Author Archives: skipbensley

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About skipbensley

Unabashed father, AV genius, part time dark knight, foodie, amateur chef, antifascist, volunteer and rabid Boston sports fan.

Four Square 5 minutes of my life I just took back

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I am all for keeping in touch with friends as much as possible, but there has to be a cutoff point before you split the atom too finely. The cutoff point for me is Foursquare. Steve Garfield introduced this to me inadvertently and initially I was intrigued.

I guess if you still aspire to go out and drink at cool bars and clubs the novelty of this app and platform might never wear off. If you are a business person however you might want to grab back those few minutes when you need them most.

I joined Four Square and quickly became mayor of the Hynes convention Center and my office here at Brilliant Video Productions. I was at the Hynes for seven days strait so thats not such a stretch.

I see lots of my friends using it to show where they are drinking beer, and if I drank beer still I guess I would be more jazzed. I drink wine, and I don’t live in Boston proper. So I have two more reasons why not to be on Foursquare. For me, I will take back those 5 minutes daily however and put them to better use.

Twitter tools I’ve actually tried

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So your on twitter and you wonder what about all the gadgets offered by companies that help you twitter. There are many and I have tried a few with varying degrees of success. I offer the following because it’s what I know from personal use. I do not endorse any of them and I have no affiliation with any of them.

TweetLater:(free with paid upgrade available) has a couple of free tools that allow you to automate some of your Twitter tasks. You can schedule a retweet, or a twit for later in the day. You can also vet your new followers with an automated welcome message. It can also look at your new followers and sort them into accept, ignore, block or spam which can be helpful. Twitter booted a bunch of people who were using Tweetlater saying that, that was not the reason why they got booted. Those counts were all reinstated however except for the spammer ones I suspect.

True Twit: (free) This filter sends a message asking that the person on the other end respond and verify they are a real person. This is common in email practices and spam programs and now there is one for twitter. I used it and it was a very good functional tool. However, I did have one person contact twitter and claim that I was spamming her. She did not know of this program apparently and was not able to google it before sending the automated response to twitter. I tried to apologize but then this person also blocked me so maybe she was spam?

Twitter adder: (free trial then paid program) I tried this program and it is a program. It will download and allow you to do a few tasks up to a point when you will have to purchase it to continue. You can use this to bulk add people, or delete them etc. You can add followers of people you already follow, and also delete others that don’t follow you back. While the program worked fine, it seems to detach you from the whole process and part of twitter and adding and following people is being involved I thought? no? How can you engage new followers politely and correctly otherwise?

Tweet deck (free iphone and desktop) I use tweetdeck on my iphone and like the interface and its quick add feature. I also like being able to search columns etc. This is a very good free application. It is available on itunes.

I used the tweetdeck beta on my Mac desktop and while it was very good it caused my Mac pro-book to overheat so I stopped using it. I heard it was API related (not sure hwta that is ) but when I took it off my pro-book problem was solved. I have heard there has since been an update but I am all set thanks.

Seesmic Desktop: ( free desktop MAC) I use this program on my laptop now and love it. In addition to all the twitter functionality you can also post on facebook which is nice also. You just have to remember where you are posting if that matters to you.

Co-tweet: (free) I tried it but found that it is more geared to large companies that have multiple twitter accounts and its more about maintaining presence then just tweeting as a small business owner and Producer. Maybe it’s something to re-investigate when my company is much bigger.

Sites and companies mentioned.

http://www.tweetlater.com/
http://tweetadder.com/
http://tweetdeck.com/beta/
http://cotweet.com/
http://seesmic.com/

Podcamp Boston 4 was a great learning experience

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I had the pleasure and Privilege to attend Pod-camp Boston 4 this past weekend. If you have not been to a pod-camp go, go now. The brightest people with some of the best knowledge and idea’s of what’s happening next are there now. For me it was hopeful affirmation that I am doing it right. I also learned more then my find can fully comprehend at this point. I am sure I will have a few more blogs to spill from it as time goes on.

I made some new acquaintances, and I got to know previous acquaintances better. I also led a group of video guys on a presentation about where we thought online video is headed. Our slide share and our video will be posted shortly.

My thanks to the organizers of Pod-camp Boston 4 and all their efforts in making this the great learning experience it was. Take a Bow

Organizers

  • Michelle Wolverton, Lead Organizer
  • Christopher Penn
  • Whitney Hoffman
  • Chris Brogan
  • Steve Sherlock
  • Doug Haslam
  • Guido Stein
  • Lance Gomes
  • Adam Weiss

Listen to your customers or else its not caring Magnified

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I placed an order for Company Logo Shirts with Queensboro shirt Company on July 4th. I needed them for the SBANE annual golf tournament. Which was a few weeks later. The process was simple, the email feedback in the process great and I assumed incorrectly that I would get my shirts in plenty of time. They shipped them flat rate on 16th and they missed by a few days. I was bummed because the shirts came out great but I wasn’t happy with the slow shipping and I filled it out on the CS survey.

I get a call today from a followup person at Queensboro Shirts and she asks me questions about my survey. She then explains why their shipping is why it is and offers to give me expedited shipping on my next order. That would be great but what about the order I got? She didn’t really want to address the situation except to say it was what it was. UPS ground is UPS ground. If that’s the answer then why use it?

I said to her that everything up to them sending the shipment the slowest way possible was great. She did say she was sorry but asked if she could be of further help and I said no, because she was not listening to anything I said. She was just going through the motions of collecting feedback because I was probably on her to do list and she was full filling her job description.

If you want your customers feedback, listen to it even if its bad. Going through the motions and not listening is almost worse then not caring. It’s not caring magnified.
I might have bought shirts from Queensboro again before the follow up phone call, now maybe not so much.

Don’t be a gerbil.

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Do not be content with running on a wheel that gets you no closer to your goals. Don’t rely on others to fill your food dispenser, and your water bottle. Learn to clean up after yourself, become self sufficient. You don’t need someone to clean and rearrange your place every two weeks. Plan, be active, exercise and learn something new. Try something you have never tried before, dare yourself. Just don’t be a gerbil.

Gerbils are content creatures. They run nowhere, eat and sleep and they excited to be back home in their tank after you clean it. They will even explore, and admire their clean tank as if they just moved into a new home.

No Gerbils were harmed in the writing of this blog.

Back up your Data Now or else….

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I had a rather rude awakening the other day. A Western Digital 500 GB Firewire hard drive I bought in 2007 croaked, died, started the dreaded click clik click on startup. This is a universal sound of death apparently. I did not have any irreplaceable on it, its just a big inconvenience and time suck.

I spent Friday looking into Data Recovery Options, which it turns out is an oxymoron. It really means “it will cost you a minimum of between 49.00 and 65.00 dollars for anyone to determine if they can even help you.”

Twelpforce (Bestbuy online) tried to help on twitter by enlisting about 7 people responding and talking around the problem until I suggested I take it to Best Buy in Natick to get it looked at and it was agreed that was best.

I got an estimate of 3000.00 from Data Doctors. They were very certain they knew my problem and that they could fix it. They even called me from CA after I spoke to a local office in MA. Great response time, but the pricing is crazy.

The thing I just don’t believe is this premise that fixing and recovering data requires a clean room. Mixing plutonium probably does require a clean room, Data recovery probably not so much. The thought that all these companies need 2500.00 to get a 150.00 hard drive to spit out it’s data is a little too wizard of Oz for me, even given the fact I produce video. If they charge that much why not let the person with the hard drive fly to the clean room and observe the process then in person. Make it a vacation to the clean room and data recovery world?

My feeling is that most of the companies online claim to be able to do data recovery but really don’t. It’s my gut telling me something smells bad. It’s also 49.00 – 65.00 dollars to find out what the problem with the failed hard drive might be, and maybe a solution.

We all rely on computers to do our stuff. We all have backups of our stuff. With millions of people paying 49.00 – 65.00 that’s lots of money spent on maybe. I say we save that 49-65 million dollars right now.

Maybe coming up with a better backup plan is a better idea. Hmmm I found mine online. Please see http://www.videomaker.com/article/14242/

Three Strikes I’m Out. WTF…

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Sometimes you just have bad customer service experiences, but when you have three in a row you start to question yourself as I have. Is it me am I doing something wrong? I will let you decide.

1. gomylocal: They had my company listed all wrong on its listing and when I tried to have them reset my password they said they could not do that. So I asked them to delete my listing. This revealed another version of my listing that was also wrong going back 4 years. I had them delete that one also so that’s that. WTF?

2. Marketcircle: (Daylite) This program is my ACT for Mac program that I wrote so many good things about last year after I got rid of windows finally. Well an update rolled out recently and now my database name and password are gone. Did they create a customer service incident? We will see. I am not in habit of deleting this info.
WTF!

3. Bank of America said they sent me a new bank card on june 11th, and yet I did not get one. So yesterday when I was heading out I had to rush to an open banking center for my temp replacement card expired. Can you say two hours of my life I can never get back. I mean WTF.

Bonus: I tried updating my map on Tom Tom last night and it crashed while downloading the new map. Sure they have my money but can I get the map to download nooooo. WTF?

You need to laugh sometimes and I try, but sometimes you just need to say WTF.

Skippy gets to a tweetup

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I sign up for tweetups with the best intentions, most are in cool places in Boston that I would like to visit again. Tonight I finally got to one at the Marketing Profs / Tapas tweetup at the Renaissance Hotel in the seaport area. The Marketing Profs has it’s two day conference there today 6/8 and tomorrow 6/9 and it was very well attended by all I talked to about it. They also had a tapas tweetup for non attendees also which is why I went. 9ubgwkse8y

The food was great, great marinated artichokes, and the sandwich things were good. There were olives and peppers and chicken with thai peanut sauce. All very good but all not Tapas. When I think Tapas I think small plates, but thats ok free food is good food and the renaissance had some of the best to nosh on.

The room was full and lots of people were milling about. I saw and met lots of people I tweet with that I had not had before in real life. I am bad with twitter names so if I goof yours up writing I appologize in advance.

I saw and spoke with twitter friends @JoselinMane happy Birthday again and many many more. You rock. I saw @damphoux from Green leads, @Robertcollins and a clone who reportedly was @chrisbrogan but I was always told he never attends boston events so I was dillusional obviously. Thanks for the compliment btw, your clone rocks. I figure if I am going to dilude myself I would throw that in also. THe other person I saw that I met before was @missusp, and I am glad my video production skills at New Marketing summitt were not completely lost.

New people I met for the first time in person were @JoeCascio, @dough , @fairminder, @jimstorer and @jeffglasson you guys were all great to talk with. Though @dough skipped out without paying “that DB”. I also was very fortunate to meet @bostonmarketer finally.

I want to thank the organizers Marketing Profs and 451 Marketing for co sponsoring the post seminar event and tapas tweetup. I had gone outside to twitter for a minute (no signal on edge) and when I returned Joselin mentioned they had called my name.

Usually the only time I get my name called is in a court room or a Starbucks so I was skeptical. I had won a prize however a very nice prize indeed. It was a Casio 8.1 megapixel youtube ready camera. Wow, just for showing up. I need to go to more of these tweetups.

My thanks again to Marketing Profs and Sage Patterson at 451 Marketing again for the really nice camera.

5 guys burgers and the Obama Factor

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5 guys burgers are very good, Keith Shaw from Network World and I were in DC a few months back and had them in Terminal B at Dulles. They are very good indeed. Last night on MSNBC the leader of the free world went out for 5 guys burgers. It was a planned covert operation where president Obama went out and got burgers for himself, staff and NBC correspondent Brian Williams.

Now in social media circles some speak of the Oprah factor in purchasing. Today Keith and I went with Jason Meserve to 5 Guys and they were very busy.

I asked a worker if business had always been so busy, and it was mentioned that they were much busier today the day after the MSNBC show aired. They reported that they were slammed all day with new customers they had never seen before at their location.

5 guys burgers it would appear then is benefiting by the Obama factor.

Know your limitations…

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In Dirty Harry the last line of the film was “a man’s got to know his own limitations” I may be good at video production but as far as being an early adopter testing things like Friend feed and feeding it to face book and twitter I am a doofus.

Interesting tonight I pleaded to the Twitter cosmos to see if anyone had similar problems. 1 person a friend and colleague responded. Thanks Jason. The thing I also noticed that in my rant of frustration I got 10 more followers on twitter. 10 more people but no more help on this problem.

Chris Brogan got me and another 100o plus lemmings to respond to a Star Trek trivia question which of course I knew the answer on.

“ a mans got to know his own limitations”