Lobster Influence Definitely NOT the Same as Mobster Influence!

Lobster influence is nice, but it doesn't carry the punch of Mobster influence.

Back in the day and probably still even today in certain areas, a person who was "connected" or had "influence" carried a lot of weight.  This person usually got what they wanted - mostly because of who and what they knew, but many times because of the fear of others.

Today, influence can be much different.  There are a growing number of social media / internet sites that try to score and track it.  

Eastside Entrepreneurs Featured Here by Joe Connector

Note:  It looks like I wrote this post back in 2010 and never published it.  Well, I did some work on it and wanted to help promote a lot of great people and their businesses, so I better (finally) get it posted.  This post first appeared at BellevueBusinessJournal.com, but I want to put even more of a spotlight on a few of our Featured Members at Eastside Entrpreneurs and link to their businesses.

Members can choose to be Featured Members by becoming supporting members of Eastside Entrepreneurs at any of three separate support levels, but the current Featured Members were chosen to be featured randomly.

A Lot to Digest at End of First Six Months of Eating Clean

At the end of this month, I will have been Eating Clean the Joe Abs Way for a little over six months.  (I started in late August 2011 before I'd ever even heard of clean eating).  It's been an interesting run - not without trials and tribulations, but very beneficial in a lot of ways - mostly in the way I look and feel.  More energetic for sure, never starving - and always eating ... the right foods.

Last week I had my body composition tested in a BodPod at BodPod Bellevue or Vitela Health, owned by Brent and Jan Mathew Stahl.  It was a pretty cool experience and I was fairly happy with my results.  I'll blog about the entire experience a little later over at Joe Abs, but I will say that I was able to get my body fat percentage even lower than the 8% I was hoping for ....

Also last week I finished up negotiations to head up a tech start-up called Text Retriever.  Text Retriever is a really cool text marketing solution to enable real estate professionals to win more listings, meet more buyers and make more sales.  My marketing strategy is to first approach a top tier of a handful of potential huge partners that could easily help us start off with good market share.  If I'm not able to create a mutually beneficial partnership with any of the top tier potential partners, I move down the list to national real estate brands, then to those who already market a complementary product to real estate professionals and then the regional MLS, Boards of Realtors and real estate brokerages.

I'm thinking that Text Retriever could make a huge splash with the right partner and it could happen very quick.  Stay tuned and see what I am able to put together.  I'm hoping to be able to announce at least one major partner at Inman Real Estate Connect in San Francisco August 1-3.

I also asked Jeffrey Gitomer and his crew to help me come up with a Gitomer-ish job title.  They came back to me with "Big Dog", which had previously been suggested, but I had decided to go with "CEO / Alpha Marketing Dog".  It's all about sales - and in this case, that means it's all about finding the right partner who markets to real estate professionals and can help us reach a huge number quickly.  I'm not greedy.  I'm not asking for anything out of reason, I simply want 1% of market share in our first year.  With approximately 2.3 million listings across the country, that is about 23,000 listings that we are going to be helping get sold.  (BTW Jeffrey Gitomer is coming to Bellevue for a couple of special events on March 22nd and 23rd)

Joe "The Connector" Kennedy's AID Statement: Appreciation, Intention, Delegation

Last month I recorded a lot of videos of my AID statements, but that took a lot of time each morning, so I had decided that I would simply write them and include them in posts (hopefully daily) on this site.  So far this month I have failed, but here's trying (btw - Happy Valentines Day!)

Some Day, Some Time, You Will Need Someone To Stand By You

This is a a really cool project by Playing for Change - really uniting people around the world through music.  How awesome!  Almost 40 MILLION views ...

What do you think about this?  I 'Like' it, subscribed and shared here - how about YOU?

Pinterest Gains Huge Social Media Momentum, Many Detractors & It's Own Version of Twitter's Fail Whale

 

[caption id="attachment_530" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="502 - the Pinterest version of the Fail Whale"][/caption]

Pinterest has been gaining huge momentum with large numbers of new members, and growing time spent on site among existing members.   Savvy social media marketing strategists (I like to think I am) are including Pinterest and other tagging sites like Fancy in a growing and varied number of ways in their social media marketing strategies.

The other night I was involved in a long thread on Google+ where most of the participants either 1) do not look at themselves as marketers or 2) Just don't get the possibilities of Pinterest and similar sites.   There were several people who said they did not need another time suck - and that they would NEVER use Pinterest.  Very close-minded I think.  I think it is a great way to not only share content amongst friends and those with similar interests, but it helps us marketers in SEO for our websites, and is a great way share products and services that we create, market and sell.

This afternoon I got an email from a good friend in San Diego who is an awesome event artist (all of his art is great, but I know he especially enjoys doing events).  Tom has a new website and is pretty proud of it - it does look great - don't you think?  He wants more people to see it.  I want to help him, so I "Pin" some of his art to a board I've called "Art" so that anyone following my boards will see it and can link directly to Tom's website if he sees a painting he likes.  I don't think that Tom or his new customer would think that Pinterest is a waste of time at all.  What do YOU think?

Oh - by the way.  The photo of the 502 error was a screen I was faced with this afternoon.  I guess 502 is Pinterest's version of Twitter's fail whale.