Friday Connections 3/20/09

Posted by TeamCharlie on March 20, 2009 under Friday Connections, Gabe's Twitter Gems, Social Media, Twitter | 5 Comments to Read

This was an extremely busy week for us and I was noticeably absent from Twitter.  I would pop in from time to time but sadly was unable to make as many connections as I would have liked.  I did indeed make some and in new ways I might add.  But first let me give a quick rundown of what MaryMargaret and I were up to.  Last Saturday, a reporter from NBC showed up at our door and taped an interview (see it here) about MaryMargaret being nominated for the Junior National Young Leaders Conference this summer.  She had Monday off, so we visited Key 103 radio and taped another interview (listen here) regarding our Music for Life fund raiser coming up on Sunday.  Last night she had her first solo presentation in front of the Kiwanis Club of Suburban Frederick updating them about the progress with Kids Are Heroes and detailing her Music for Life project. (This organization is handling all the donated funds for us.)  Somewhere in there we were interviewd for a podcast moderated by @tumblondad, one of my earlier Friday connections.  And our Twitter activity also got us noticed by the Denver Post, who did a story on us that will be in Tuesday’s paper.  Now I am not naive enough to think that this kind of attention will continue.  As a matter of fact, I believe it was a fluke occurrence that it all happened the same week because we have no more media events on our immediate schedule.  So things should be back to normal and I hope to be making more connections this coming week.

This week I made five connections.  I believe three of them were made by different methods than those used in the past.

 #1 angellr 
I saw a tweet from Bob asking if anyone knew of a utility that would back up his followers to his local drive.  It seemed to me I had seen something like this before during my travels.  I assumed that someone would have given him the answer right away, so I told him if he didn’t get the answer within a few minutes I could see if I could find the link for him.  Well, no one else reading his note had the answer so I googled.  I came up with a utility that sort of did what he wanted.  I sent that to him.  A few minutes past, and it was bugging me that I didn’t really solve his problem so I googled some more. I found Tweetake, a third party utility that did exactly what he wanted it to.  You can save all your followers to a text file on your hard drive.  I felt very satisfied to send it to him.  Bob was very excited and gracious to get this information.  So much so that he put me on his #followfriday list last week.  That wasn’t necessary but was appreciated very much.  This is one way of making a connection that I have talked about before.  A great way to connect with someone is to solve a problem for them.

#2 and #3 @MissBlondie919 and @Annagain66
Last Friday night’s Twitterthon was a blast.  I put these two tweeps together in my connections list because they were both in attendance.   There was a lot of participation last week and right at the very end I was going to announce to all to join our “after party” on Ustream.  Sadly right at that point I had used up all my allotted tweets for the hour and got booted.  This was even after taking the precaution of having @TeamCharlie send out the songs.  I DM’ed a few people about the after party (note when you run out of tweets you can still DM) and @MissBlondie919 and @Annagain66 came along with @jonkurozawa who got a Friday connection mention last week.  MaryMargaret read all the questions and it was more great fun.  @MissBlondie919 was getting many of the answers right.  When that happens I try and change things up a bit and ask something I think is difficult from another subject.  The question was this: “On what vegetable did an ancient Egyptian place his right hand on when taking an oath?”  I asked this question with a smug smirk on my face thinking, “They’ll never get this one!”  Miss Blondie quickly typed: “An onion.”  I’m thinking, “No way!!! How did she know that??”  So I asked her.  It turns out her grandfather was an historian and she would sit on his knee and listen to story after story when she was young.  What a cool fact to know about someone!  Even in a silly little trivia game you can make a connection.

#4 @rmolden
This is a good one.  One of my previous Friday connections, @hiannie, lives in Singapore.  She recently told me she put the Kids Are Heroes web site on her blogroll.  How cool is that?  Kids Are Heroes and Twitter are a perfect match because they are both global applications.  Being included in Annie’s blogroll made me think of ways I could reach other parts of the world more effectively.  The answer I came up with was to tweet about Kids Are Heroes during their day.  I googled for a utility that would tweet at a scheduled time.  The best one I found was FutureTweets, because it allows you to tweet at a scheduled time recurringly for free.  Not wanting to be obnoxious about it I scheduled it to tweet the Kids Are Heroes link just twice throughout the night.  Well the first night I did it I saw that it had been retweeted by @rmolden who lives in Sydney.  That was cool so I sent him a belated thank you.  Turns out he was still up.  He liked the link so much he asked for it again so he could retweet again!  Who would ever think you could make a connection on Twitter while you are sleeping?

#5 @OKE_Menachem
Menachem is simply a nice man.  He has retweeted my tweets on several occasions.  He participated in our Twitterthon last week.  I made his #followfriday list this week.  He even donated to MaryMargaret’s Music for Life cause last week, as that is why we do our Twitterthons.  Thanks so much Menachem.  Now I’m not saying you have to donate to the Music for Life program to get a mention here, but it sure doesn’t hurt. :)

This is so much fun tracking all these new people that I meet on Twitter.  Remember if you want to do the same, use the #fridayconnect hash tag and mention the people you have connected with throughout the week.  It’s also fun to progress with the same folks each week.  If you have any #fridayconnect stories, please share them with us in the Comments section.