1. Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky) – Dr. Mark D. Drapeau is the 2006-08 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, U.S. Department of Defense, Washington DC.  Mark writes many articles and blog posts about new media and government.
2. GovTwit (@govtwit) - GovTwit is a website that helps filter U.S. Government Twitter accounts.  They are also active networking and having conversations on Twitter.
3. Philip Nowak (@philipnowak) - Philip Nowak is a very active social media and runs the blog Social Media Unraveled.  As the social media director for Thomas Castillo, he is very active in the political world.
4. Bill Schrier (@billschrier) - Bill Scrier is the Chief Technology Officer for the City of Seattle.  He has been actively engaging on Twitter for some time and runs the blog Chief Seattle Geek.  He will probably be a good resource for local politicians.
5. Jeffrey Levy (@levyj413) – Jeffrey Levy is the web manager for the EPA.  He has also been very active on Twitter and  certainly knows a lot of elected officials on Twitter.  He has done a great  job of being in touch with “government 2.0,” which has pushed the EPA forward with their use of social media.

What struck me first about the Cluetrain Manefesto was  the copyright date – 1999, 2001.  The Cluetrain Manefesto was certainly early.  Even before the advent of Web 2.0 platforms, the Cluetrain Manefesto was encouraging conversation between businesses and customers while deriding businesses for their short-sighted marketing practices.

The “Markets are Conversations” chapter reveals to me that these ideas aren’t quite as new as I think they are.  In general, I link ideas of markets having conversations to the time web 2.0 websites started becoming mainstream (around 2006).  However, it is clear these ideas aren’t driven by the web 2.0 websites we know today.  Clearly, online networks were strong in 1999, and certainly before that.  Since that time they’ve become much stronger, but that doesn’t mean the ideas behind them are new.

Businesses are still struggling to understand how to have conversations with their customers.  They are certainly getting better – particularly big businesses that can pay a lot of money for social media consultants.  Personally, however, I’ve found small businesses are struggling to catch up.  Many small businesses have been trained to market online like big business, but haven’t made the shift to conversations yet.  The unfortunate part of this is that small businesses can more easily have conversations with customers online because they can generally be more authentic when they engage in online conversations.

It will certainly be interesting to see how marketing continues to evolve.  Looking back at the Cluetrain Manefesto, it is clearly evolving slower than I would expect, but now that web 2.0 technologies have developed and become more mainstream, we may see the evolution accelerate.

As companies change the way they market, it will also be interesting to see how they use web 2.0 technologies to take advantage of the massive amount of wisdom that can be gained from the population as a whole.  Cass R. Sunstein discusses the power of large numbers of people in his book Infotopia.

The first chapter of Infotopia address the potential strength and weakness in having a large group of people make decisions.  By crowdsourcing decisions, we have the capibility of being more accurate than if we made a decision ourselves.  This is great for guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar, but how can it be applied to business?

The answer comes with open platforms that are slowly becoming the norm.  Many web 2.0 websites open up their API so third parties can link into their resources and integrate their service into another website or application.  Twitter applications, Facebook applications, and even Google Maps and Google Calendar all take advantage of APIs.  What we see from this is products far better than if the company themselves made it.  I really doubt Twitter would be as widespread if they hadn’t opened up their platform to the masses.  The product now is far better due to large group intellegence than it would be if it were developed my the company alone.

What this means is the divide between business and customer is closing.  Smart companies won’t close off their product, but will actually allow their customers help develop it first hand.  By letting go of control of certain aspects of their products, we will find products that are cheaper and create more value than ever before.

Because of my interest in politics more than the workings of agencies, I think I’ll move forward with elected officials.

As far as the format of the book, I think there will be a lot of value in keeping this a living document.  While we should certainly move forward with a dead-tree style book, I think it will be really important to have a website that will be updated as the use of Twitter evolves.  Future classes can add and improve/update our work.

I’m not sure what it takes to do this, but distribution through Kindle might be cool.  That way it will be much easier distribute new editions that will certainly be necessary in the near future.

Our class is trying to do something pretty cool – we are telling a story in 22 parts – each part is going to be a 90 second video done by each student.  We will have an overarching theme that ties all of these together.

My topic proposal is “Transportation in Seattle.”  I believe a user is likely to engage because there are quite a few different types of transportations and issues surrounding transportation.  Because everyone uses some form of transportation, we can all relate to the fun and frustrations involved.  I’d like the topic to be broad enough to allow creativity – one could make a video on issues of public transportation in Seattle, or perhaps a video could be made on someone that rides a unicycle to work.

The focus would be on present day Seattle.  Videos could be either silly or serious; start conversation or cause laughs.  I think having a broad topic that allows for this kind of flexibility would make the final video more interesting and engaging.

In February, my long time friend and roommate, Darien asked me to help him revive his company, now named YongoPal.  The company provides conversational English tutoring to South Koreans.

Quite a bit has happened in the last few months, and I want to briefly reflect on the progress we’ve made since this project came back to life in February.

Back in February, the project was on the shelf due to an extremely weak South Korean currency.  After chatting with Darien about how a weak American economy coupled with a weak exchange rate might actually a really good time to launch, Darien asked if I would be interested in helping him get the business going again.

Since that time, we have accomplished the following:

• Renamed and Rebranded the company
• Officially registered the coporation and opened our bank account
• Found fantastic developers to develop the website
• Created detailed specs describing exactly what we want the website to do (40 pages worth of details, wireframes, and user-flows)
• Contracted with a designer to create the logo and website design
• Started some light customer acquisition
• Began talking with another company about potential marketing partnerships (very preliminary at this point)

Currently the site is finishing up the first week of active development.  We will be meeting with our developers every other Friday to keep up-to-date with progress and to make sure things stay on track.

We are crossing our fingers for a late-August/September launch.  We understand there are always delays, but it’s good to have a goal.

Not bad for two guys with jobs bootstrapping their business.

Pro Care Advantage

My business partner, Mike, and I just got our first website to go live a few nights ago for our new business Sayenko Design. The site is for a small window cleaning business in Bellevue. The site is simple, yet professional, and we are pretty happy with it.

The name of the business is ProCare Advantage.

We tried to design the site in a way that allows the client to update content easily. Both the text on each page and the forms are easy to edit through Wordpress.

A blog was also included to help put a more human face on the business, while boosting search engine optimization.

We hope to have another website live in about one week. That site will be much more complex, and includes video podcasts.