An Ignoble Experiment: Helping Small Business help themselves - SolutionsArePower™

Here are the latest updates for ignoble.experiment@arconati.us

I just came back from my Black Friday shopping and visited Office Depot, Target and Barnes and Noble ( Nope haven’t bought my LCD TV yet) and just had a brilliant idea. How about a web site to share all the jokes that South West and other airline flight crews crack and in the process crack me up whenever I fly them. So I used the Special Black Friday deal $9.99 domain name deal at Network Solutions and bought the domain name flightattendantjokes.com

Now another idea struck me. How about a spontaneous contest? How about a contest for the best domain name idea for the day? If you buy a domain name today from Network Solutions and its unusual or has a great idea behind it- give us the name of the domain and the idea in the comments below or send us an email at smedia at Network Solutions.com . We will give 3 best ideas judged by the blogging team at Network Solutions a free book - Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki.

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate 'Black Friday - 5 hours to go - $9.95 domain and flightattendantjokes.com - contest anyone?'

Online advocacy guru - part 1: an interview with RAD Campaign Partner & Women Who Tech Founder Allyson Kapin

allyson kapin avatar

Who she is: a rad thinker and tech advocate
Allyson Kapin, founding partner of the online communications firm RAD Campaign (and also founder of the annual WomenWhoTech Telesummit) recently met up to discuss her latest social tech projects, social media successes, & marketing priorities.

Listen while you work: 7 minute audio
Feel free hearing Allyson’s audio conversation as she reveals more on this year’s WomenWhoTech Telesummit and social media’s impact.

We use technology to transform the world.

Allyson on RAD Campaign’s mission: campaigns, advocacy, and tech
Rad Campaign is an online communications firm that provides web design, web development, and online marketing and strategy to socially responsible businesses, non-profits and political campaigns. We use technology to transform the world and inspire change whether it be developing a website to educate consumers and companies about green certification — or developing an online marketing campaign to urge Congress to stop Big Oil from drilling in the Arctic Refuge.

Target audience, social media, and tough times: the economy question
Allyson and her team helped a lot of organizations related to the election season. In light of elections coming to a close and the economic climate, we discussed her company’s situation, strategy, and outlook.

…companies need to know that cutting budgets which give them access to these online environments have consequences.

When you know potential clients will be cutting budgets, you need to prepare. And advising clients on the value of social media and tech in these times can be an opportunity (and sound advice). You have these senior execs who don’t understand the value of technology and social media yet they are axing those related budgets. They need to know that because their consumers, advocates, users, and constituents interact with their cool product or service online, that’s where they too should be. So that needs to be emphasized. They need to be asked ‘How are you (the company) going to stay connected to your target audience when you limit your own online access?’

One of our constant points of focus is to look at clients’ offline communications and their online communications strategy — and synchronize them.

Focusing on technology and constituent management
We’ve been really fortunate enough this year to be extremely busy.
I think that has a lot to do with political campaigns and issues connected to the elections. We’ve had a hand in some innovative projects. And moving forward, we’re always thinking how the company will continue to evolve. We’re thinking of how and where people will be from a technology and a constituent management perspective. We ask: ‘where are they?’ from an online social media perspective as well.

Citizenry and innovative social tech: Citizen Toolbox
One of the projects we’re hoping to develop is Citizen Toolbox. We’ve made it to the second round of Knight Foundation’s grant program. In a nutshell it will allow users to create local petition drives directed at local officials in your area – local commissioners and getting down into government offices, zoning and planning.

The goal of this platform is to hold office officials accountable, aggregate concerns, create a communications pathway, and build community around that effort.

Walking through Citizen Toolbox
Let’s say you’re concerned about your neighborhood school: you end up writing a petition letter to the mayor and education chancellor. That letter would be then posted to Citizen Toolbox. Then let’s say 50 people sign that petition letter, then Citizen toolbox would send that to the right leadership. Now let’s say said leadership didn’t respond; the Citizen Toolbox platform will send an auto-reminder at a certain threshold date. And if they still didn’t respond, then the organizer or petition initiator would be contacted. At that time, the system would facilitate a media advisory.

Next up: part 2 with RAD Campaign’s Allyson Kapin

-The Jon Stewart Show!
-social media ideas for small business;
-thought leaders to follow in technology;
…and more.

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate 'Online advocacy guru - part 1: an interview with RAD Campaign Partner & Women Who Tech Founder Allyson Kapin'

25% off Hosting on Black Friday

Special coupon for our blog readers (for a limited time). Use the code OFFER00522 - at check out for 25% off all annual term Hosting and specific website/ hosting business packages at Network Solutions.

Network Solutions has a special Black Friday offer of $9.99 for domain names.

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate '25% off Hosting on Black Friday'

Twitter: I Was Doing It Wrong

I pretty much use Facebook as a birthday reminder service. And I’ve seen people who use Flickr photo pages to blog. It sort of demonstrates that, if you can get it to do what you want it to do, there really isn’t a “wrong” way to use a social media tool.

However, I really didn’t “get” Twitter for a long time. I wasn’t really much of a text messager at that point. Plus, though I wasn’t a super-early adopter, I was still ahead of a lot of my friends, so there weren’t that many people I already knew on Twitter.

I didn’t mind the 140-character limit so much. (If you send a lot of IMs, you know that your writing tends to get short and choppy. Scarily, it tends to carry over to your other writing.)

The thing that put me off most, ironically, was the mobile aspect: I hated getting incessant text messages, about totally inane stuff. Even if I generally care about you, I don’t necessarily care about the random, ephemeral stuff you’re doing (or even if I do, I don’t necessarily need to know it in real time)… especially if it’s delivered in an incredibly interruptive way, such as a beeping and vibrating mobile phone alert.

Coming Around on Chat

It wasn’t until I saw someone at a conference using a Twitter desktop client (Twitterific, in that case; I use Twhirl now), that I realized I was hung up on the mobile stuff, and missing out on Twitter’s other uses. When you use a desktop client, Twitter changes from an annoying, mobile-based microblogging and friend status update platform tool, into:

* A distributed public chat client, where, once you get past the idea that it’s a chat, even though not everyone is in the same “room,” the flow of status updates feels like any other text chat, where you can dip in and out, or scroll back through, as needed.

* A public IM client, where by using @replies, you’re primarily talking to one person, but in a way that other people can see, like a comment.

* A private IM client, where you use Direct Messages to reach someone privately, including on their mobile (where, incidentally, you can get to them without knowing their cell number, or revealing your own.)

Still Not 100% Sold

These days, I’m still not that “good” of a Twitter-er. For starters, I refuse to call posts “tweets,” I’m only following 146 people, and have 180 followers in return. (My twitterrank is 98.08, or 89th percentile, whatever that means). And of the people I follow, I only get mobile updates from a few of them (and of those few, even fewer actually post with any regularity).

As to the rest of it: I’m still something of a Twitter-skeptic — I still think that Twitter users, as a whole, are disproportionately convinced of their disproportionate influence, and I think that the current corporate adoption of Twitter as a customer service channel won’t scale in its current form once more people figure it out.
But I did get more value from Twitter, once I started looking at it as a chat client. It’s another tool for the social media toolbox.

What do you think of Twitter? (Remember, their uptime is much better these days, so you can’t just crack on the fail whale.) How are you using it? Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and I almost forgot — this is me: @joelogon, but I’m telling you now — if I don’t know you, I probably won’t follow you.

Maybe I’m still doing it wrong.

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate 'Twitter: I Was Doing It Wrong'