Our very own Dave Barger was mentioned in a Commercial Appeal article earlier in the week. It recognizes Dave’s role in working with entrepreneurs in our community through LaunchMemphis (which he co-founded) and the Society of Entrepreneurs. This article gives a small glimpse into Dave’s role and impact on our community. You can find Dave on Twitter at www.twitter.com/davebarger.
On August 20th, Dave Barger of LunaWeb was able to share his thoughts on the Social Web at the Society of Entrepreneurs‘ roundtable luncheon. The meetings are held monthly and feature speakers and topics geared towards Memphis businesses.
Dave Barger and Roundtable Attendees
Dave was able to share his insight into Social Media, not as something that can be broken down into check boxes with “power tips,” but as a philosophy and a conscious decision made by a business organization to provide transparency where there were once barriers. He discussed the tendency by Social snake oil peddlers to oversimplify and invent formulas for something that should never be reduced to mindlessly executed tasks, but should be a sincere attempt to create relationships with your customer base.
He mentioned that businesses must consider the time investment that it takes to do Social Media well, and start small by finding out where their customers are and creating a presence there instead of trying to do everything at once.
It was a great turnout and plenty of excellent questions from the crowd after the presentation. You can look for the full audio and video to be posted on the Society of Entrepreneurs site in the near future.
Facebook’s search tool has never been considered the crown jewel of the Social Networking site. This past week however they rolled out new functionality that breathed much-needed life into the struggling search bar.
Dave Barger of LunaWeb does a great job showing us exactly how these new additions may change the way you use Facebook:
This upgrade, along with Facebook’s recent acquisition of social aggregator FriendFeed (made up of several former Google employees), seems to foreshadow big news in the upcoming months for the site’s search feature and who knows what else…
"Stormy Weather: Lightning" by Sabrina Campagna on Flickr."
EDIT: A direct message from MLGW on Twitter requested that we change the headline to reflect that they weren’t aiming for attention, but rather that they were just trying to help. That’s the main point of this story, so we’re happy to comply. (Once again, thanks for the good work, MLGW!)
Severe weather tore through Memphis Friday, June 12. The weather knocked out the transmitter for the local public radio station, and the digital television switch ensured that anyone left without a converter box couldn’t rely on local television for breaking weather news (and several thousand Memphians were left without power anyway). So where did people turn for the news?
They turned to cell phone-friendly microblogging service Twitter.
When the storms hit, even local news turned to Twitter for information about how people were faring. The Commercial Appeal was the only news source actively tweeting during the event, though its news was scant at first (it’s hard to tweet from a cell phone in a basement with neither WiFi nor cell service), but once they got out of the basement, the main source that the CA was using was the suddenly very active Twitter stream of Memphis Light, Gas, and Water.
MLGW, over the course of about 72 hours from early Friday evening to mid-morning Monday, sent out over 880 tweets, mostly either @replies or information directly relating to the outages. Only the people at MLGW know how many direct messages they sent, but judging from how many times they told people to check their DMs, it’s up there around that 880 mark.
And though their followers have drastically increased (1,265, up from around 400 early Friday evening), what really sets their tweeting apart is that they haven’t changed their tactic: responding to every customer question possible.
The Social Expedition Blog