Is your life like this? Are you constantly trying to sell your client on the value that you bring to the table. The same client who was searching for said qualities in the RFQ, RFP, and the 3 rounds of designs and boards!? Good times………I especially like the last 5 seconds, that drove it home! This is true whether it is the Idea (straight advertising creative), or the execution (consulting and services).
Thanks @tbrunelle
This weekend there was a lot of discussion about who would be tweeting at the oscars, what peopling where saying online. Last weekend it was the same thing with the NBA All-Star game (particularly Dwight Howard for Adidas). Well Monday night I followed a live event although not as sexy.
Sitting on my couch at 1:44 am, thinking I shouldn’t have taken that 3 hour nap at 7pm; my mindless ESPN watching was interrupted by a tweet from @NASA: “OCO launch update: Liftoff is now set for 4:55 EST. Catch it on www.nasa.gov/ntv“. This was a lot more interesting than watching the rerun segment of sportscenter for the 4th time straight.
OCO stands for “Orbiting Carbon Observatory”. The mission as described on its site is to: “After launch, the OCO mission will collect precise global measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists will analyze OCO data to improve our understanding of the natural processes and human activities that regulate the abundance and distribution of this important greenhouse gas…….” So I shot off the TV and started intently watching the 320 x 240 feed. The video was not that great, but the audio was perfect. The system checks and pre launch activities added to the excitement. I tweeted a couple comments about the activity. Then I twitpic’d a shot of the lift off. To my suprise someone re-broadcast my tweet. Then it dawned on me to see if other people where following the launch. I went to Twitter Search and was suprised at the amount of people who where following it. There were people who were watching it online as well as people who were able to see it overhead. It just made the entire event that much more exciting. Check out the NASA search results here.
Unfortunately, what you will hear about the project is how it failed…About 3 quarters of the way thru the launch, launch command called for the contingency plan to be implemented, “Nobody leave the room, nobody call out.”. A little while later they say that, “The faring did not separate from the spacecraft”. A press conference will convene in 2 hours…The excitement of the event was immediately replaced with a feeling of disappointment. I think my emotions were heightened (good and bad) because of sharing it with these other individuals. Unfortunately the mission failed. Unfortunately not enough people pay attention to what NASA does (we pay for this!!!). One positive, we have access to watch events like this.
One other interesting aspect of this whole event. Some people will read up on the events and news of Monday’s launch. It is a unique experience to follow it live as it happens. I will be watching more NASA launches in the future. Hopefully more people watch these events. Hopefully more of them will be successful. #FAIL!
I have attached the video of the launch for your viewing pleasure. I have also included the follow up press conference to why the mission failed.
So I finally hit the tipping point. I have too many networks to keep up with. Now I don’t sign up and use a service just because it is new. I will check it out and see what it has to offer, but I definitely need to find value in the service if I am going to use it regularly. With that said I have hit the limit of the amount of sites and posts I can physically update. Even before this point, going to all the services I had made it hard to keep up with the witty repartee. At some point the well runs dry.
The latest service I have found is Yammer. The idea of being able to communicate with co-workers on a Twitter-like network is fascinating and needed. It is a great way to build your presence and share your ideas in the place it can have the most impact – your job! It is great way to find out what is going on within your organization for things like as projects, pitches, events, etc. I work for Sapient, we are an organization of 6,500+ people with offices all over the world (LA, Boston, Miami, London, Germany, Sweden….you get the point). We also have a couple thousand people in India (Bangalore, Dehli, and Gurgaon). The amount of projects, the use of technologies and the types of innovations happening in all these places is hard to keep up with. Yammer has allowed me to keep up with all this while building relationships and getting human context outside of an email.
I find Yammer useful, but I also find Twitter, Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Flickr, and Delicious also very useful for different reasons. So adding Yammer to that list just pushed me over the edge. There is no way I can keep up with all those services and still find time in the day to eat, sleep and more importantly – work! Something had to be done. So what did I do? I started looking at other services that might help………It isn’t what you think though, let me explain.
I think we have come to a point where the marketplace is saturated with these sites and services. They are popping up all over and most of them with very similar features as their predecessors. Innovation is coming from the mashups of these services, creating new services that allow you to access multiple sites from one interface. So I was doing some research, and found ping.fm. ping.fm allows me to access all the services I use and through an interface I already use. I can update Twitter, Plaxo and Yammer all thru AIM seperately or all at once. You can setup tags to send updates to specific services. For instance, if I preface any message in AIM with #tweet, it will send the message to my Twitter and Yammer accounts. If I preface any AIM message with #status it will update my LinkedIn and Facebook status. ping.fm has allowed me to consolidate all my communications and without an additional desktop application or website.
Whats your opinion? Do you use a lot of different social media sites? How do you ink them together? What are the best applications out there like ping.fm?
I better make this short, because I have to get up in 4 1/2 hours to get in line to see Barack Obama sworn in! I actually got to see him this morning. He was doing community service a block over from where I am staying (thanks for the hospitality Samantha). I wanted to post pictures from today. I also wanted to give one last plug for the face book app Sapient (that’s me and my developers) have developed!. Tomorrow it will be huge. It will pull in twitter, youTube, sms, and Flickr photos realtime As well as stream the NPR national broadcast of the event. All I have to say is thank you Andy Carvin, NPR, and the Inauguration Report for the opportunity to create something I am proud of. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your folks! Check out the app on Facebook:
http://apps.facebook.com/inaugreport/
Update:
You can now view photos of the actual event hear.
We almost did not make it in past the gates, we were one of the fortunate few who made it past the purple gate.
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There is an article over at IT Business Canada that I contributed a pov for. I guess with the holidays I forgot it was going out.
It talks about the changing attitudes of CMOs in regards to social platforms (particularly facebook and mySpace). I get the sense that this nut was to hard to crack. In the article I put some reasons as to why. I will follow up with more thorough post related to the topic, but in the meantime you can read the article here.