It has been an interesting few days.  On Monday, we officially announced that BlueStorm hadd aquired CYBERCity, another Binghamton-based computer services firm.  The merger is a solid mix of CYBERCity’s personal-to-small business market and BlueStorm’s small-to-medium business focus.  We are looking to expand our enterprise infrastructure business and use the advances in enterprise infrastructure technology to make them available to smaller organizations.  The big upside is in the managed services business where both teams have been having success, so we see this as a great growth opportunity (trying so hard not to use the word synergy, but this is a text book example).

It was a fun strategic/tactical exercise to roll-out news to each outlet.  The first step was to coordinate website updates to show a co-branded presence. This had to be done before I posted the announcement on our Twitter and  Facebook because  of the immediacy of those outlets, so I had somewhere to link readers.  I also wanted to make sure news outlets had a chance to confirm (because they still do that) and assign the story, so sending out email and faxes (yes, dialed it myself) also had to be sent before the social media postings.  The big surprise was having one of the local TV news stations call so quickly that I had not yet received the fax confirmation.

Here are the steps I followed –
A week early:

1. Create a call sheet – name, email, fax, and Twitter accounts
2. Sign up to follow their twitter accounts – You want to give them time to follow you

Day of the announcement:

1. Update website — In case  news people go there to confirm
2. Send out faxes and emails
3. Post on BlueStorm’s Twitter and Facebook — It’s also good to have some of your co-workers on-call to RT and “Like” so the message spreads virally
4. Post on local third-party or business blogs — The local news site allows the public to create their own blog space, so I posted the release on BlueStorm’s PressConnect page
5. Send direct message to reporter’s Twitter — I only did this to those that I had a prior relationship
6. Good old-fashioned follow-up — This worked great because I found that my local press contact was out that day from her voice mail.  I was able to connect to the news desk and placed a press release based article at the top of the Business section. That would have been an embarrassing miss.

The Results The story ended up in the lead segment of two local news broadcasts, including this report on Newschannel 34.  We also had the Business section headline in the Binghamton Press and appeared on the front page of the Binghamton Business Journal.  The only downside was that the WBNG-TV News interview and Press articles were not posted online even after I called.  My lesson there was that next time I needed to include the web producer on my release list.

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This is the first post from my WordPress for iPhone app. It took two versions and help from the tech support team at 3essentials.com. Thanks to their team who went beyond the norm to make it work: Patrick, Josh, Damon and Sam (hope I got you all).

Here’s to trusting auto-correct.

– Tim

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I had a unique opportunity to attend a presentation put on by The New York Semantic Web Meetup called Content, Identifiers and Freebase from Metaweb about ways to use Freebase. I’ll use organizer Marco Newmann’s words to describe Freebase:

“Freebase is a community managed database for knowledge about the world. Information in Freebase is organized as a web of facts, which can be systematically retrieved.”

So get this: Someone else stores and maintains the data, and you get to use it. This is a great resource for building applications or as a repository to supplement content projects.

As I had covered back in June, I am itching to build something using these resources, and last night may have given me a little more inspiration. For help I’ll look to pick up Jaime Taylor’s new book “Programming the Semantic Web“. Jaime Taylor presented a mix of high-level application ideas along with some code samples to show how it works, both the ease and flexibility of accessing data. Robert Cook, the co-founder of Metaweb Technologies, covered aspects about how we can use the Freebase database, including usage allowances (100k queries/day), the Creative Commons licensing requirements, and how we can upload and maintain Freebase data

I can already think of a great semantic search application that can be built with already available data — so if you are that client I spoke to last week — call me fast this is a home run, or I’m building it myself!

Like I said: It makes you want to start building. Great presentation.

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Sometimes you are just caught off-guard and where you will find genius. Today it was a at Macy’s Santaland(r) (I had to add the R since it seems so silly). We decided that we would take our little one to visit the “real” Santa, according the “Miracle on 34th Street.”

I was ready for standing in line for a couple of hours, but it was like a Christmas Miracle, and we were out in about 30 minutes. But there’s a secret, I’m not sure exactly, but there are more that one Santas in Santaland.

How? It’s not like a mall where Santa sits in the middle, the kigs line up, and we can all walk past. Here they bring the families through an enchanted forest type of setting that ends in a room filled with Christmas trees and helpers, we’ll call them elves, lead each family to a different cubby area hidden behind the trees. The family in front of us was taken off to the left, and then we were taken off to the right where we waited behind a family that was a good distance in front of us in line.

Anyway, the baby cried when she saw Santa, so the whole family ended up in the photo in order to maintain the peace, but I had to say that I had a pretty big smile after seeing how they handled the crowds with the multi-Santa solution. I have to look for places to put a similar plan in place.

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