The Wasatch Girl » social media

Impact of the Chip-In Widget

WasatchGirl — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:13:56 +0000

In May Phil Burn’s daughter, Serenity, was diagnosed with leukemia . Phil Burns is a local entrepreneur, blogger, and technologist and well known in the local technology scene. With the announcement of the news, fellow bloggers immediately responded by distributing the Chip In Widget (created by Jesse Stay) amongst their online presence and pitching in donations. Jesse had initially set the targeted donation goal at $500 to hopefully be achieved within the one month period. The $500 goal was quickly exceeded, resulting in Jesse bumping the goal to $1,000. Yet, the donations kept rolling in and by the time the month had passed, $10,600 was raised through the simple addition of a couple lines of code on a number of blogs. (I swapped emails with Jesse in hopes of understanding the exact distribution of the widget, but unfortunately the widget creation site used does not provide the statistics. Bummer.)

This simple campaign made me ponder how a good sum of money could be raised over such a short period of time and if it was a model that could be used in the non-profit realm. Looking back on the Chip In Widget, it seemed to be have such an impact for four main reasons.

It Hit A Pain Point – many of us probably know someone who has been diagnosed with cancer. But the pain point in Serenity’s case is that she is young, being diagnosed at the age of 22 months. An age that shouldn’t have to endure pain or a terrible disease.
It was Personal – often with non-profits you see a picture of a child or a family but you don’t personally know that family. I don’t know the exact distribution of the widget, but it seemed that many of us personally knew Phil.
It was Targeted – The widget was distributed through the technology community with which Phil is a member.
There was a Deadline – It is human nature (or at least in my case) to procrastinate. The creation of a deadline made people respond.

Would this be able to work in a non-profit scenario if they had an online presence and following? Seems like the targeted and deadline points could easily be achieved, but hitting a main pain point and making It personal are the tricky aspects. What do you readers think?

My first episode of WineLibrary.tv

WasatchGirl — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:31:58 +0000

I met Gary VanderChuk briefly at SXSW at the Wine Library Cork’d Party. I have been meaning to watch a full episode of his show for awhile now as I am a wine lover and because I am truly impressed with what he has done for an old industry through the implementation of the web and social media. For any of you who have yet to hear of WineLibrary.tv, Gary (who often goes by Garyvee) was raised working in a New Jersey based family liquor store. As a teenager he started reading the wine magazines and training his palette “backwards” by tasting all ingredients (including dirt) that go into a bottle of wine. While in college he re-branded the company liquor store as Wine Library and continued to train himself on all aspects of wine, tasting every bottle that entered the store and creating a reputation as an expert with his customers. Within a five year period he grew their business from $4m to $45m. Gary then introduced social media to Wine Library by creating WineLibrary.tv, a website with video episodes of him tasting new wines, focusing on showing the masses that they should try many different types and bottles of wine, trusting their own palettes rather than the reviews. A new video episode is released five days a week and has garnered a strong community referenced as the “Vaniaks”.

A couple days ago I watched my first full episode and found it highly entertaining. It took me awhile to get used to Garyvee’s enthusiasm and lingo, but grew more and more interested as he started tasting the wines and providing his feedback. Below is today’s episode.

There are two websites, the Wine Library, the e-commerce store, and WineLibrary.tv, the video blog. The WineLibrary.tv shows all his episodes (now on #461), lists his social media presence, includes a downloadable spreadsheet of wines and their ratings, showcases his new book 101 wines that is already within the top 1,000 best selling books though it doesn’t come out until May 13th (currently at 755, but I have seen it in the 300′s) and so much more.

Here’s a cheers for you, Garyvee.

Changes in Del.iocio.us

WasatchGirl — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:37:47 +0000

Del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo in 2005) has been making some changes to their product. I like the new user interface on the pop-up box, think the suggested tags are “smarter” than previously, and like the new firefox toolbar that shows my recently tagged links. However, I don’t understand why they now have a limit on the length of the description. I find value in bookmarking all the recently funded companies in specific sectors I watch, clipping the raise press release into the description field and updating when I see news about that company. But now, I have to ensure that the description is less than the allotted length of 255 characters. What is the advantage of them putting a cap on the length?

Finally Twitterpated

WasatchGirl — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:32:46 +0000

Last year I posted about my lack of understanding for Twitter. It seemed so pointless and I couldn’t derive a reason why I would actually want to use it. Yet, I kept reading articles and posts about how people just loved the service, so I stopped boycotting in May of last year. I first hopped on and connected with some Utah entrepreneurs and would chat with them on sporadic occasion. Then I started hopping on a somewhat more regular basis, to be honest, just to use the widget on my blog as I liked having the little updates next to my real post (I now what to implement Tumblr as well, but they haven’t made their own widgets. That is a whole other post…). He he… horrible reason I know. Then, I went to SXSW and my understanding of Twitter completely changed.

Twitter in a conference setting is invaluable! Everyday I met all these people and wanted to catch up at panels, meetings, dinner, etc. Rather than putting a phone number in my phone, I could easily connect on twitter and follow their updates by phone during the duration of the conference. Then on the way home, I switched the settings so that I could still see their updates by web only.

Yet I continue to see the value on a daily basis, which is increased by the more folks I follow. I notice that through my updates I get good leads (in real time) about something I might find useful. Or I see interesting feedback if I throw out an open ended question. For instance, the other day I threw out the following questions (I am @WasatchGirl) and received the following answers:

@WasatchGirl “ I just learned in a company pitch that 20% of cell phone users do not have a land line. I fall into this group. What about you?”

@CharlieOliver No landline here, same for at least a dozen people I know (they do have cells)

@yuricake totally

@MelissaKing I got rid of mine over a year ago & I can’t say I missed it all that much

@tamineedham I have to have a land line, no service bars in my house…

@tweetipFH re : no land line ~ no voice landline for 8 years…

@Kalei I have 5 cell phones, no land lines.

@humancell I have a landline … that is the number that I give when I have to provide a number, but I really don’t want to hear from them

@selves somewhat, company pays my landline/inet/&cell, so i don’t really count.

@WasatchGirl “ What type of value do you derive from Twitter? Examples?”

@Kalei From Twitter I get: real-time news events, news from Hawaii, new links/websites, keep in touch w/family, & entertainment!

@tweetipFH ~ realtime truth on breaking news, where ever it is in the World…
~ twitter helps restore our gut “filtering” of what doesn’t feel right…
~ within a few tweets of 140 chars, the truth emerges, from earthquakes to twitter ads

And then I learned the other day how to start doing searches on Twitter and read this post by Charlie on how to actually track certain words.

If you haven’t checked out Twitter yet, here is an easy to understand video to get you started.