Jun

24

My ‘Awesome’ Experiment – Fiverr.com

As most you know, I offer a few services at Fiverr.com to experiment with micro-commerce exploration. My first thought of this service was motivated to do something fun, not make money so I set-up several ‘gigs’.

The idea of Fiverr is novel and the ‘gigs’ that are available now are all $5; no more, no less. They are very unique but mostly involve SEO help, blog posting and social media based marketing ideas (basically Spam). Some are more original like a $5 doodle of a picture your significant other send OR a Youtube video of some stranger singing the Birthday song to your best friend. Pretty fun! (Watch out for copyrights though!)

Well, I recently have been getting ‘gigs’ to help people add there sites to the social bookmarking site for $5 and it was fine. It only took a few minutes and I even created a lead for Stand And Stretch, my startup Social Media company. Sweet!

NOW….I finally had a person purchase a fun gig. I was ready to have some fun. My unnamed Fiverr client purchased my services to do the following gig.

I will make you feel good about yourself by texting you about how awesome YOU are for 24 hours for $5

I was ecstatic! Finally, my own novel experiment could take place! So, I accepted and then received my contact number. I immediately began adding ‘awesomeness’ to some random strangers life. I loved every second. I felt like a ego coach!

Over a 24 hour period, I filled a person with the best 140 character lines I could think of. I didn’t cheat and caste (copy/paste) any of it. I did get some good laughs and (some replies!) so I thought I would share them with you here. I have hidden the AWESOME ‘anonymous’ persons identity! Thanks ‘whoever’ you are! ;) My privacy is important so I convey that same privacy to everyone else.

So, here are my ‘awesome’ notes including timestamps (thanks to Google Voice). Enjoy!

Me: First, Thank You! Thank you for knowing that you, too, can be happy! Let’s have some fun! 8:40 PM
Me: Over the next 24 hours I will give you sunlight in darkness and make you see the brighter side of how awesome you really are! 8:41 PM
Fiverr Client: Yayy!! I’m ready! Thanks! 8:58 PM
Me: When you enter the room, everyone around you is wanting to know more about you! And they should, you are awesome! 9:12 PM
Me: Other people are jealous of you! Take time to notice how great you look today and how everyone wants to be your friend! 11:22 PM
Me: YOU! ARE! AWESOME! 11:22 PM
Me: Your awesomeness even follows you into your dreams! GOOD NIGHT AWESOME DREAMER! 11:48 PM
Fiverr Client: Night! 11:53 PM
Me: Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! 1:00 AM
Me: Good morning sunshine! Your day awaits you! Did you know there are people who depend on you to make them smile? Awesome. 7:08 AM
Me: You Are Pretty Awesome! Just so ya know! 8:58 AM
Me: You give the sun reason to rise in the morning! Enjoy your day because it was meant for you! 8:59 AM
Me: How does it feel to be so friggin awesome! Make sure you smile at people today because they want to know you and it will make their day! 10:55 AM
Me: You don’t enjoy eating your lunch….your lunch enjoys being eaten by You! That’s clearly awesome! 11:06 AM
Me: You’re friends are all waiting on your to call them and spread your awesomeness around! Don’t let them wait in aniticpation….call them now! 11:53 AM
Me: RE: Your friends are all waiting on your to call them and spread your awesomeness around! Don’t let them wait in anticipation….call them now! 11:53 AM
Me: When all else fails, look into the mirror and know that YOU….are awesome and you can do anything you want, at any time. 2:17 PM
Me: Quick! Hide! The awesome police are on their way! You’ve be ‘cited’ for being too awesome… punishment? HUGGED TO DEATH! 3:14 PM
Me: YOU = AWESOME! 3:50 PM
Me: Take your time in doing everything, for if it involves you then it’s important and your end result is always excellence! 4:34 PM
Me: AWESOMENESS is not something you are simply given. A series of remarkable actions are done to equate to what you are. You do well at being remarkable. 6:53 PM
Me: The sun goes down but you still shine bright! 7:26 PM
Me: And for the last awesome message I want to THANK YOU for being awesome and choosing my services to get you through 24 hours! THANKS! 8:22 PM

Pretty “awesome”, right?! Who’s next…?

Posted by Lucas Shaffer | 2 comments

Jun

19

Nexus One Waterproof? This Is Why My Phone Is So Much Better Than Yours!

iphone killer / mobile devices / mobile safety / mommy / nexus one / nexus one review

Yes. I am serious. It is better. I will prove it with this story.

My story here begins with a tragedy and ends with a thrilling moment of triumph and luck! It all begins with a good idea to spend time with my family…

It was Wednesday afternoon, June 16th, and I came home early from work to surprise my wife and baby boy to take them to the pool and spend the day with them. I scooped them up in a bustling hurry and with all smiles got down to the pool quickly. I grabbed the SPF 10,000 and lathered Gus completely from head to toe, put on his little hat and got right into the pool. Win!

After about 30 or 45 minutes, the heat was unbearable and Guster was getting tired and anxious to get out of the sun. We dried off and headed to the car and started loading our stuff. To my surprise, there was this dead weight in my pocket and I had no idea what was about to happen next. I reached into my pocket and as soon as my fingers touched the exterior of the item I knew immediately.

I had forgotten I put my lovely Nexus One in my pocket. #omgfailhowcouldIdothiswhatwasithinkingandwhatamigoingtodo_fail

Of course, my face lost it’s color, my wife mumbled something I couldn’t make out and everything was is sllllooooowwwwww- mmmmmooooooo. I went into panic mode even though the phone was completely water logged. Like the next 2 minutes were going to drastically change the outcome.

I burst into the apartment, grabbed my tools and began surgery on my Nexus One. She was my most loyal friend and I had to give it my best shot. After all, this wasn’t the first time this has ever happened to me and at this point my Cell Phone CPR success rate was at 100%. I have never lost a phone. My only goal was to take it apart and dry it completely and hope for the best.

Fast forward to the next day. I get home from work having had a very anxious day thinking about where I was going to budget enough money to get a phone that could ever compare to this one. I was anticipating the worst.

Well…I put the phone together and plugged it in and to my surprise the charging light came on. Win! This means something is OK….right? 10 minutes later I try to turn the phone on and another WIN! The screen is clear and the loading process begins without a hitch. Then it turns off. Then it turns on and the loading process begins again…. Then off. Hmmmm…. I now have come to the conclusion that the battery is no longer good. Or maybe not…. Here is a short video clip to summarize.

Less than 24 hours later and thanks to Amazon Prime, I have a new battery by the next day and charging commences. In a rush from work I get home and the green light is alerting me that the battery is fully charged. I turn on the phone and presto! It turns on like nothing ever happened. Of course, a few things are not 100% (ie. speaker phone) but everything else is turning out OK. (Had to re-install a few things)

Success!

So, here is my testimonial that the Nexus One is better than your phone. Yes…I said it. You still think your iPhone 3, 3GS,4 is better? Throw that thing in a pool for 30 minutes, dive in and retrieve it and make it work without replacing anything but the battery. Yeah….didn’t think so.

Here are some pics of me and my family during the incident. As you can see, I was concentrating on much more important things. Love my baby Guster! Yes, my Nexus One is in my pocket in every picture….

Haha! Thanks and see you next time! :)

Posted by Lucas Shaffer | 2 comments

Jun

11

Twitter Identity Crisis: Multiple Account Management

automation / bad habits / best practices / networking / new society / original rules / overworked / scheduling tweets / social media / social safety

In the age of the auto-tweet and the fact there are 2 billion tweets a month, I consistently engage users who have a line, or two, drawn in the sand. They make bold statements about what twitter ‘should’ be used for and how it’s utilized the best. I say, twitter is what you want it to be. Most of us already manage multiple accounts and it’s not impossible to see the advantage of separating your personal identity from promotional traffic. Chris Brogan recently made this same move separating his blog roll posts to @broganmedia which allowed him to engage his users with @chrisbrogan. Smart move. With all the tools available, having multiple twitter accounts (non-client) should be a standard practice for any seasoned twitterer.

Yes, you follow some greats. The best twitter proponents are already linked to one account and you don’t want to have to follow and follow to build each account the same way. I understand you put a lot of work harvesting your following from the flock but what if you could possibly better serve them. Here are 3 ways to find out if you could benefit from setting up multiple twitter accounts.

Promotional Tweets
You are guilty. You plug every event, every conference, every new gadget and your followers love you for it. So, why are you informing your audience you are ‘tired and going to bed’? I’d bet they only want links to the iPhone 4 review and not links to your newest picture of your ‘cute’ puppy or a foursquare check-in. Fail. If you have developed a following of understanding, supportive users then consider yourself lucky. However, there’s a good chance you only know a small percentage of your followers. And they just don’t care. In this case, your promotional tweets need a new home. Start a new account and plug away…leave the ‘morning coffee’ comments to a personal account.

Engaging Tweets
Yes! Finally, I had a follower RT my tweet (and I don’t even know who they are). Mentions and replies begin and you are now locked in twitversation and you are building relationships! Wonderful! Don’t tread on your friendly followers with continual feed links and promo tweets. I believe the one way to lose value as a twitterer is to tweet irrelevant crap by the crap-load. I understand you can engage the user and make conversation but why are you shoveling links on tech news in my face, too. Unfollow. Your personal account can be best for engaging people. I go for the avatars that have ‘real’ names instead of cool nickname that I don’t get. These ‘real’ people put their name on the line and have brought me value from experience. Removing your personal news from your other accounts and centralizing it into a new account can be liberating as you no longer question the post about a killer salmon fillet you had with dinner. You might even decide to make it private. Hmmm…

Link Tweets
While reading up on twittergrader, I stumbled upon a a algorithmic parameter that decreases your score and it was linking, or use of links in tweets. If all of your tweets contain links then you are probably pretty boring. Just kidding! lol Well, actually, you ARE scored lower on twittergrader because you are considered a RSS feed and less a real person. Even klout grades you by your number of links you post. You can go from Networker to Chatterbox, or vice versa, by simple changes to your link habits. If you find yourself putting more links into your tweets than anything else, then you should probably create a new account to shelter this generous nature and occasionally offer your engaging friends and promotional followers a taste.

Are there more scenarios where you could use even more accounts? Sure. But these are the most common among my network. In many cases, the networking ability you can create within your own accounts can hint at a bigger sense of authority for the owner. Also, your accounts can bleed over to each other and blend into a conglomerate of tweets making you appear more important than just one busy account…

The number of followers has never been a gauge of total network worth. It’s all about content. If you make yourself decide on what you want to gain from your experience with twitter, then you can profoundly integrate this method to better serve you and your followers.

I’ll follow that.

Posted by Lucas Shaffer | 3 comments

Jun

04

Stand And Stretch Goes Live!

Featured / Uncategorized

Stand And Stretch - Social Media Resource I am proud to announce my idea now has a home. Today, I launched the Stand And Stretch web site. To make it interesting, I launched the day before my 30th birthday. This was strategically planned so I can always say I started ‘something’ before I was 30. lol

Anyway! Here it is…where passion meets fruition. I would like to acknowledge my wife for being patient and helpful, yet stern and loving. Also, My baby boy for motivating me to be better. From 5pm to 10pm on weekdays he reminds me of how lucky I am. Luckily, he sleeps from 10pm to 2am so I can work on this project! Sleep? No one sleeps anymore…..right?

AND…Follow Us on Twitter http://twitter.com/StandAndStretch and Facebook!

Connect with me SOON!

Posted by Lucas Shaffer | 1 comments

Jun

02

Monitoring The Web Using Google Alerts

automation / common sense / facebook / google / google alerts / networking / social media / twitter

In a past post on how to be more responsible on the web, I brought up Google Alerts as a tool to help locate information on yourself to build awareness to what others would see. I think it’s time to dive a bit further and discover how to monitor the web for news, brand interaction, interesting articles, yourself and other people.

There really is no limit to what you can ‘monitor’ on the web using this tool. Below I will give a few scenarios and hopefully you can find value in this short post. Start monitoring the web today to bring value to you instead of participating in the constant struggle to discover new information.

The Self-absorbed

Most of us have never found the time to Google ourselves and discover that our names are a big part of who we are. Without a ‘name’ we have no true real estate on the web. Whether it be an avatar, business name, nickname or your real name, you deserve to know when you are being represented on the web. Google Alerts can take a parameter as simple as “Lucas Shaffer” and email me every time Google crawls a site that uses the term “Lucas Shaffer”. You can set it to instantaneously alert you which provides a quick boost of ego altering messages or you can have it digest the top amount for a day, week or month. You can toggle this feature to get the best managed result.

The only lesson here is that while you may have Google’d your name in the past, you possibly were not aware you could monitor and receive emailed reports of your name ‘activity’. I personally use many versions of my name and prefer the avatar ‘lucaslshaffer’. So, I currently monitor the following combinations and receive regular reports on them.

Lucas L Shaffer
“Lucas L Shaffer”
lucaslshaffer
Lucas Lamberto Shaffer
“Lucas Shaffer”

Needless to say, I seem a bit ‘self-absorbed’….

The Brand Police

If you own a copyright or trademark then you partake in a very customary ritual. You subconsciously seek your name or brand throughout the entire day. You possibly use a search engine to find whether or not you are mentioned in an online periodical or if you are trending on twitter. Either way, you are working way too hard. Google Alerts can search for your brand for you and report any discussion to your email as you command. It’s liberating to turn these services on and watch as you concentrate more on work and less on finding the ‘bad guys’.

You can basically be your own brand monitoring service to a certain degree.

Maybe you just want to follow Nike and their new Air Jordan campaign or follow a trending topic on twitter about the Oil Spill and BP stock reports. Here are a few brands I monitor on the web in which I can turn a blog comment into a connection.

“The Game Headwear”
The Game LLC
Soffe
Delta Apparel, Inc
Junk Food Tees
“the bar design”
classic headwear

As soon as the web crawls this information on the web, I am alerted and can consume as I like.

News

With the proliferation of news sites you can get lost really quick. You almost always have to fight the gushing ads and ‘feeler’ comments to get to the value you seek. You possibly already have RSS feeds attached to your favorite reader and enjoy the combination of time and effort built into these tools. That’s all fine. But what about ‘bleeding edge’ news? The news that is so lava hot your awareness is compared to the watchdogs at the Huffington Post or Mashable.

Well, here it is. A trick I will share with you now to help fulfill your needs from gathering the latest and greatest from the web. Your fishing line that only reels in the fish you want. If you want mobile device information for Androids new releases as it hits the wire directly from the source and you also want competitors reactions, then you can have it. That is it. This scenario is easy to follow and seen daily from my tweets as I try to provide the latest Android info to my followers. My monitoring keywords are below.

“Android”
Google Android
Android Froyo
Nexus One
iPhone
BlackBerry
Incredible

As these topics hit the feeds, I am the first to know and sometimes first to share! :) This has been a reliable and very intuitive way to create remarkable conversations on facebook and twitter. It also has the ability to create a bubble of expertise around yourself as you consume the alerts daily to build knowledge on the topic of choice. Others notice your are just a step ahead of them on the news and they will begin to expect it.

I will stop here as I feel I have covered the major scenarios. Either way you slice it, I stay up to date without much effort. Google Alerts brings my consumable news, brand engagement and interactions and people talking about me directly to my inbox. Google is also expanding into social media sites, like twitter, making the power of news management a skill where filter creation supports precision and not just broad strokes of results as in the past.

The first question to ask is what do I search for regularly? Financial data? Twitter blogs? iPhone articles?

The cost of Google Alerts are cheap. They take less than a minute to set up and begin paying off rather quickly. You may find yourself tweaking popular parameters to a digest setting while your inbox fills with the information you seek.

Teach a user to search, the user learns for a day. Teach the user how to utilize Google Alerts, the user learns for a lifetime, in small emailed reports. Until turned off.

Happy Alert Building!

Warning: In an effort to filter the entire web on everything you want to know, you may create a wave of uncontrollable spam for yourself. Start slow, build alerts that work with precision and go from there.

Posted by Lucas Shaffer | 0 comments

follow me as I interact with the web

24

My ‘Awesome’ Experiment – Fiverr.com

I will make you feel good about yourself by texting you about how awesome YOU are for 24 hours for $5

19

Nexus One Waterproof? This Is Why My Phone Is So Much Better Than Yours!

Success!

04

Stand And Stretch Goes Live!

latest

Testimonials

comments

Quick Links

Projects

Archives

© Copyright Lucas Shaffer in Columbus, Ga – Personal Site Powered by Stand And Stretch

follow me as I interact with the web

24

My ‘Awesome’ Experiment – Fiverr.com

I will make you feel good about yourself by texting you about how awesome YOU are for 24 hours for $5

19

Nexus One Waterproof? This Is Why My Phone Is So Much Better Than Yours!

Success!

11

Twitter Identity Crisis: Multiple Account Management

08

Google Just Got A Little More Awesome: Enter Background Image

Google Win!

04

Stand And Stretch Goes Live!

02

Monitoring The Web Using Google Alerts

The Self-absorbed

The Brand Police

News

latest

Testimonials

comments

Quick Links

Projects

Archives

© Copyright Lucas Shaffer in Columbus, Ga – Personal Site Powered by Stand And Stretch