There is a lot going on in Kansas City, these days. Google has launched it’s “Google Fiber” product and the entrepreneur community is buzzing with activity. It’s a hot bed for startups, and it’s being coined as “Silicon Prairie”. In 2008, Silicon Prairie News was founded to discuss the developments in the startup scene in the flyover states of Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. SPN, launched Big Omaha a couple years ago, and today was the inaugural Big Kansas City conference kickoff, where top innovators, startup founders and digital disrupters share their wisdom in an old school airplane hanger, that is now the Airline History Museum.
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Posts in category Marketing
Innovation and Inspiration at Big Kansas City
My Experience Working With Yahoo! And Why Marissa Mayer is Right about Not Letting Employees Work from Home.
Everyone has been busting Marissa Mayer’s proverbial balls over the past week over her decision to make Yahoo employees work at a corporate office and stop working from home. My work commute is approximately 66 steps from bed to work chair. It works for me. I work for a silicon valley company from my basement office in my Kansas City home. Living and working in Silicon Valley is too damn expensive so living there isn’t really an option. Having said that, I understand why Yahoo! totally needs to do it.
In the past summer, the company that I consult with was working on a partnership with a well known movie producer on a joint venture with Yahoo and my company. Meaning, we had to work together closely to make it happen. They had a distribution partnership with Yahoo! Screen and we had to work with it.
The Kansas City Chiefs Twitter Case Study
Back in September, the Kansas City Chiefs had lost their opening game to the Atlanta Falcons by a wide margin. That evening, I was texting a buddy of mine that I’ve have known since 5th grade about how poor that the 
Chiefs had been with the salary cap, and how cheap I was perceiving them to be. After the conversation, I tweeted out what I thought was a meaningless tweet rant about my perception of the situation.
“I’m not much of a @kcchiefs fan anymore. [Chiefs owner] Clark Hunt’s yearly 30m under the cap bullshit is unethical. Greedy bastard owners can F.O. cc @nfl”
Let’s just say… that tweet caused a bit of a social hoopla. 3 minutes after I sent that tweet… a Chiefs employee tweeted me a response via a private direct message. I then took a screencap of this message and shared it with the world. This triggered a chain reaction, in which the Chiefs blocked me on twitter, a top post on Reddit, many local and national interviews and a social media case study was created.
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Social Media Stormgasms During Bad Weather, Big Events and Disasters
Yesterday, Burger King’s Twitter account password was hacked. I was able to monitor it in near real time. WDAF Fox 4 in Kansas City was thinking of having me on as a social media strategist and interview me for my opinion of the Burger King… the producer nixed that story and wanted a story about social media and how it impacts people and the frenzy during bad storms and disasters. This is the video of my interview on the local Kansas City news station WDAF Fox 4.
The Hidden Benefits of the @BurgerKing Twitter Hack for Burger King
If you were watching the interwebs this morning, you may have heard that Anonymous hacked the official Burger King Twitter handle @BurgerKing and changed all of it’s branding to McDonald’s logos and imagery. This could be catastrophic for the agency or the BK Social Media team who manages these accounts.
While I watched this play out in real time, I was astounded at the sheer velocity of growth that the @burgerking Twitter account was experiencing. From my estimation, @BurgerKing was at about 77,000 followers to start the day.
Once “Anonymous” hacked the profile due to an alleged “whopper123” password, the buzz started spreading, the amount of @burgerking twitter followers begin to grow.
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Verizon Early Upgrade for Samsung Note 2 is a Win for Amazon.
Let’s face it, gadgets make the world go around now. After all of my extensive research, it was time to upgrade my phone to the Samsung Galaxy Note II. I looked online at my Verizon Wireless account and noticed that on Feb 17th, my main line became eligible for the upgrade. I figured that I could use my charm and good looks to get the hook up and get my phone a week early. The following chain of events showcases how poorly different divisions of corporations speak with one another.
First of all, I admit that I’m a geek. My line of work entails that I interact with technology, online, mobile, social, search… you name it. I need a phone that allows for effective multi-tasking.
Business Relationship Optimization – BRO!
It’s no secret that the road between social media and SEO is becoming one connected entity that needs to be dealt with in an overarching content strategy. No more separate silos of operation, search and social is clearly now about relationships and the strategy behind building those business relationships. I call this, “Business Relationship Optimization” or BRO.
Every person on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or Google+ has an audience. So, how can we identify the brightest thought leaders to connect with and how can we use these relationships to drive buzz, increase SEO back links and rankings, along with providing the search engines with strong social signals? These following tactics and resources will help you optimize these business relationships over time. SEO is about your Bro’s. It’s Brocial Media! (Wait, that was horrible, wasn’t it? let’s just roll with it.)
