“Your accountable”. Okay, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this or not but… have you ever been ask to set your own objectives at you place of employment? Well in a past position I was. As I recall I was ask to put a number on how much I could increase the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers that the company versus the number they already had. It was my job to basically handle all the companies social media – so at first blush, setting a number for doing my job seems very fair = put your money where your mouth is – right? Well yeah, I agree except for one little issue.
In order to increase the companies social media presence – I put together a plan. The plan involved contests, promotions, lots of interaction, a bunch of fun and of course numbers. Here’s where it gets interesting – my boss at the time – said to me “I need you to tell me an exact number of how many more followers you are going to get in with in 5 months” – which is a typical businessman’s response – “just the numbers kid, just the numbers.” Here’s the rub, my bonus was based on how I did against the numbers I set BUT it was likely that the plan I proposed to get the numbers was likely to remain in limbo on my bosses desk or his bosses desk for the 5 months.
So if you put two and two together you’ll see that I was accountable for the numbers but even after 5 re-submissions of my plan (by the want not revisions, re-submissions of the same plan) later and I still hadn’t received the go ahead to start or any feedback about my plan.
By now I guess you can guess what happen – my employee review came up and I was ask “Why didn’t you reach YOUR set objective?”, “YOU stated that YOU would increase the followers by X amount”, “That’s not something that reflects well on YOUR review”. I stated that I submitted my plan 5 times and I had a very large email trail of my requests to proceed with my plan to gain followers but it fell on death ears. You see I didn’t reach my stated numbers…
Side note: When I created my required objective I brought the problem of giving set numbers without approval to use the plan that my numbers were based on – to my boss – but my boss smiled and shrugged “It’s YOUR required objective.”
It might seem strange for a tech geek like me to be into plants but I am. I grew up in an extremely small town encapsulated by farms on every side. My family had a garden and I planted all sorts of veggies and a like. Today I have a herb garden/melon garden right in the back of my house and I am considering buying an food dehydrator – and I don’t mean one of those little food dehydrators I mean a really cool multi-tray, temperature controlled, timer controlled food dehydrator. Does that make me a green geek?
Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of books about growing and selling herbs. It’s been a fascinating learning experience. It’s kind a cool learning about not only how to grown and harvest but how people use herbs now and in ancient days for remedies… and how many “myths” about herbs healing properties have been lab tested and confirmed. So maybe my grandmother’s use of mustard packs on the chest – really where good for colds – they sure did clean out the sinuses from what I’ve heard 
I think I’m going take a look at creating a venture that involves green.
Okay, now this is interesting – First functional synthetic bacterial genome announced. If I am reading this correctly – Craig Venter was able to create life or rather replace existing life (DNA) with whatever DNA he so chose. I think he basically took a mapped genome that was stored in a computer file, synthesized the DNA from the file and then placed the new DNA in a cell; i.e. replacing the existing DNA with his synthesized DNA. I don’t know what else to say except, wow!
Jurassic park, that should be easy now… And I can see myself telling my kids (probably my kids telling their kids) I don’t care if all your friends got DNA to grow tails your not getting one!
I can finally tell you about 1 of the seriously cool projects I’ve been working on. Here’s the press release. Here’s a quote from the release: “We believe that Rutter’s is the first convenience store in the United States to introduce coupons on a mobile phone,” said Scott Hartman, president and CEO of Rutter’s Farm Stores. “We’ve made a significant commitment to our customers to provide them with the latest technology, from our Web site and social media to mobile applications, which now include money-saving coupons.”
Not only are we able to send coupons to mobile phones we also have an entire system in place for creating value for each customer, to easily creating coupons, to tracking the effectiveness of each offer, letting customers use their mobile phone as their Rutter’s Rewards card and a lot, lot more. In fact, I’ve only scratched the surface of what the system does and what we put into its creation – there is so much more behind the scenes…
It’s great to be on the cutting edge of innovation!
I’ve been chomping at the bit to tell you what I’ve been working on but the release has been delayed by circumstances beyond my control. It’s really quite cool and very innovative. Maybe I’ll be able to “release it” this week… I haven’t been able to blog much or do anything else really … because I’ve been trying to push everyone to get it done! I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve been working on a covert new media project. It’s seriously cool and has many facets! I hope to be able to tell you all about it next week or at least tell you a little about it. It’s some really innovative stuff running the gamut from traditional media through social media marketing through mobile marketing… more later
Really? Are you telling me that I have to carry my car keys, work keys, motorcycle keys, bicycle lock keys, house keys, credit card, rewards card from a zillion businesses, cell phone, insurance cards, drivers license, cash and shit like that!#$%
With today’s technology can’t I just carry my cell phone or suchlike? I mean seriously can’t I use my cell phone for all of it? What’s stopping this “technological break through“? As if this would be even a tad bit hard, I mean really RFID or a mixture of a few technologies and wah la digital wallet. And to make things easier maybe some battery company could build in RFID into replacement batteries or a cell phone case company could build it… or whoever. Or if that wouldn’t work how about a wrist bracelet or ring that does it – you could build in a PIN or something for security… Or how about a device with a programmable magnetic stripe and bar-code LED screen – then just program all your card into it and push a button or two to access whatever card you want?
Seriously someone get on this!
4,000 followers and less than one day left till we give away $50. It’s been interesting trying to get Twitter followers but I’m thinking of taking a new approach to finding users. Twitter seems like the perfect place to find users who might want to earn money by using unbig.me short links but there are several other likely sites/users that might take advantage of the concept – like digg or reddit…
That being said I think I am going to “play” with Reddit.com next. My friend Gabriel Weinberg mentioned in a tweet that advertising on Reddit work well for him so I think I might give it a try to see what happens. And of course I’ll post a few things and see if they pick up any traction.
I’ll keep you posted.
Over 2,000 followers – http://twitter.com/unbigme
Thousands of ad impressions
More and more entries into our $50 giveaway http://unbig.me/contest_3_1_10.php
Lots more work to go!
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Falls but it got me wondering what people would have thought about this if it was discovered in Biblical times. Maybe I’ll even take it one step more – lets pretend that this is a sign from god and that global warming needs to be stopped! Does this blood from ice show us a sign of the coming apocalypse?
Lets all breakout our bibles and get praying, lest we all be sent directly to hell! What does Pat Robertson think?
On a more serious note. Doesn’t it seem likely that a lot of the occurrences in the bible were merely unknown happenings? To me one of the reason religion has such a strong hold on people is that there remains one more great unknown – what happens to us when we die. Just like the Greek and Romans didn’t understand lightning (and other natural happenings) – so they imagined up Zeus and other gods…
I’m not trying to turn this post into a religious debate but I do think this kind of “strange” occurrence deserves a thought or two…