedule. I enjoy driving, but not in sleet.

I feel it’s a good time to now split my tweets to have professional & personal. This is fairly common practice with blogs and not yet as common in Twitter, but it seems to make good sense to me. So, here’s how I’m splitting it:

@lalunablanca
Professional related tweets without the mundane day-to-day tweets.

@davebarger
Personal, mundane, rants, and “unprofessional”   tweets. I may make an experimental post that appears work related here as well. I am curious and experiment from time to time.

Of course, people can subscribe to both. I don’t plan on double posting (but if it’s something earth shattering, all bets are off).

The Twitter clients I use are:
Hootsuite for the desktop

Tweetie on the iPhone.

See you out there! and have an awesome Full Moon. (right now!)

What do you think about this approach?

I’m no longer surprised by how many people don’t know what a podcast is. I often explain it like: an a.m. talk radio show more often than not created by people with a passion for a particular subject. The show is downloadable as an audio file, usually in an .mp3 format, and usually to an “iPod” or similar .mp3 player.

Me and Podcasts

I was first really intrigued with Podcasts when my wife and I attended PodCamp Nashville back in 2007. Over the recent holidays, I listened to countless hours of podcasts and can’t seem to put them down. I enjoy podcasts because they:

• Allow me to consume information about the things I’m interested in
• When I might be in a situation where I can’t read (mowing, driving, doing cardio…)
• Allow me to skip past useless (to me) episodes
• Let me pause and play, rewind, etc…

Rarely do I listen to a podcast while sitting at the computer.

I used to (pre iPhone) download .mp3′s to an SD card and listen in my car or via my Treo.

With an iPhone, I am able to grab the podcasts from iTunes and download to my phone. I keep earphones handy. I also have a cable allowing me to use my car stereo to play them.

There are some great shows out there with wonderful content. I encourage anyone to search for podcasts in their area of interest and try out at least a couple of shows from each producer (even excellent podcasts may have a dud episode and you’d hate to draw a conclusion from one of those).

Finding Podcasts

If you’re on iTunes, go check out the Podcasts section. Just note that not all podcasts are on iTunes. Many are not. As my interest is in Social Media, I regularly download:

• Dishy Mix – Host can be annoying, but she does a great job interviewing wonderful guests.
• CC Chapman’s – Managing the Grey
• Mitch Joel’s – Six Degrees of Separation
• Joseph Jaffe’s – Jaffe Juice
• Albert Maruggi’s – Marketing Edge

Podcast Directory-type Sites

You can Google Podcast Directories, but I’d recommend hitting up your social bookmarking network like Delicious, Redit, or StumbleUpon to see what humans are recommending.

• Visit the National Public Radio (NPR) Podcast page (pack a lunch, it’s a great place to get lost in).
• My Podnet
• OpenCulture – Interesting college lectures and more!
• PodCast Pickle
• BlogTalkRadio (more technically a “network” but nice directory)

If you wind-up empty handed, it could be an opportunity for you to start your own PodCast on a particular subject.

Do I have a PodCast?

Not, yet. However, with social media in Memphis steadily on the rise, LunaWeb does have a 7 minute Social Media Expedition segment on the Small Biz Show which is an actual a.m. radio show in Memphis, TN.

• Google/Facebook/iPhone
• Proximity Marketing
• Speech Recognition
• Black Hat SEM
• Web X.0
• Facebook turn Distribution

More prediction interestingness from Bob Hazlett at: OneHalfAmazing.com

and of course, Happy New Year!

Here’s my Follow Policy:
- Twitter sends me an email stating you’re following me.
- I click the link and look at your profile (what you get at twitter.com/your_twitter_handle )
- On that page, I look at in this order:
Photo, Location, Updates, Profile, Following, Followers.

I’ll immediately follow you if:
- I know you
- You’re in Memphis, TN area

I’ll immediately almost disregard you if:
- I suspect you’re an automated bot
- You have only a few tweets but are following hundreds with only a few following you back. I suspect your motive or approach is wrong and that you’re not actually here for a conversation, but rather for followers
- Call yourself a guru, expert, ___ rockstar etc… in any tech/web/social media field as I feel these folks generally need additional humbling.

Pass that initial cut, then I’m looking at your tweets themselves:
- Are they mixture of your own tweets balanced with @ replies (you have stuff to offer on your own, and you participate in the conversation)? This is a visual pass. Don’t even have to read them at this point.
- Are the tweets of interest to me and not pure promotional like “visit my blog at http….” (I cringe when I see this).

Other notes:

I do not send “thanks for the follow” tweets, nor automated responses (see Chris Brogan‘s post on this yesterday).

If I follow you, I will not be happy with a “thanks for following me and visit my site at ___“. I don’t recommend auto tweeting anything (and see this more and more).

When Twitter cleaned the gutters here recently of bots and spammers, I was happy to only have lost less than 3% (as that let me know that I’ve been doing an OK job filtering the junk accounts).

Helpful twitter info (and you can count on differing opinions):

• ScottMeis.com – Beyond the Tweet
• Margaret Mason – 14 Ways to Twitter Politely
• AllTop Twitter

If you’re in Memphis and want to be found by other tweeters, add yourself here and if you’re tweeting as a business or organization please use this page .

I’m at twitter.com/lalunablanca .

See you in the conversation!

GeekBreakfast

I’ve been seeing tweets for a year about Nashville’s Geek Breakfast. I didn’t know until recently that Dave Delaney got it started and was actually celebrating their one year Anniversary on 12/18. I had to go.

I had also seen many tweets about heading to “Noshville” and thought that this was just slang for Nashville. It’s a real place, and evidently the home of the GeekBreakfast.

Agenda for the GeekBreakfast: Visit, eat, visit, meet, visit, visit, leave (something like that).

Very nice folks one and all. Congratulations to all these great folks that are part of an admirable Nashville community conversation. And congratulations to Dave Delaney that started this and has inspired so many others (myself included) who have in-turn inspired others. Somewhere in all this is Marcus Whitney too, one of the warmest smiles in the conversation.

Real quick mentions:

Guy on the very left in the photo is Nathan Ketsdever. If you ever talk to Nathan, bring paper and pen. This dude knows a TON of stuff and will roll it at you like a Tsunami. I must video Nathan next time.

Next to Nathan is Mitch “Studio Nashvegas” who is a nationally recognized WordPress guru. He speaks at many ___camps and it was a privilege to have him out at BarCampMemphis.

Great seeing Gavin and Erin Richardson again since BarCampNashville2.

Looking forward to further collaborative event conversations with Elle and Elin. With Scott Maentz rolling in the East, who knows, maybe we could get the whole state talking.

Cheers folks!

Recently, I was told of a blog that mentioned my presentation to the PRSA wherein I purportedly implied that Social Media was a Silver Bullet. This is hilariously incorrect. Not only do I know that Social Media is not a Silver Bullet, but also I don’t believe in Silver Bullets.

I learned decades ago as a consumer product reliability engineer never to make absolute claims. You will eventually eat your words just about every time.

Don’t ever trust a silver bullet unless it’s coming out of a barrel at you.

In general, there are NO Silver Bullets when it comes to dealing with people. We’re all too (wonderfully) diverse.

If someone is crying out about a Silver Bullet, I promise it’s nearly pure Silver Bull.

See you in the conversation!

Photo courtesy of a Tim Ellis derivative.
Thank you Tim and Creative Commons.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License.

(intrinsic – gooey middle)
Additionally, there is the expansive psychology around social networking that needs to be part of the conversation as well. How, as human beings, we relate, adopt, deny this media is additionally critical.

In creating the Social Media Expedition, we should continue to have these popular business-related discussions AND also expand the conversation internally as beings, and externally beyond business.

I welcome all thoughts on this and we’re refining daily.

As it turns-out, having a BarCamp summons more inspiration than you’ll initially budget for. There are too many “thank you’s” to completely attribute the character of the gathering that was our BarCamp.

BarCamp is Gratifying – w00t!
The participatory nature of BarCamp brings a unique gratification of connectedness, camaraderie, discovery, openness, and sometimes acceptance.

The Spirit of BarCamp
I was able to share three fundamental concepts I relate to the spirit of BarCamp:
1. We are all richer at the end of the day through sharing our expertise and selves with our community rather than through greed and self-centeredness.
2. We are “the change” as borrowed from Gandhi’s quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world“.
3. We become not only part of the BarCamp Memphis community, but also part of the global BarCamp community.

Hearty thanks to the Planners and the Sponsors for facilitating it. True.

What was most special were all 90 or so people that made it. In this, I am most thankful to the other attendees and their people.

You rock and should freely regard yourselves as plankowners of an expeditionary voyage. Crewmembers, if you will, of the proverbial train that’s left the station.
Blue Skies!

Visit BarCampMemphis.org

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Hat tips to LaunchMemphis, Geoff Livingston, Sara Lacy, Eric Mathews, Bob Hazlett, Daniel Pritchett, and Andy Glover

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