- Posts tagged San Francisco
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If I Ran Product for Nissan Leaf (@NissanEVs)
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Checking In - You're Either Boring or a Rich Dick
- Groucho Marx via last.fm
I'm The Mayor of Your House - #crime
At the end of the year, I read Michael Fertik's great post, 2010: The Year of Atomic Branding on my friend Jennifer Leggio's blog. I file this under 'scary - interesting' and I thought that was the end of it.
A couple of weeks later, I'm in the city for the weekend with my family. We had just trudged through the rain and were sitting in the bar of the St. Francis. The kids having hot chocolate, me having a martini and I checked in on Foursquare. The act of checking in on Foursquare when I'm with my family delights my kids because they like to know the Mayor of places. The act of checking in on Foursquare pisses my wife off to no end and has been the cause of many a shopping spree.
This time, she simply said "So now everyone that follows you knows that we aren't at home and we are over an hour away. How many people follow you and how much do you trust them not to rob us?' I wish she would have stopped there, but of course, she follows that up with "How often do you check in, telling the world that you aren't home, but maybe me and the kids are?"
Flashback to Michael Fertik's article, the potential threat of oversharing on social networks.
Of course this got me thinking about how safe location based social networks are. How vulnerable are we?
I've heard interesting stories about people & stalkers and being dumped or being fired because of FourSquare. I haven't heard about people being robbed. Yet.
A week or so later, I did a simple check to see how vulnerable we really are. I did a quick search for people in San Francisco sharing their status on Twitter and checked in on FourSquare or Gowalla. It's a simple query using Twitter's advanced search capability.
What I found amazed me. People checked in all over the place. FourSquare was living up to it's reputation. However, an easy cross check from Twitter - where people tend to put their full name and where they live, with WhitePages.com let me easily figure out where people lived. I don't mean just the city, but also their exact address and even a nice little Google Map with directions to get there.
Of course, not everyone is easy to find on WhitePages.com, but my quick little informal experiment yielded about a 25% hit rate. I got freaked out. No more FourSquare for me. In the old days, burglars would prowl around neighborhoods looking for empty houses. Today, they simply need to search for affluent neighborhoods and look for people who have checked in at places more than a few hours away. The movie theater for example.
I took it one step further. Here is a feed for people who have checked in or are posting "I'm at" the key phrase for both Gowalla and FourSquare. When people say where they are, they also say where they aren't (home, for example).
Glad I have an alarm system. How long until someone really malicious does a nice little Twitter / WhitePages mash-up?Photo by Johnny Grim.
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Crush It - A Review of @garyvee 's New Book
I'll admit upfront, I'm a big GaryVee fan. When he announced his new book, Crush It, I ordered it no questions asked. I knew that it would be that good. Plus, I've mooched off of his unbelievable content for the past 2-years, it's the least I can do for the guy.
I first heard about Gary when he came to San Francisco and my friend JJ invited me to go see him do a live taping of WineLibrary.tv. Of course, I was a dummy and turned down the offer. I had never heard of Gary, I don't really drink wine so I passed to hang with my family. A few days later, I watched the video and kicked myself for a couple of days more.
If you've ever watched Gary, even once, you know the voice. That unmistakable, semi-hoarse, kind of screaming, enthusiastic voice. That voice was in my head the entire time I read this book. I thought that was cool. Here is a book about building a personal brand and I can't even get this guy's voice out of my head. Talk about brand.
The book itself, like his videos, is pretty short (total read time was only about 2 hours), easy to digest and extremely motivational. You can't read this book and say ho-hum, I'll stick that on a shelf for a rainy day. Hell, it's even got me blogging again. It's also got me thinking about how I can help my dad in his pending retirement and my sister with her new pet store and my buddy the artist. You just want to go out and spread the gospel.
If you're pretty savvy on the social media front, a lot of this will be second nature to you. You'll know all the tools that he talks about. You'll probably have them all set up and you're using them from time to time. If you've spent anytime with anyone that has built a good personal brand, you'll know a lot of the strategy that Gary lays out, but what you won't know is the hustle that he describes. As he points out in the beginning, this isn't a get rich quick scheme, this, like all good schemes, it's a get rich slow with a lot of work one.
But he spells it out for you. In the book, Gary shares with you everything that he did to build his own personal brand. It isn't rocket science, it's work. It isn't get a million twitter followers over night, this is get them over 2 - 3 years of hard work and brand building. But the directions are there, all you've got to do is follow them.
