Shame Mask - Rothenburg Torture Museum

During a recent Spurs game, Mike Bacsik (@mikebacsik) wrote despicable tweets that would make most people cringe.  Today, Peter Burns (@peterburnsradio) and Bruce Bowen (@bowen12) hosted Mike to talk about the situation.  Unfortunately, the discussion between Bruce and Peter turned sour.  Each was passionate about their position.  Mike was wrong, undoubtedly, and some suggest that Bruce and/or Peter was/were also wrong.

I know that I’ve been wrong before in the past, even if it was just once, and I’ve said and done things that I wish I could take back.  I know though that I’ve been forgiven.  I’d like to ask you to forgive Mike and if you think Bruce was wrong and/or Peter was wrong, forgive them as well.  Check out Colossians 3:13-14 (MSG) – 13 Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you.14 And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.

One day, I’ll certainly be asking for your forgiveness and I hope you’ll extend it to me.  I look forward to being able to do the same back to you.  It makes the world a better place because love beats anger, hate, frustration, fill in the blank – every time.  So, forgive that person that’s wronged you; show them love instead.  Lead the way and teach your enemy how to forgive.

Marcus and I have been friends since the 90′s. Since Bill Clinton was President.  Since Motorola introduced the StarTac.  Since he chewed on my loaned pen (I didn’t take it back). Recently, I’ve been enjoying his tweets as he’s become really active on Twitter. Marcus is known as @mlnorvell4 and recently he made it his mission to get a response from Brent Spiner – @brentspiner – of Star Trek and Independence Day fame. How would he do this? Tweet insane messages. It worked. Here are the high res JPG and PDF files for your humor. Keep it up, Marcus. Next target? @JimNorton Good luck, buddy.

UPDATE (2/26/2010): Marcus has been listed as The King of Celebrity Twitter Harassment by Asylum.com

I think this is what started it all…

@BrentSpiner"data-count="vertical" data-via="nanpalmero" data-lang="en" data-related="%40brentspiner,%40jimnorton,bill+clinton,brent+spiner,jimmy+norton,little+jimmy+norton,marcus+norvell,motorola+startac,twitter"">

This morning I watched the new Best Buy Twelpforce commercial (@twelpforce) where a gentleman stands up in the middle of a football field and proclaims his need for a new tv. Best Buy’s team of people, known on Twitter as the Twelpforce respond to him from the bleachers suggesting an LED tv. He responds back that he’s price conscious and the Twelpforce explain they have a price match guarantee. Here’s where it gets interesting. Back in March 2009, Best Buy was charged with a class action lawsuit for providing financial bonuses, based in part, by denying valid price match requests. So, I posed the question to the @twelpforce linking to the Consumerist article (linked above).

@twelpforce replied back:

I understand that Twelpforce, as most twelpforce’s go, is powered my hundreds, maybe even thousands of people (look at those commercials!). My curiosity extends to wonder whether there was some type of approval process for determining how you get to join the Twelpforce (are there elite Twelpforce SEALS or Rangers?) and who answers what questions? At this point, the Twelpforce says it’s business as usual with their price matching shenanigans. The tweet was surely a mistake, right?

So do you think the Twelpforce approach is helping or hurting Best Buy? I’d love to know your thoughts.

UPDATE: Thank you to @bernierjohn, @TWELPFORCE, @rickmead, @Coral_BestBuy, @BestBuyDanvers. You all responded back quickly via Twitter to let me know that if there’s ever a price match discrepancy, to contact (888) BEST-BUY and the Customer Relations Department should sort it out. I appreciate the responses!

With the surge in shortened communications, such as Twitter and text messaging, there seems to be a loss in the nickels and dimes of social interactions. Those small but valuable tokens are the words “please” and “thank you.” I know, you only have 140 to 160 characters to get your point across. I know you’re busy and moving quickly. Just remember, everytime you choose to have an interaction with a person, be sure to drop them a nickel or a dime. Just like compound interest at the bank, those nickels and dimes turn into dollars later.

picture by EJP Photo

As seen on Salesby5.com

Welcome to the first installment of Nan the Power User. You’ll see me pop in from time to time with reviews, tips, tricks and ideas with a business twist. I’m the Chief Inspiration Officer at Salesby5, a marketing and consulting group in San Antonio, TX, where we dramatically increase sales for companies and organizations. Additionally, I am quite the BlackBerry fanboy/evangelist. I’ll welcome feedback and new ideas; I always like to try new things! One of my weapons of choice in connecting with others is to use Twitter.

Connecting with People

In the recent past, there have been small windows of accessibility to the people you aspire to connect with. If you think back, sending a letter was a great way to connect with someone. Then, we evolved into sending these letters via fax because it was more time efficient. Now, looking back, faxes seem ancient compared to sending an email. Those that led the way on using these technologies were able to cut through the noise and connect with the right people. Today, the new window to access people is Twitter. I call it a window because, like the previously named methods of communication, it’ll be ruined by the noise of too many people and will close as a great way to connect.

For those of you that haven’t heard, Twitter allows you to talk to your friends and strangers, 140 characters at a time. This medium requires you to be to the point, which is important since the average human is hit with over 3,000 messages per day. It isn’t that we are too dumb to process information, it is merely a matter of scarcity – there is not enough time to deal with so many words!

Due to Twitter being hip to API’s and allowing people to develop applications to attach to their service, we have so many ways to access Twitter. Although this isn’t close to an exhaustive list, some of the BlackBerry Twitter clients include TinyTwitter, Twibble and TwitterBerry. Each of these applications allows you to post, check out your timeline and the public timeline, send direct messages and more. Some people prefer the location aware Twibble, while others prefer TinyTwitter’s ability to hide ultra chatty-friends from time to time (yeah, I’m looking at you @guykawasaki). My personal favorite is TwitterBerry. I like the layout of the screen for the timeline because the pictures aren’t too big and the font size is just right to be able to fit more tweets on the screen. Additionally, @jaschroe is working on auto-updating feeds and notifications. I would also love to see the ability to temporarily hide friends.

Today, on Twitter, you can meet new vendors, CEOs, CIOs, authors, bloggers, techies, freaks and geeks. During the course of my day, I am able to ping new folks to connect for a drink or a quick meeting. To date, I have developed relationships with world class thought leaders because I spent the time to send a “tweet” that was genuine.

Sharing Your Life

As I mentioned, I live in Texas. It wouldn’t be uncommon for me to see rattlesnakes, armadillos, or Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs. Using TwitterBerry lets me share those experiences with people all around the world who would likely be fascinated by such occurrences. Just because it’s everyday life for me, doesn’t mean that it is for you as well. When I share these sights and sounds on Twitter via TwitterBerry or Twitpic, it weaves my existence more tightly into yours and gives us a bond that we didn’t have before. Recently, I attended CTIA. From there, I tweeted the keynote highlights as they were spoken. Later, I decided to walk from my hotel to the famous Lombard St. I tweeted my progress and supplemented the walk with photos via Twitpic, a service that lets me post pictures to Twitter. My Twitter followers were ecstatic. They basically felt as if they were riding along on my shoulder learning new information from CTIA as it was announced (before the media was able to do so), and later, they received a photo tour of my walk. This scenario would not have been possible without TwitterBerry and its abilities to receive replies and direct messages. Standard texting would have been a hassle due to the number of text messages I would receive in reply.

Bottom line: You don’t necessarily have to be important, powerful or good looking. Being authentic and slightly ahead of the curve—in this instance via Twitter/TwitterBerry—is allowing me to share my life with more people, connect with people who I would not be able to reach in a different mode and find new people who are an asset to my life. I’d say that’s a great use of technology!

As seen on BlackBerryCool.com

When I wrote my #FollowFriday post I had a ton of Twitter user names that I was too lazy to link. Fortunately, @larsreineke created Twitter Name Replacer, a WordPress Plugin. According to his site, “In every post it replaces @sometwitterusername with @sometwitterusername It recognizes mail addresses and skips them. If you precede the username with an exclamation mark like this “@sometwitterusername”, the username will be skipped.”  Thanks to Twitter Name Replacer, I didn’t have to do anything but add the usernames with an @. The plugin did the rest.

So, if you are a person that likes to include Twitter user names with their links in their WordPress blog posts, have a look at Twitter Name Replacer, it’s excellent.

Follow Friday is a recent phenomenon on Twitter where users recommend other users that should be followed.  Micah Baldwin of Lijit started Follow Friday and you can read about it on Mashable.  I’ve created this post to share some of my favorite recommendations with a small explanation.  This certainly isn’t final and will be edited in the future. If you were left off, it was likely a mistake and I apologize.   Be sure to add yourself and your suggestions in the comments section as I’ll be tweeting this list out in the future.

@ashleypalmero -  my beautiful wife and an amazing photographer
@laurapalmero – my sister and humanitarian

@SalesBy5 Team
@erikdarm – Chief Energy Officer of @salesby5 and marketing expert
@heidigerhardt – Project Manager and marathon runner
@kya10 – Brand Evangelist
@bobbyfreeman – Outdoorsman
@sarahq27 – rockstar editor of my blog posts

BlackBerry and Technology Experts
@ahmadnassri – Director, Web Services at @Viigo
@asacco – CIO.com
@azeis – crackberry.com
@bbgeekchic – BlackBerry expert
@bbunderground – blackberryunderground.com
@bettiol – boygeniusreport.com
@blackberryrocks – blackberryrocks.com
@boygenius – boygeniusreport.com
@cbgarz – crackberry.com
@crackberrykevin – crackberry.com
@davepeckens – BlackBerry enthusiast and showman
@daytripper67 – BlackBerry expert and amazing RT’er
@donluig – BerryReview.com writer
@fabianmh – BlackBerry Developer
@gizmoalex – funny guy and rep for @thephonestore
@jesssquire – my brother from another mother and Product Manager at @viigo
@jsanders10 – BlackBerryNews.com
@kasperapd – crackberry.com
@kylemcinnes – blackberrycool.com
@loutreize – blackberrycool.com
@mas90guru – geardiary.com
@mdflores – boygeniusreport.com
@mjbogart – @Viigo Marketing Consultant
@phonescooper – phonescoop.com
@probigeorge11 – theblackberryaddicts.com and helpful guy
@ruddockmh – @Viigo CEO
@sean_armstrong – BlackBerry Guru and parachute cord artist
@simonsage – intomobile.com
@shaunpcollins – BlackBerryNews.com
@slackerradio – great BlackBerry app
@thekruser – Marine/BlackBerry Addict
@themes4bb – themes4bb.com
@tferthomas – BlackBerry enthusiast
@toddboy71 – berryreview.com
@tron – formerly of blackberrycool.com, now works for The Man aka RIM
@troybrownbbnews – blackberrynews.com
@videos4bb – videos4blackberry.info
@viigo – one of my favorite BlackBerry Apps

Non-BlackBerry Folks Covered in Awesome Sauce
@1337wine – local wine guy
@alanweinkrantz – PR ninja and great guy
@addieking – New Orleans’s best unofficial tour guide
@andinarvaez – community leader
@andreaduke15 – sports nut
@arnehulstein – Chairman of Young Life, Europe, likes big trucks and technology
@bemadthen – San Antonio famous runner
@benridler – Results.com smarty
@bkearney – my favorite twitter executive producer of @ksatnews
@brainbrew – of @eurekaranch and @planeteureka where they created the Swiffer
@brandstack – get your logos and brands here
@chocov – we’ve been friends for so long, we have buddy bands
@chrstphrbrwn – nice guy, physics and computer guy
@derrich – banker by day, wiseguy by night
@epodcaster – community leader
@eurekaranch – where the Swiffer, Xterra and American Express Black Card were concepted
@evaruth – cool gal reporting the gritty side on the Express News
@exjetsguy – Express News dude and hangs with @roybragg, so instant winner
@flicksandfood – movie and food review
@geekettebits – fun, wisecracking chick geek
@imaginechurch – my Twitter church in San Antonio that rocks, one tweet verse per day
@jgoldsborough – my buddy at Sprint
@joeruiz – KSAT web ninja
@jujube5160 – bought her way in
@juliagoolia – absolute genius humor
@kevj – Pastor of @imaginechurch, great friend
@kr8tr – Racker and includer, brilliant human
@lalorek – Express News reporter, delightful person
@lettergirl – snark, humor and goodness found here
@lram2 – coolest sportscaster. ever. Here’s why.
@mark_hayward – Train for Humanity
@moconnorsa – recruiter for Tesoro, does an amazing Anthony Sullivan
@momonmars – super mom in San Antonio
@mitsuyamazaki – Economic Development Expert and Master Connector
@natalietejeda – PR ninja and Zumba lover
@pearanalytics – brilliant SEO and business analytics mind
@planeteureka – helps inventors get found
@rachelpolish – PR rockstar
@rackerhacker – funny and Racker (yes, Rackspace)
@rackspace – fanatical support nuts
@ralphp – great leader’s pastor and attorney
@rjamestaylor – Racker and a clown
@roybragg – one of the funniest guys on twitter
@ryankohnen – published author and retired drug dealer
@sa_sports – helping San Antonio through sports
@samlerma – rockin’ local video dude
@sbradley3 – if I were still in school, I’d want him as my professor
@scotmckay – dating coach rockstar
@seanasullivan – Fortythree PR star
@sloane – Kiva person and Causemopolitan
@stephenlynch – Results.com smarty
@vidluther – one of the smartest dude’s I know, amazing guy
@voxaeterno – Apple ninja, good buddy
@writeontime – San Antonio Biz Journal star and wonderful human

Thanks for checking the list and again, add yourself to the comments!

Considering the economy and the difficult job market, it’s an especially important time for new graduates to be well prepared for success, especially online. The wonderful part about this time in history is how connected and accessible recruiters, executives and decision makers are online. This means easier access for the folks that are leveraging the free tools available to them. Let’s review some of the tools and tactics I suggest for accelerated success.

1. Have a High Speed Summary on Your Resume

If you haven’t heard already, people are busy. No one has time to review your twelve page resume and nobody cares about all your extracurricular activities, at least not on your resume. Your resume is merely to get your foot in the door. To do this, I suggest you do things a bit differently. I tell job hunters to include a high speed summary at the top of their resume (under their contact information), instead of an objective. A high speed summary includes 3 or 4 bullet points of what makes you awesome and sets you apart. Make it as powerful as you can, showing leadership, dedication, intelligence or whatever special qualities you are able to bring to life. If you’d like to pick up my favorite free template, head over to lifeclever.com and download it.

2. Clean Up Your Social Networks

One would hope that you would never show up to a job interview with a beer in hand – save that for when you’re golfing with the CEO after you’ve been hired. Similarly, you should review all your social networks, online photo galleries, blogs and other websites for less than flattering photos. Promptly remove them as any person who is hiring can likely find them as well with a quick search on Google, Facebook, MySpace and the assortment of other nooks and crannies online. Instead, why not make your sites a place to help sell yourself with pictures of you doing great things with and for others. Make these sites sales tools that work for you by telling the real story of you, instead of working against you. Test this by having your friends search for you and see if they can pull up anything questionable about you.

3. Register on Linkedin

Sure, you’ve been on MySpace and Facebook for some time now. It’s time for you to also register on Linkedin. Never heard of it? No problem. Head over to Linkedin.com to get started. Complete as much information as you can that is pertinent. Just like a resume, have someone proofread what you’ve written for accuracy and grammatical errors. Use a headshot of yourself (not bonging a beer). While you’re at it, why not make all your headshots, avatars, and gravatars match across your websites. Yes, it takes time but you develop a consistent personal brand. Also, remember to create the personalized URL, it’s a breeze and free.

4. Join Twitter

Have you heard of Twitter on tv? If you don’t know what it is, hop over to Common Craft and learn about it. While you’re there, why not brush up on some other topics like Google Docs and RSS. Once you’re on, use Twitter to contribute to the conversation in a positive fashion. Provide great links to things you’re passionate about. Help others who are struggling by encouraging and coaching. People are grateful and others notice. You’ll see that Twitter is chock full of decision makers and you can speak to them – directly! Here’s a hint, if it’s available, use your real name or a shortened version of it as your user name. Once you’ve chosen this, do your best to use it across all your networks.  Come find me, I’ll follow you back.

5. Set Up Your Google Profile

Remember the resume that you’ve been working on and the Linkedin profile that you sweat over? Why not pull all that information over to your Google Profile. No Google Profile? No Problem. Get one now. Be sure to link to your other pages and networks. Have a look at mine, if you want an example. You can also do this with PeoplePond for additional hits on Google.

6. Get Involved In Your Community

Your parents and friends have already told you, but getting involved in your community is a great way to get connected. Getting involved can mean applying your abilities for non-profit at a place of worship, participating in one of the many “camps” or even attending a tweetup. There are amazing people all over, be sure you get outside of your usual group of people you’re comfortable around and meet some new ones. You never know when that next person will be your next mentor, boss or business partner.

If you’ve applied these six steps, you will soon have a number of new friends, contacts and abilities. You’ll be amazed as to how easily “searchable” you become online as well as how well you can leverage the internet to make you look as good as you are. If you have additional suggestions, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

As seen on MySA

Who has two thumbs and...ah, nobody cares.

We live in a “me” centered society where people don’t care about you.  You might even have trouble getting your family to read what you’ve written!  You may be lacking in defining a personal brand for yourself.  Not to worry, here are a few tips on what you can do to firm up your personal brand.

1.  Start with your Strengths.  We all know that there are inherent desires and passions within us that gravitate towards different subjects.  You’ve known this since you were a kid.  What are some of those passions that you have where you have endless levels of energy to read, research and grow?  According to Marcus Buckingham, Strengths have SIGNs.

Success – You have been successful in developing this area of your life.
Instinct – There’s a natural desire in your life to do that activity.
Growth – When you do the activity, you get better than the last time.
Needs – You have a desire to do the activity again.

Once you’ve framed your Strengths, you can use that as your basis for your personal branding.  What’s exciting about it is that you have a natural drive to learn more and share more about those subjects.  For me, I love business and consumer level technology, so you’ll notice that that’s what I talk about.  What can you hang your hat on?

2.  To drive your personal branding you need two basic prongs – content and channels.  The content includes the blog posts you write, the tweets you send out, the comments you leave for others, the updates you provide on social networks.  What people sometimes forget is that content spans audio and video.  Your personal brand becomes even richer when you provide photos, video and audio.  These forms of communication should drive forward your brand that you’ve developed from your strengths.

3. Channels are the places where your content can be found.  Are you on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, YouTube, 12seconds, etc?  You don’t have to be everywhere, you just should be where the eyeballs are and where you can be effective.  Pick those places, then bundle them all together with websites like Google Profiles, FriendFeed, Ping.fm and PeoplePond.  These sites let you consolidate your online presence and some will even let you send your updates to your other sites.  When you update from one to the others, you should be careful – use this sparingly, as your followers can get annoyed from too many updates.  The bonus, however, is that the Google and the other search engines love this stuff and it will make you even easier to find, especially if you use a consistent name or brand.

The bottom line is that you need to do personal branding for yourself regarding topics that you’re passionate about.  Once you’ve determined those strengths, pump your content through your channels.  *Thanks to Dan Schawbel’s comment, I realized I wasn’t explicit about mentioning that your personal brand is not all about you.  People care when the content you provide fulfills their needs versus having a platform for self promotion.  Now GO!

What are some tips and tricks that I have left out?  I’d love to get your input!

Last night, I was watching tv, scanning my tweetdeck and I see this:

@mashable

We got our church, Imagine Fellowship, tweeted about by @mashable!  Yes, when @mashable says something about you, your site gets clobbered (ours crashed, temporarily – thank you Pete Cashmore + Friends!).  Tonight, a few of the leaders from the Imagine Fellowship had a conversation about how we got Imagine there in the first place.  In fact, the process was surprisingly simple.

1. We started with stimulus. There was another church that was testing twitter out in their church. I read about it on Church Marketing Sucks and thought it was a great idea.
2. I proposed the idea to Pastor Kevin Joyce (@kevj) who agreed the idea was brilliant. He wanted to do twitter on screen the next day. Not possible, we didn’t have any followers, it’d have to wait a week.
3. Imagine Fellowship does twitter weekly.  At first it is there to only show people tweeting from the audience, then it grows into @kevj asking questions and having people answer on the screen.  Next, we start live tweeting the sermons so people outside of the four walls of the church can attend. Some people even attend church through their phone.
4. Imagine Fellowship receives it’s first piece of coverage from @roybragg in the San Antonio Express News aka @mysa.  A huge win for us.  How’d we do this? We told @roybragg about the story and he liked it.
5. K-Love does a national piece on Imagine Fellowship talking about our use of twitter in church.  How’d we do this? We sent a tip in through the news section of the page.
6. Outreach magazine, a large and influential Christian magazine recognizes Imagine Fellowship and our use of twitter as one of the trends reshaping the American Church.  Outreach found us via the San Antonio Express News and K-Love.
7. @mashable tweets about Imagine Fellowship uses twitter at church.  Amazing! How did that happen?  One guess – submit a tip page.

Do you see a theme developing?  If not, let me spell it out for you:

1. Find a cool idea and apply it
2. Contact the media
3. Repeat and think bigger

If you’re scared and don’t think you can do it, check out this video from Cameron Herold to get you fired up.  Watch the video, do something cool and pick up the phone – GO!  Remember, pitching the media is like asking a girl out, she might say no, but you’ve got to swing to hit.

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