We’ve posted their newest episode featuring Church Health Center below. Help support these guys and all the good they are highlighting in our city!

• FedEx has sent more than 350,000 pounds of relief supplies, with plans to send more flights.
• The Haiti Medical Missions of Memphis is currently taking donations at their location on Kirby Pkwy.
• After committing to treat children injured in the quake, LeBonheur Children’s Hospital has now made plans to send a team of physicians directly to the epicenter to help with relief and treatment.
• The Young Avenue Deli is holding a Haiti Benefit Concert on Saturday, Jan. 23. All proceeds will go to Haiti Medical Missions of Memphis and Food For The Poor. Rocking out for a good cause has a storied past — why not do it right in your hometown to help Haiti? Doors open at 8 p.m. and the show starts at 9 p.m. A $10 donation gets you jamming.
• The Children’s Museum of Memphis (@CMOM) will hold a Zumba Fitness class on Sunday, Jan. 24 from 3 to 5 p.m. with proceeds benefiting the relief efforts. It’s pay-what-you-can, but $5 is the minimum and it’s all heading to the Midsouth Chapter of The American Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund.
• Ten University of Memphis registered organizations joined together to form the “It’s Not About Us, Love Haiti” relief effort on campus. The relief campaign will take donations through Jan. 29 inside and outside the Tiger Den, Wilder Tower, the campus bookstore and several other businesses in the area near the Poplar and Highland Avenue intersection.
• On Saturday, Jan. 30, the Fred Astaire Dance Studio is holding a benefit Bellydancing performance called Dance From the Heart: Project Haiti. Any donation to the cause gets you in the door.
• Memphis Rotary continues its relationship with Stop Hunger Now with two separate food-packing events in February in conjunction with Haiti relief. The events will be Feb. 18 and Feb. 20, both at the Southern College of Optometry. Follow @MemphisRotary or visit MemphisRotary.org for more information.

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.

LaunchMemphis, with Mercury Technology Labs, is hosting the Business Plan Boot Camp, where new entrepreneurs will be given a push towards business success. Experts from several fields will be on hand with hard-earned advice, while attendees can get tailored feedback on their business plans in several break-out sessions.

Covered topics will include:

• Business plan development
• Legal issues for entrepreneurs
• Marketing
• Financial considerations for entrepreneurs
• Gaining funding
• Finding investors

LaunchMemphis’ goal is to foster entrepreneurial growth within the Memphis community. The group is non-profit and the cost for the Boot Camp is $60 for two days filled with insight (lunches included).

The two sessions will take place on August 15th and 22nd from 9:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. at the Mercury Launchpad located at:

EmergeMemphis, Suite 133
516 Tennessee Street
Memphis, TN 38103

For more information email Chris@LaunchMemphis.com or call (901) 628-4657.

Don’t forget other important dates coming up:

BarCamp Chattanooga
July 25
Chattanooga, TN

Social South (SoSo)
August 21 and 22
Birmingham, AL

SocialCamp Memphis (Organized by LunaWeb through LaunchMemphis)
September 19
Memphis, TN

WordCamp Birmingham
September 27 and 28
Birmingham, AL

BarCamp Nashville
October 17
Nashville, TN

BarCamp Memphis (Organized by LunaWeb through LaunchMemphis)
November 14
Memphis, TN

While things change and people grow up, there are always a few people who manage to hold on to this mindset as they step into their professional lives. The rules are irrelevant to them and the rest of us get left in the dust. Social Media has been riddled with spammers and even legit companies trying to get ahead by circumventing the rules of the platform.

"Don't cheat" by quinn.anya on Flickr

LunaWeb has fallen victim to one of these social delinquients as of late in the flurry of excitement surrounding Facebook’s new vanity URLs.

When the URLs were first released they were only available to individuals and Public Profiles with more than 1000 fans. While we weren’t huge fans at being left out of the loop (we don’t have 1000 fans but we’d love it if you were one) we bade our time until Facebook allowed the smaller pages to start claiming URLs.

This past Sunday night we logged in at the appointed time to claim our vanity URL at long last, only to discover it had been done several days before by an individual profile from a person suspiciously named LunaWeb Agence. Apparently a French company of the same name created a fake profile for the purpose of snagging the URL before anyone else did.

You can bet we’ll be taking this issue up with Facebook and we’ll keep you posted on what happens. Until then… play fair.

"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.

For any business to pull this off in a time of emergency is remarkable – and admirable. With Memphis’ summer heat kicking in, a lack of power for fans and air conditioning really is an emergency situation, and MLGW’s willingness to connect with customers through social media (especially via a service that can function as SMS text messages) has truly shown their respect for their community, and their eagerness to help that community get back to normal as quickly as possible.

That respect extends all the way up MLGW’s totem pole, too. Jerry Collins, president of MLGW, took a few minutes to answer customer questions, in what amounts to a grassroots press conference.

It wasn’t just homes without power, either. Many local businesses (ourselves included) were affected by the outages as well. Our own Dave Barger, who had been following MLGW for the better part of a year, noticed on Friday how their updates begin showing up more and more.

It started with some updates about the service status, letting their customers know how many people were without power and how long it would be out. Then they posted some phone numbers, both for emergencies and simple outage reporting. Barger immediately took advantage of the phone numbers.

“I called the number,” he said. “I don’t think the automatic system gave me an option for business, so then I tweeted my report. I got a pretty quick response. They were very responsive.”

Susan Mealer, of Answering Advantage, found a similar situation. Because she is not the building manager at her office, she wasn’t sure if she had the appropriate information for reporting an outage over the phone. So she tweeted it. She too, got a very quick response. Though MLGW said they passed the information on, Mealer said that she was pleased just “knowing that [report] was heard.”

Having that online communication with her local power company was convenient for Mealer, too – she was on vacation at Disneyland when the storms hit. When she found out about the storms, she was naturally concerned about her employees and customers. She said it was comforting to know that MLGW was there and taking care of the electricity situation.

Which is exactly what MLGW wanted. Richard Thompson, who runs the MLGW Twitter account, says that the real focus this weekend has been “getting people information about what’s going on and when power can be restored. That’s what’s most important to us right now.”

For Thompson, the decision to tweet MLGW updates was merely a practical one. “Hopefully we’ll continue to integrate Twitter into our communications, but we’re not there yet.”

Mealer had kind words for MLGW’s use of Twitter during the outages. “The buzzword here is ‘transparency,’” she said. “We can all see how they respond to everyone. It really allowed them to shine. It really showed that they heard their customers and that they were responding.”

Barger had high compliments for the sense of community that MLGW’s transparency instilled in him. “You definitely feel part of a community which is going through the same sort of problems. There’s this camaraderie sort of thing that kicks in. You know that the guy across the street has limbs down, that his power’s out.”

For the record, chances are quickly diminishing that you or the guy across the street have their power out. MLGW is working around the clock to get power restored, and as of 4 p.m. Monday, only 32,285 customers are still affected by outages. This is down from a peak of over 130,000 Friday evening.

“TechFuel: New Modes” by LunaWeb on Flickr.

C.C. Chapman and Adrian Ho, two of the top thought leaders in the online community, joined us to share their passion about Social Media and the new climate of “online marketing”.  Both men gave insightful presentations that went far beyond the tools and how-to of Social Media.  They also allowed for exhaustive Q&A in which great questions were met with equally strong answers. The real value, as always, was in the conversation.

A great turnout to the event translated into a valuable forum for networking, brainstorming, sharing ideas and meeting the movers and shakers of the Memphis community.  C.C. and Adrian stuck around through the late evening hours, and tirelessly conversed with Memphis’ entrepeneurs.

Check out the Commercial Appeal coverage of the event.

Next for LaunchMemphis is the 2nd Startup Weekend in Memphis.  A wide range of thinkers and creators will be needed to band together in an ambitious attempt to launch a new startup in just one weekend.

The post “TechFuel: New Modes” by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

One bright spot in the midst of this gathering, was the serendipitous and spontaneous creation of several unconference-like core conversations.  Dave was lucky enough to be a part of one of these conversation, when several SXSW attendees converged on a session that had reached max capacity.  These 50+ rejects went on to form there own conversation group, “The Rejected Connected”.

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TweetHall – Rejected Connected from LunaWeb on Vimeo.

The discussion became a valuable mindshare of best practices for Twitter.  The group ranged from people brand new to Twitter, to Twitter application developers.  Everyone was able to contribute, and everyone walked away with a headful of new ideas to ponder.  The key takeaways for the session from Dave’s blog were:

- Using a good photo of only your face.
- Share your twitter handle everywhere.
- Don’t use the profile URL to merely link back to your twitter page.
- Multiple users of one org’s twitter account can end tweets in “/fl” that being /(first initial)(last initial) or state the person tweeting in the profile description.
- Be genuine and don’t be uptight about tweeting, just get out there.
- Don’t protect your tweets and still try and seek out people to follow (the analogy of “going to a cocktail party and locking yourself in the bathroom” was shared).

There was great discussion on the best way to manage a corporate identity on Twitter. Deceptively tricky questions like, “How much of myself do I put into my corporate Twitter account?” and “If I choose to have multiple Twitter accounts, what’s the best way to keep up with them?” were debated at length.

Tiffany Winman, one of the attendees, did a great job of nailing down the rationale behind marketers using Twitter. “Awareness/traffic; viral buzz; lead generation; increased customer satisfaction and loyalty via increased community networking, identifying and fostering relationships among employees and customers; generally decreases in costs and resources from traditional marketing methods; research on brand image, public sentiment, hot topics to improve messaging and product/service development.”

Otis Maxwell also had some valuable insight into how a previous session at SXSW provided further illumination on the spontaneous hallway discussion.

If you’d like to see the twitter conversation that resulted from this ad hoc gathering, search for #tweethall on twitter.

blogpost by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The LaunchMemphis group has been hosting these networking evenings as part of its ongoing effort to bring focus to entrepreneurial activities in Memphis, TN, and to deliver new technology business startups to the economy.  The organization was very successful in making progress towards this goal last year.  In that spirit, they have designed a schedule of events for 2009 that will continue moving Memphis to the forefront of the business community.

Upcoming on the LaunchMemphis Calendar are:

SocialCamp Memphis – March 6 & 7
Location: Memphis College of Art
SocialCamp Memphis is an unconference focusing on Social Media and Social Networking.  Just imagine a conference where the morning is comprised of designated speakers/topics, and the afternoon is comprised of focused discussions and impromptu presentations that are decided on by the attendees.  There will be a networking event the evening of March 6th, and the main event during the day on March 7.  See more information at the SocialCamp site and Facebook page.  Register early!

Startup Weekend Memphis 2: Back by Popular Demand – May 29, 30, & 31
Location: EmergeMemphis and Mercury Launchpad
Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of technologists and entrepreneurs to build a community and new business ventures in a weekend in a short 54 hours.  These motivated individuals come together form teams and decide what to make. Attendees are responsible for bringing the ideas, desire, and passion and walk out of the room with a brand new businesses launched or started.  Startup Weekend is a national program that has once again selected Memphis, TN as one of the cities that it will visit this year.  See more information and don’t forget to register.

blogpost by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.