Most of the time, people will use social media to bitch about something or some brand online. Rarely will people take the time to write a blog post PRAISING a company.
Hold your breath, folks, I’m about to do just that. The Facebook F8 Conference was amazing. A McDonald’s employee went OUT OF HER WAY for me in a big way on Sunday. And United made me breathe a sigh of relief, I’ll tell you why.
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My first tech startup, MethodLaboratories was a big web project that started with an idea from my good friend, Jonathan Shaun.
Methodlabs was where we featured artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creatives, gave them free webspace, showcased their work and even created t-shirts for the artists and designers that submitted their work.
To make the project a reality, I learned and mastered HTML, CSS & Javascript, as well as designing the whole project.
We also brought in the talented Alexander Petrides, who helped do all of the tough, custom modifications on the code. He actually built the Dropbox-like feature, and helped customize our user profiles system and many other things. Together, we grew the concept into a large web property with tens of thousands of members.
In many ways, we were a bit ahead of our time: READ MORE »
I tweet a lot. And I tweet about many different topics. Many of my followers don’t give a flying shit about many of the topics that I’d otherwise like to talk about.
You can segment people with lists, so that can filter their broadcasts, however, you can’t select an audience to deliver certain tweets to, outside of a hashtag. I propose they fix this, as it’s in their best interest for advertising targeting.
For instance, I live in Kansas City and have always loved watching the Kansas City Royals. Let’s say I’m watching the Royals game and I want to tweet about it… There is a browser with Twitter open at the ready, my mobile phone is right here, also… and I have a browser open of the Royals playing. READ MORE »
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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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.
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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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.
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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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.
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.)
@teedubyaTravis Wright is a Venture Catalyst, Public Speaker, Digital Disrupter, Marketing Provocateur, Stand Up Comedian, Tech Blogger & Brand Awesomeizer.
This Travis Wright guy shares marketing resources, industry analysis, interwebs strategery & random hilarity along w/ occasional sport or political rants. If you can stand his jokes and want his opinion on something, feel free to connect with him.
email: tw [at] traviswright [dot] com
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