Jim did a great job presenting about Twitter at the DC Social Media Club meeting last night (hosted at Viget.)  He told some engaging stories about his Twitter habit, and how he’s used the service during everything from the Virginia Tech tragedy to his travels to Iraq with President Bush. 

The discussion got me thinking more about how Twitter is being used practically, right now, to address real business issues.  I experienced an example this week.

I’m a fan of Mixx, in part because I love to see local start-ups do well.  They’ve been getting Crunched lately, which is cool.  I signed up a while ago, but I’m not very active yet.  I do have the “Allow other users to share Mixx items with me” option checked, which I believe is the default.  I’d never received an item from other users, though, until this week when I pulled up my email to see about a half-dozen emails from Mixx, all saying “Someone has shared a link with you from mixx.com.”  I was surprised, and happened to tweet:

“wondering why i have so much email from mixx this morning”

1 minute later I got this reply from Justin, so I figured something was up system-wide:

“@barn: i have a lot of mixx e-mail this morning too”

3 minutes later I got a direct message from Will, who works at Mixx:

“we are fixing the issue as we speak. Someone did a little spamming last night.”

Had I been concerned (which I wasn’t) my concerns would have been allayed.  Communication problem solved. 

Now, I know Will — we follow each other — so that was easy for him.  Following all of your users might be difficult (but why not try?).  He could also track the keyword “mixx” and contact complete strangers the same way, when needed.

Is this a good way to use Twitter?  Is this an efficient way to communicate with your users?  Regardless, it’s effective and it’s working right now, so why not use it?

Tom, a new contributor on ColoradoStartups.com, posted an interview with Andrew Hyde, founder of Startup Weekend.  If you’re wondering what SW is all about, give it a read.

Viget is one of the sponsors helping to cover the cost of drinks at Nick’s launch event for Social Times on 12/13/07 at MCCXXII in DC.  One of our clients, Razoo, will be demoing along with several others including Gary V.  There’s no cost to attend — just register here.

We are growing quickly at Viget, working to hire the best in the industry into a bootstrapped consulting business.  Part of the motivation to grow is our work with web start-ups.  We see tons of opportunity to do great work with funded, fast-moving ventures.  We went through the Internet boom and bust in our first year, though, and we’ve always maintained a balance in our clients because we know how quickly funding sources — and our start-up clients who depend on them — can disappear.

As we analyze our growth plans, we keep an eye on the overall economy.  Fred wrote a good post yesterday called How Will Tougher Economic Times Impact The Web? that touches on this topic.

“We (me and my colleagues at Union Square Ventures) believe that the web is accelerating its transformative power and that businesses built around a web foundation will continue to take share of the worldwide economic pie.  So I suspect that there will continue to be a healthy supply of capital targeted at web applications and services for as far as I can see.”

As part of my pre-Redskins-game prep, I just finished reading a Post article about Demetric Evans, a defensive lineman from Haynesville, La. who has been with the ‘Skins since 2004.  I never really knew much about him.  The article focused mostly on a tragedy he went through at age 12, when a classmate accidentally shot and killed his best friend while showing off the family gun.  Later on, during a brief stint out of football before he earned a spot with Washington, Demetric survived a carjacking at the hands of criminals who had killed other victims.

A fellow lineman and friend, Renaldo Wynn, said:

“With all the stuff that happened to him … a lot of guys would have been like, ‘I can’t do it.’ But making that team was nothing for him … And with the things he saw at 12, man, a lot of guys go to a life of crime or violence and could have easily retaliated or went the wrong way. But he didn’t. The adversity he went through in football is nothing like what he went through in life, and that was his motivation.”

This touches on an interesting aspect of human nature, in how people deal with adversity, particularly at a young age.  I’ve had setbacks and frustrations in life, and I’d like to think I persevere and use them as motivation more than anything, but I had it pretty easy as a kid — and certainly never experienced anything as severe as Demetric’s childhood ordeal.  Parents play a big role in how kids deal with challenges, no doubt, as Demetric alludes to in this quote about his single-parent mom, who worked nights when he was growing up:

“To this day my mom never complained about having to work that schedule … That’s one thing I always admired about my mom: She never made excuses.”

Clearly what’s important is an enduring mindset, not a specific reaction to the tragedy (they apparently didn’t discuss the event very much as a family.)  It comes down to how people make decisions, and how those decisions are impacted in the long-term by upbringing and in an instant by tragic events.

Do inspiring stories like Demetric’s alone do enough to motivate kids to make the right choices in life rather than the wrong ones when they face hard times?  Regardless, Demetric’s final quote of the article should be up on a wall at every school in America as far as I’m concerned:

“In life, man, everyone has something they can continue to go back to and make a crutch for why this is not happening, or why I’m not successful. I grew up without a dad and everybody’s got a sad story and all of that, but you know what, it’s all about you as an individual standing up and knowing what you are capable of and having confidence in yourself and really believing that you can do what you want to do, because this life, you can’t appreciate it enough.”

This mindset would benefit everyone, whether you’re a kid struggling to get through school, an undrafted rookie trying to make the NFL, or an entrepreneur struggling to launch a business.  Even though Demetric says talking about these experiences doesn’t do anyone any good, to the extent that’s he’s willing and able, I believe hearing his story could help a lot of people.  I’m glad he shared it.

It has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. 

When we started Viget in 1999/2000, we expected that we (the whole staff) would be working crazy hours all the time.  The dot-coms were going nuts and there was more work to do than hours in the day.  I remember thinking that we’d need to force ourselves to take a break at least once a month … and Third Thursday was born.

If you check your web start-ups timeline, though, you’ll recognize that pretty quickly in to Viget’s existence the “unlimited work” with dot-coms went away.  With it went the late nights for everyone, replaced by a couple years of struggling to find billable work.  One of the many good things that came out of that tough period was balance.  We’ve always worked hard (9-5’s are for the uninspired, if you ask me) but we do a pretty good job of balancing work-time and non-work-time — even now, when we’re back to a seemingly endless amount of great work to do.

Over the years, we have scaled back Third Thursday to be quarterly rather than monthly (hence it’s new name, Third Third Thursday), making them easier to plan for and more fun to participate in.  We have a lot of traditions at Viget, but TTT is easily one of my favorites.  Like everything else in the company, it evolves over time — I’m excited to see where it goes.

One of the guys I got to know during Startup Weekend is Micah (say “me hah”) Baldwin.  We talked about Colorado, lacrosse, and excessive partying, among other things.  He’s a classic connector, and he’s just getting into angel investing.  Like a lot of web guys these days, he’s sharing his experiences along the way on his blog and on twitter, much to the benefit of those who pay attention.

Micah wrote a post called Relationships Can Be Based On Money last week that is worth reading if you’re looking for angel money and wondering what the other guys might be thinking.  Don’t take my word for it — BusinessWeek wrote it up in Confessions of an Angel Investor.

I was able to attend the Potomac Officers Club event last week which, contrary to what a lot of people assume based on the name, has nothing to do with the military.  It’s a CXO-only networking group that brings in notable speakers every month for a meeting at the Ritz in Tysons.  Most speakers are business-focused, as the POC has hosted Jack Welch, Charles Schwab, and Bob Johnson.

The November event did have a military slant, however, and featured Lieutenant General John F. Sattler, Director for Strategic Plans and Policy, J-5, The Joint Staff.  General Sattler is very close to the activities going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He gave the room of about 80 executives an overview of what is happening right now in those places, and how it relates to the U.S. strategy to fight terrorism.  It was an engaging discussion, and refreshing to hear information and personal opinion directly from military personnel with direct knowledge of and experience with the situation.

My dad and both grandfathers were in the Navy, and I have a ton of respect for our military and those who serve.  I also find the military culture to be fascinating, and often relevant to how businesses operate — but not always in clear ways.  I wrote down a few quotes from General Sattler that I found particularly interesting (may not be word-for-word).

On the importance of finding strong leaders:

“We’re always asking, ‘where’s Spartacus?’  If you put a lion in front of a flock of lambs, you’ll fear those lambs.  But put a lamb in front of a pride of lions, and you’ll beat those lions everyday.”

When asked if a change in the administration will be disruptive to the current military strategy, General Sattler said this about following a leader:

“In my 36 year career, I’ve been through multiple administrations.  The Commander in Chief is the Commander in Chief.  As long as the order is moral and legal, I’m going to follow it.  I’m not supposed to have a personal bias.  If I have a personal, I’m going to resign.”

My favorite quote of the day, which I find relevant to any organization structure, was:

“Responsibility minus authority and resources equals failure.”

I attended the Mindshare 2007 class graduation in Tysons tonight.  Phil Merrick, who graduated in the first class way back in 1997 when his company webMethods was just getting started, spoke to the group.  He ended his talk with one of my favorite quotes — one that every entrepreneur should know.

“It is not the critic that counts not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or the doer of deeds could have them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the Arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood who strives valiantly who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming but he who does actually strive to do the deed who knows the great devotion who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

 There’s another, more succinct version as well:

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

A central theme to Phil’s talk was advising the room of entrepreneurs to make decisions.  He pointed out that most decisions are binary (yes/no) giving you 50/50 odds of making the right one, and even beyond that many decisions don’t matter either way, giving you even better odds.  Ultimately, though, it’s the ability to make decisions at all that’s important.  Perhaps he should have referenced another Teddy Roosevelt quote:

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Derek Scruggs, founder and CEO of The Enthusiast Group, gives a candid interview to David at Colorado Startups.  His company just decided to shut down after working for a couple of years to create a series of niche social networks targeting outdoor enthusiasts with sites like Your Cycling and Your Running. 

With web businesses hot again and huge acquisitions grabbing headlines, it’s good to get a dose of reality.  Most startups (web or otherwise) fail.  Not surprisingly, when they do, most of the founders don’t feel like talking about it publicly.  Derek’s willingness to share his experience is valuable for any would-be entrepreneur, but it’s particularly relevant for anyone considering launching a web-based business.

Last Thursday, thanks to ExecutiveBiz, I was able to attend Fight Night, the black-tie charity gala dubbed by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the biggest social events of the year.   It was, by all accounts, an impressive event. 

Fight Night brings together the heavyweights of business and government, entertainment and community service, as well as legends from the boxing world, for an evening of fun, auctions, and even professional boxing.

Indeed, boxing legends like Héctor Camacho and Joe Frazier were there, as were celebs like Quincy Jones and Chris Tucker as well as business icons like Bob Johnson.  Three mayors made appearances (Barry, Williams, and Fenty).  Ted Nugent did an incredible rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.  My favorite entertainer of the night was Hammer, especially since he was so cool about grabbing a photo (alas, he didn’t perform).

The whole event supports Fight for Children, and non-profit founded by Joe Robert, CEO of J.E. Robert Companies, in 1990.  They raise millions of dollars each year to support DC’s underprivileged kids. 

Fight For Children focuses on educational and healthcare initiatives to ensure that all children in the nation’s capital have opportunities to learn, grow, and succeed.

I’m a big fan of supporting charities that help kids, and Fight Night raises more money in one evening than most do all year.  Kudos to Fight for Children for putting on such an impressive event.

We went to Future of Web Design this week.  It was my first FOWx experience, and it won’t be my last.  It was good, but not great — sentiments Jackson shared on the Four Labs blog.

Ryan Carson / Carsonified runs the FOWx events.  He also runs Drop Send.  And Amigo.  And Vitamin.  He blogs openly about his experiences, and has a nice following of people paying attention.  He’s also a super nice guy who I’ve enjoyed hanging out with and getting to know recently.

Ryan strives for good things: authenticity, credibility, and quality come to mind.  He does the FOWx conferences because he’s a web guy.  He loves the content and digs the speakers.  As an entrepreneur who runs web companies, he feels qualified to put on FOWx in ways non-web guys can’t.

That may have been right when he started, but now, I think he’s wrong.

On my way out of the MediaTemple party on Wednesday night, I told Ryan I thought he should dump his web companies and do nothing but conferences.  Vitamin should stick around as a platform for knowledge sharing and a central place for the community to connect and collaborate (with only an occasional essay from Ryan — not any management oversight), but his full-time (4 days, anyway) should be putting on the best events in the world.

My guess is Ryan won’t do this because he likes to run web companies, and that’s fine.  Greatness requires focus, though, and speaking strictly as a conference attendee, I wish he’d just do conferences.  He “gets” the space and now has the contacts and attention of the community needed to put together great speaker line-ups and draw quality audiences, and that’s all I care about — not whether he runs a web company himself or not.

Speaking as his financial advisor (which I am not) I’d suggest focus as well.  If he can put on the best web conferences in the world, he could make a killing doing so.

Speaking as his friend, I’d say screw it, do whatever you feel like.  As long as you’re having fun and you’re proud of the output, let the focus come naturally, whatever it may be.

The New New Internet: Web 2.0 for Business Conference was last week, which I had the pleasure of helping to organize.  Ken wrote a good recap on the Viget blog, as did others like Geoff, Brad, and Frank.  As an organizer and judge in the app competition, I had a unique perspective (not all positive — I wasn’t able to attend all the sessions, for example, but it comes with the territory).  Some highlights for me were:

• Pre-Conf. Happy Hour - On Wednesday night, I was crammed around a table with Brad, Om, James, Frank, Rohit, and Gary.  It was cool to chat with all of them informally.  We teased Brad for wearing a suit (he’d been in meetings in NYC all day) and Om seemed genuinely excited to talk with James.
• Pre-Conf. Dinner - After drinks, we jumped over to a private dinner room that JD scored, where Ryan and Tim joined us.  Gary picked out some great Australian wine, and proceeded to preview his major point of the following day: “it’s over!”  Brad shared some stories about negotiating deals with Google.  Fellow authors Rohit, James, and Tim chatted — presumably about being authors.
• App Competition - There were a number of companies shooting for a 5 minute spot to address the crowd, and the stellar group of judges selected 3: Empressr, Honesty Online, and Spigit.  I enjoyed hearing the pitches and wished each had the chance to present.
  
• James Surowiecki - Author of The Wisdom of Crowds gave an engaging talk that covered the topics in his book, and related them to how crowds operate online.  He made a key point that stuck with me: that crowds are good at evaluating ideas and filtering out the bad ones, but they can’t really innovate.  Crowds are reactionary, while individuals are innovative.
  
• Future Panel - Ryan moderated with Brad, Hans, and Alex participating.  As I mentioned, I was really looking forward to this one, and it didn’t disappoint.  In reality, Brad could have been a keynote — he has a great way of communicating complex ideas in a clear and entertaining way.  Attendee Debbie Weil (who was invited to speak but initially had a conflict) grabbed a quick video nugget with Brad after his panel.
  
• Tim Ferriss - Author of The 4-Hour Work Week did the lunch keynote.  As he does in his book, he offered good advice about valuing your time and focusing on high-value tasks, while eliminating (or delegating) the less important stuff.  I’m not sure his story about outsourcing his social life struck the right chord with the older DC audience, but he was nothing if not entertaining.
  
• Marketing Panel - Rohit did a great job of keeping this panel on track, even with Frank wearing a camera and Gary loudly striking fear into the audience (appropriately).  The overall message was that marketing is completely different than it was even a few years ago.  Gary gave a great example of ROI: he spends several million dollars marketing winelibrary.com with billboards and other traditional media, but spends almost nothing on traditional marketing for winelibrarytv.com, which grows through social networks and word-of-mouth.  The TV site, though, has suppased the store site in traffic and continues to enjoy explosive viral growth.
  
• Back Room Interviews - I actually had some work to do, so I snuck into a back room to jump online.  In doing so, I inadvertently sat in on a couple interviews the local trend junkie Greg was putting together.  More good stuff happening on the sidelines of the conference.
• Post-Conference Dinner - After the conference happy hour, I grabbed dinner with the Carsons as well as Mike and Sunir from FreshBooks.com.  We talked about management styles and kicked around creative ideas for keeping a growing company feeling small.  We also swapped travel stories, and I told my River Phoenix haircut tale for the first time in a long time – felt good. 

A ton of work went into putting the conference together, most notably by Suzanne at ExecutiveBiz.  Nearly 800 people made it out and I heard lots of great comments on the way out (and follow-up emails since).  While my day at TNNI was unique (and exhausting,) I must say I had a blast.

I still read the print edition of the Washington Post every day, just like my dad did.  I rarely read the online version because I don’t want spoil tomorrow’s print copy (I check cnn.com now and then for “current” news, and generally assume that if something really interesting is going on I’ll hear about it quickly.)  When it comes to press consumption, I’m pretty old-school.

I have an underused Facebook account and I’m fairly active on Twitter.  I’m a heavy email user, light SMSer, and probably average phone caller.  I IM a fair amount, mostly with co-workers, and blog occasionally here and on viget.com.  When it comes to communications, I consider myself fairly savvy, but not exactly cutting-edge.

I opened the Post today to see, to my surprise, the Viget logo front-and-center on the cover of the business section. 

Not only is our logo clearly visible, but the caption reads “… at Viget Labs in Falls Church …”  For anyone who knows Viget, it’s immediately visible.  As a friend said to me today “you can’t buy that kind of exposure.”  True.  But with whom?  And to what end?

In addition to the print version, the article is available online.  In this version, though, Viget is much less of a focus.

The photo is cropped such that our logo is gone, and the caption has no reference to Viget either.  Anyone who read the article online wouldn’t even see a Viget reference until 1/2 way through page 2. That’s fine, by the way — the article is about Startup Weekend, not Viget.

Right after I read the article, I blogged about it on Viget’s Four Labs.  More than a dozen contacts who saw the article – some I hadn’t heard from in years — emailed me to say “congrats on the coverage.” 

One contact called and left a voicemail.  One contact wrote a “congrats” on my Facebook wall — a savvy web user, no doubt. 

No one contacted me via IM, SMS, or Twitter.  No one took the opportunity to comment publicly on the Viget blog (alas, comment-less posts are still somewhat common.) 

This activity is interesting to me because in parallel I’ve recently had several communications with people via direct messages in Twitter or private messages within Facebook that have caused me to say “why don’t they just email me?”  Presumably because they are not heavy email users.  Or maybe my email address is hard to guess.

From all this I developed this brilliant hypothesis: older people still read the paper in print, and they react to it by making phone calls and sending email.  Younger people read news online, and increasingly communicate on social networking sites and other non-email means. 

Also: print news is dying, but that’s nothing new.  Email is in trouble too, and for good reason. 

Online communication is a mess, exacerbated by things like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be.  There is a solution that will allow us to break free from the chains of old email habits without fragmenting into dozens of disconnected platforms.  It will let us consume, collaborate, broadcast, and chat all in one, and will include fantastic history and search.  It will ignore traditional technical limitations and be modeled after real-world communications but still be intuitive enough for old email vets to transition effortlessly.  I predict, in fact, that it will learn from us automatically and be available before we even knew it existed without changing a single habit.  And I can’t wait.

The guys at Business Destiny put up a copy of the radio show I appeared on last weekend along with Geoff Livingston and Hart Rossman.  The focus was on Web 2.0 and it’s impact on business, in part to talk up the New New Internet conference.  Considering I’d been up until 2:30 am the night before hosting Startup Weekend and then was on air at 8 am without having had any coffee (don’t ask), I’m just happy I didn’t doze off mid-show. 

Luckily the Tears for Fears transition music kept me going.  Nice choice, John!