Ryan Wofford

With just a day left in the year, don’t downplay the opportunity to donate to your favorite charity or social cause this year. It’s a great tax write off and the non-profits can more than use the support in these times, so do your part!

If you are in Georgia and looking for a great local organization, try checking your local hospice agencies. Abbey Hospice in Social Circle, Ga is an amazing resource for families dealing with terminal cancer patients in their lives. Visit their website for more info www.abbeyhospice.com

Old School Media Image via Wikipedia

This article brings to light the necessity, even in the role of a web 2.0 demand generation strategist, for an offline strategy.

As I was meeting with a client the other day, who was in charge of his company’s online marketing destiny, I posed the question, “Where do your clients live?” He quickly began to reply “well, we’re an SaaS company… we hope they live on the web” and I had to interrupt, “what if they don’t?”

As he backpedaled, he then began to tell me to think of their customers, in fact, as the “Rust Belt“. “This is no good,” I thought. We need an offline strategy. I need to show these folks that we can win this battle old school style… We can rock this lo-fi, no-tech scene too.

Then, I had an idea… we can get our promo message out on CD or DVD, like I used to trying to get gigs.

I decided we would try something that looked like this:

Vertical Market Demo

By following this course, we could not only spread our brand message, but then convert offline users into online users by driving them to a conversion point on the web. Sure, the chart and the message needs a little refinement, but the idea is there, and it is a great idea to have a supplemental offline strategy to go with your web presence.

How do you supplement your online strategies when you have to take them offline?

Image via Wikipedia

Hi I am posting this blog via the new dragon dictation iPhone application. This app allows you to speak words into your microphone and have them translated to text. You can then select all, and copy and paste into another application such as SMS or e-mail.

Here I’m going to try to post this to my WordPress blog…

edit: So, the above was posted via the Dragon Dictation app successfully. I did have to try a few times to get it to work, primarily because I believe I was probably speaking more words than it could process at a time (it did not specify any sort of limit). What I found I could do to work around it was speak a sentence, hit “done” and let it process, then continue recording and repeat that process until I finished what I wanted to say. Maybe not the ideal way to write a blog post, but certainly cool for shooting off a quick email or SMS message.

Image via CrunchBase

Earlier this week Apple approved the first live streaming video app for the iPhone. Pointy Heads Software’s Knocking Live Video app is now available in the App Store and basically it allows iPhone-to-iPhone users to share and stream video between each other’s handsets.

I personally downloaded it right away and found it to be quite buggy at first. Initially when I downloaded it, every time I launched the app it would just hang at the initialization screen. I uninstalled it & tried again several time to no avail, so I just left it on my phone. The next day I launched the app and got as far as to set up an account and search for / add some friends, but when a buddy and I tried to get it to connect, nothing happened. Today I went back in and allowed “notifications” from the app and we immediately were able to “knock” and connect to one another. I never saw anything in the notes / reviews that you needed to do so, but maybe you need to allow those notifications for it to work.

At any rate, the video stream shows a little latency but it is still pretty cool. Currently there is no audio support for it, and it’s only a one-way connection, so even if the iPhone had a camera on the “business” side of the phone, you still wouldn’t be able to use it for a video conference. All said, it’s a neat little app that will surely pave the way for much greater things to come. Already in the works is audio support, recording, and ability to connect with users on non-iPhone handsets.

See it in action here.

What else is cool is the back story of how the app got approved… check related articles below for more on that.

Related articles

• Steve Jobs Approves App Personally

image courtesy of craigmdennis

I was just going through my morning tweets, when I followed a link to what I thought was going to be a humorous picture or some comedic added value, but all I found was… MORE WORDS!

Yes, I unfortunately by clicking that link I stumbled across a service called Twitlonger, “For when you talk too much for twitter”. This web service offers registered users a place to spew beyond the oh-so-restrictive 140 characters of Twitter… Just what we needed.

The site admits that they’re kind of going against everything Twitter is about (but they’re doing it anyway), and encourage you to still keep it under the 140 mark, but they are there just in case you need to really wax poetic on a topic.

I’m sure this will be used as directed (especially considering the post I was exposed to it on was about coffee cups).

image courtesy of jima

With the launch of TweetDeck’s update that I wrote about yesterday, the support for displaying your Twitter lists as columns has gotten much better. The great thing about the addition of Twitter lists and column functionality in TweetDeck is that you can build lists of people or search trending topics, both of which can provide a wealth of information, and keep them all in one place by topic or groups of friends or whatever.

Additionally, you don’t technically even have to “follow” these users if you have added them to a list to see their tweets. This can take a little time to set up and manage, but I’ve started to really dig into it and it’s a great way to clean up the clutter, filter out the “noise” and focus on what matters to you most in a concise fashion.

So, over the next few days if you discover that I have suddenly “unfollowed” you, don’t be sad… As Tupac would say, “I ain’t mad atcha”, I probably just moved you to a list in an effort to stay better focused.