The Wah Report

I just walked by a recent college graduate's desk at our office:
He was twittering, listening to his iPod, texting with his iPhone, Facebook up on his computer and creating a spreadsheet. All at the same time.

Whenever I've moved it's always been a bit uncomfortable. Getting to know new people, learning the ropes, etc.

Growing up here has it's comforts now that I'm back. The outlaws are 20mins away, I can see my parents a lot more then twice a year and tonight we had two of my friends that I've known since grade school over for dinner.

I enjoy the uncomforts though, I think they expand your mind and experiences and the things I've learned, people I've met, and experiences I've had would never have happened if I stayed in Minnesota.

The city of Minneapolis has 369,051 residents, but every time I go out for a ride I run into someone I know. That 369K doesn't include the suburbs in and around Minneapolis or even St. Paul. It doesn't matter if I ride North, South, East or West I still run into people. I saw 3 people I knew today and they were all riding solo.

Even the 6:00am rides I've been known to run into people I know.

They were down for the weekend and helped pimp the house of Wah even more..New closet door in the entry, new front storm door, an early birthday gift lawnmower. And the help with Skylar is priceless

But now that everyone has FINALLY woken up, the next step is to put all this shit together & make it useful for everyone else OUTSIDE the walled garden. In short, that means:

1. Use 3rd-party account infrastructure to provide single sign-on / "no login required"
2. Use profile data for landing page customization & campaign targeting
3. Use email data for friend lists, then filter by msg frequency & keywords
4. Use all of the above to enable viral distribution on the non-social web
5. Use payment info (after MSFT/GOOG buy AMZN/EBAY) to let them buy stuff

once you combine portals + social networks + messaging + commerce, you get a very very interesting & potentially lucrative combination of assets.

Master of 500 Hats

Labels: Master of 500 hats, Social Media Marketing

I forgot about the GP Saturday morning group ride until FPA brought it up. I used to do it when I lived in St. Paul 10 years ago. 2 hours with some sprints thrown in. I rolled out of the house at 6:30 and hooked up with the ride at 7:30. 5 or 6 sprints and 65 miles later I was home at 10:00. The ride skews older because SPBRC has a ton of old guys on it. It's funny to see all the spanky $10,000+ bikes. All the old guys can afford the pimped out rides...I'm afraid I've fallen into that group as well. I wonder if the younger riders look at me and call me "one of the old guys".

the cyclocross wheels have the roadies on them now and they are pissed off about it

Saturday AM Sprint Ride

Otherwise known as the World Championships of Bike Racing. Leaves the shop at 7:30AM. Usually a large ride. Several sprints and other opportunities for glory. This is a hard 2.5 hour ride.

Grand Performance in St. Paul

Be there

The bike breezes through the warm morning air.

How @replies work on Twitter

We bought our house for a lot less then the tax value, so I was thinking..that doesn't seem right. I've always bought houses for more then tax value. Peggy called the St. Louis Park property taxes person and they came over...and they reduced our property taxes to be based on the sale price of the house... Saving us a bunch of money.

All it took was a phone call.

Are you paying to much in property taxes?

Anyone in MN have one they want to sell me?

How does your Twitter social graph look?

WOW..MIMA event tonight was standing room only.

DUALITY REALITY: WHO CONTROLS SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ENTERPRISE?
Members of the panel will include local experts who will talk about strategies for approaching, managing and deploying social media.

* Jim Cuene, Director, Interactive, General Mills
* Brad Smith, VP of eCommerce & Digital Marketing, Fingerhut Direct Marketing
* Gary Koelling, Creative Director, Social Technology, Best Buy
* Jason Kleckner, Manager, Information Architecture, Target Corporation
* Moderator: Michael Kraabel, Group Creative Director, Gage

Things of note..
1) Nobody has it figured out, yet everyone is convinced that you need to be in the conversation and using social media.
2) The question was asked about how do you track ROI in social media. Best buy guy "i hope they never figure out how to track ROI in social media" I have to agree with him. You can track conversations and sentiment, and you can track clicks to sale, but how do you put ROI on conversation?

Here is my life right now

Today up at 6:30, do an hour of work at home. Kiss the baby and wife and head to work. Meetings all morning, then gave a social media and search marketing presentation at the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce over lunch. Back to the office and meetings until 6:00. Tuesday night bike racing starts at 7:15..Rush home, kiss the baby and wife, then rock the TT to the race and make it 5 mins before registration closes. Baby and wife watch me race. Ride the bike home. Get home at 9:00. Do some more work till 10:30 and go to bed.

Tomorrow up at 5:30 and on the bike at 6:00. 8:30 new biz meeting. Meetings and try to get some "real" work done during the day. MIMA social media presentation from 6:00 - 7:30 and then head home and kiss the baby and wife and do some more work.

There is no end in sight of this schedule....

Rocky mountain high is looking really good right now....ask me again why I keep moving back there.

breakdown coming soon

To all the moms in my life

Love

Skylar and Jared

sometimes they rock, sometimes they roll

Today my truck computer rolled. I went back to the parking garage after minnebar hit the lock button so I could hear my horn beep so I could find my truck, then hit unlock and hopped in. I turned the key and the battery was fine and everything worked, but the security light was on and somehow the security system disengaged the starter. No matter what I did, I couldn't get it to turn over. I tried calling Dodge and of course they don't have a help line. WTF. Then I called a couple Dodge service departments to see if they could tell me how to disarm the alarm and security system. This was about 3:00pm and they were all closed. I searched the web for a solution and found nothing. Peggy brought me my extra key to see if that would work, no deal. I finally called AAA, which if you don't have get it. I use it at least once a year or let someone else use it and the price of AAA pays for itself in spades. The guy came out and unhooked the positive cable on the battery and unhooked the computer plug under the dash and then hooked everything back up and it started again. What a pain in the ass. I never figured out why the system got whacked and it works fine now.

up at 5:30, out the door at 6:00 to hook up with ScottErob for a 3 hour spin. Good times. The early morning ride is great. By 9:00am you've got your time in on the bike and your whole day ahead of you. I'm heading to geek out at BarCamp Minnesota - Technology & Design (un)Conference: No Spectators, Only Participants for the rest of the day. Web 1.0 was so much easier then 2.0. If I miss a day of RSS feeds or don't attend a conference or watch the presentations from them I feel like I'm so behind.

I can't handle the truth. A lot of people rocking the local TT last night. Me? Hell no. I don't do TTs unless I'm forced. I don't need a clock to tell me how fast or slow I am. The truth hurts. I don't get it and never will. People spend $$thousands on wheels, bikes, etc. for a 14-16min race. There are 40K TTs the next 2 weekends, so I'm out of races for 2 weeks. If I want to go ride hard by myself, I can do that any day of the week. Props to those who have the head and the pain threshold for it.

6:00am ride is always a good way to start the day.. then I got out for another ride after work and ran into FPA and a crew and got in an extra 10 miles because the conversation was so good. Skylar is chatting up a storm now, so interacting with her was super fun today. When I got home from the ride Peggy had a meal already for me. 6 bonuses in 1 day is a good day.

Digsby

Read it

In action. Saturday night at 10:00pm I sent out an email to Super*, B2B and FPA seeing if they wanted to ride on Sunday morning. There was some interest, so I made the call that we would meet at 10:00. FPA couldn't come. Sunday morning at 8:00am I sent an email to Trissel, Twittered it, put in in my Facebook status and posted it to the GSCA racing forum.

10 guys showed up. We ran into Billy O mid-way through the ride and he said I saw the update on Facebook, but already had a ride planned.

The power and viral expansion loops of social media are insanely powerful.

I've never liked them....even with a 3rd place today, I still don't like them. I want to get out there and put the hammer down for an hour (crits and cross) and blow shit up, attack, get caught, attack, get caught, repeat. I don't want to play patty-cake, gutter ball and cat and mouse for 3 hours.

Master 3/4 Mary Road Race
Dave P, Billy D and I lined up with a shit load of GP and Loons. We were clearly out numbered.

Dave rocked out early with a flanders dude. 1st lap? Billy D took a flyer and cooked it and had to ride with a girl to catch back on. Dave was the hero of the day staying out in the wind for most of the race in a break. He let Billy and me stay fresh. Some how we caught him and the flanders dude going into the 4th lap. We had a group of 10+ guys left at that point. I was sitting mid-pack taking a gel when a flanders and GP guy attacked, nobody responded. By the time I got to the front they were gone. I hit the gutter back stretch section and put the tire on the edge of the road B2B style, giving nobody a draft trying to chase and somehow popped the group. WTF. I hate the gutter ball and I hate TTs, how am I riding guys off my wheel??? I waited for a couple guys, but then they couldn't hang and I dropped a guy on the hill and rolled it solo until 1k left when I got caught by a GP guy. Shock and Ow would have been impressed with the sprint. I played the guy like monopoly. He caught me with 1k to go and said "dude you are riding strong". I said no words...500M I tapped the breaks lightly and made him lead it out. I sat on his wheel till 200 meters and rocked the sprint for 3rd.

in a road race....i hate road races