Summary:

Yesterday, Twitter may have helped to save a 1 year old girl who was kidnapped and in serious danger. Here’s the best Twitter story ever, (short version).

Details:

The long version is available at Twitter helps solve Amber Alert (long, but worth it).

Yesterday was the best day in Twitter’s life because yesterday was the day when Twitter may have helped to find a kidnapped one year old baby girl named Jaylin Boudria. We won’t know for a while if Twitter and cell phones helped, but the girl is safe, and that’s the important thing.

The Amber Alert spread like wildfire through Twitter. People from all over the world ReTweeted it in the hope that somebody might be able to find the car containing this kidnapped girl.

Here’s the chronology from my point of view:

11:30 AM

Baby girl kidnapped in Swansea, MA. It would be hours before it’s investigated, confirmed, et cetera, and it hits the radio.

2:30 PM

As I was listening to the radio, the state police broke in into the broadcast and said that there was an Amber Alert, and a one-year-old baby girl was in serious danger. I looked at my computer to find the story from my friend, news reporter Ted Daniel (http://twitter.com/TedDanielFOX25), and sure enough he had Tweeted the information. He had a pointer to a Fox news webpage with more detail. I re-tweeted it immediately with the hope that some of my 20,000 followers would ReTweet it, and it would be passed on to many others.

I then kept ReTweeting the same information periodically and saw that tons of my followers were ReTweeting it also.  Their names are listed in the long version the story Twitter helps solve Amber Alert (long, but worth it).

Hundreds of their followers tweeted it also.  Other original tweets were ReTweeted as word of mouth spread to thousands in seconds.

Sara Underwood (http://twitter.com/sara_underwood), anchor for Fox news, tweeted about it. It was picked up and ReTweeted by the actress Alyssa Milano, who passed it to 600,000 followers in a moment.

The Twitter community was in a frenzy sending it to people on the highways.

5:00 PM – The best Tweet ever

The little girl was found in a rest stop in Connecticut, and she’s safe. Absolutely awesome.

The “world village” saved one of its children, and Twitter users may have helped.  I still get choked up thinking about it.

• Amber alert ended.
• Baby girl saved.
• Total time – 5.5 hours
• Not having to see her picture on a billboard for 10 years? Priceless.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed about it on Fox TV news last night with Sarah Underwood. The video is posted above.

Future generations will find a better way to do this. When I say future generations, I mean myself and others in the next few months. Some day, when I run the world, cell phone companies will be required to figure out a way to broadcast critical information in certain geographical regions to people on their cell phones.

However, for now, a three year old named Twitter may have helped us find a one year old named Jaylin.  It will be a long time before she realizes that if she was born a few years earlier, there may have been no way to save her.

Thanks to all of the people who ReTweeted, posted on Facebook, called people, or did anything else to help save her. You are all heroes in my book.

Summary:

Yesterday, Twitter may have helped to solve an Amber Alert, and saved a 1 year old girl who was kidnapped and in serious danger.  Here’s the best Twitter story ever.

Details:

The short version of Twitter solves Amber Alert is here if you don’t have time for this.

Yesterday was the best day in Twitter’s life because yesterday was the day when Twitter may have helped to find a kidnapped one year old baby girl named Jaylin Boudria.  We won’t know for a while if Twitter and cell phones helped, but the girl is safe, and that’s the important thing.

The Amber Alert spread like wildfire through Twitter.  People from all over the world ReTweeted it in the hope that somebody might be able to find the car containing this kidnapped girl.

Here’s the chronology from my point of view:

11:30 AM

Baby girl kidnapped in Swansea, MA.  It would be hours before it’s investigated, confirmed, et cetera, and it hits the radio.

2:30 PM

As I was listening to the radio, the state police broke in into the broadcast and said that there was an Amber Alert, and a one-year-old baby girl was in serious danger.  I looked at my computer to find the story from my friend, news reporter Ted Daniel (http://twitter.com/TedDanielFOX25), and sure enough he had Tweeted the information.  He had a pointer to a Fox news webpage with more detail.  I re-tweeted it immediately with the hope that some of my 20,000 followers would ReTweet it, and it would be passed on to many others.

My vision was that we would try to develop a huge “human chain” of people using Twitter, Facebook, and cell phones who could all be looking for the Silver Ford Focus that contained little girl.  If just one person could find the car with the distinctive Minnesota license plates, they could quietly follow the car and call the state police.

I realized, though, that most people with cell phones on the road wouldn’t have time to read the full webpage that most TV stations had dedicated to the cause.  I called Ted Daniel at Fox news and said that they should post a specific type of webpage that was just convenient for cell phone users with iPhones, Blackberries, Droids, et cetera.

There was no easy way to do it, but Kyle Bishop at Fox was willing to bend some corporate rules and create a “quick hack” page that would contain just the most critical information so that it can be read easily (in one or two screens) by people with Smartphones on the road. The info included:

• The time and place where she was kidnapped
• License plate number
• Pictures of the kidnapper, the child and the car (brilliant ideas, Kyle and Fox)

I then kept ReTweeting the same information periodically and saw that tons of my followers were ReTweeting it to, including:

@NEMultimedia, @ZinoClassic, @socialcap, @NEMultimedia, @TimMCahill, @JessicaHanson, @pretty_peace, @PoshMom, @RussBenoit, @yolandafacio, @DJDeja, @eXapath, @CaronElectric, @JonMichaeli, @cielyn, @MichaelFina, @LisaRFrank, @The420Fairy, @deb_lavoy, @MojoCaster, @Lynnelle, @WellnessWebGirl, @KristinEDziadul, @embracegracie, @stevedragoo, @ConstantContact, @JackInChicago, @snhparents, @BillyMacDonald, @capegirlindc, @Manage_Kelley, @RedHeadMeag, @reviewingcigars, @smoketherev, @FlyTheSky, @billshander, @DrSES, @PeytonACraig, @joeckmrc, @kizerandbender, @ldg1109, @AllergyProne, @chupieandjsmama, @chupieandjsmama, @gothamli, @DavidAtNavigate, @stales, @airjan23, @PeytonACraig, @codeYogi, @TimDineen, @AlMcGourlay, @meghanwelborn, @Bloodslave78, @JudeNewcomb, @naked_beauty, @taojoannes, @sammeem, @BrightEndeavors, @helphandrewards, @hinda_incentiv

Hundreds of their followers tweeted it also.

I also had the idea that if I tweeted people with huge followings (like the celebrities that had three or 4 million followers) that if they re-tweeted it even once, the viral effect could help spread the word to millions of people.  Therefore, I sent tweets to Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, Shaquille O’Neal and others who had over 3 million followers.

I also monitored  the story on Tweetdeck  to see how many people were ReTweeting the story.  As you would hope and expect, people began to help by ReTweeting the story to their own followers. I also broke one of Twitters unspoken rules by ReTweeting the same information multiple times.  Throw me in Twitter jail if you want.  I’ll sleep well on that metal bed tonight.

The story changed, as the state police found out new information like

• the fact that the car was actually a Silver Kia Wagon
• the license plate might not have been accurate, but was a Minnesota license plate

and as they did, I updated my tweets.  The Twitter army ReTweeted the most current info to others.

I also used Twellow to find the people in the Boston area that had the most followers, and I sent tweets to them, hoping they would ReTweet it to their Boston following.

Sara Underwood (http://twitter.com/sara_underwood),  anchor for Fox news, tweeted about it.  It was picked up and ReTweeted by the actress Alyssa Milano, who passed it to 600,000 followers in a moment.

Every news station was running a text banner at the bottom of the page giving info about the little girl, and the Twitter community was in a frenzy sending it to people on the highways.

5:00 PM – The best Tweet ever

The little girl was found in a rest stop in Connecticut, and she’s safe.   Absolutely awesome.

We still don’t know exactly how the girl was found, and that probably won’t be known for days, so we don’t know if Twitter nation helped.  However, the fact is that a combination of Twitter, cell phones, radio, TV and the good nature of millions of people may have helped to find this girl in a way that was unimaginable a few years ago.  The “world village” saved one of its children.  I still get choked up thinking about it.

• Amber alert ended.
• Baby girl saved.
• Total time – 5.5 hours
• Not having to see her picture on a billboard for 10 years?  Priceless.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed about it on Fox TV news last night with Sarah Underwood.  The video is posted above.

Future generations will find a better way to do this.  When I say future generations, I mean myself and others in the next few months.  Some day, when I run the world, cell phone companies will be required to figure out a way to broadcast critical information in certain geographical regions to people on their cell phones.

However, for now, a three year old named Twitter may have helped us find a one year old named Jaylin.  It will be a long time before she realizes that if she was born a few years earlier, there may have been no way to save her.

Thanks to all of the people who ReTweeted, posted on Facebook, called people, or did anything else to help save her.  You are all heroes in my book.

Want to see only status updates on Facebook so that you don’t have to see every time one of your friends buys pizza for someone else in Mafia Wars?  Here’s how…

Details:

Facebook tip – see only status updates

In February of 2010, they changed Facebook again, and it was designed by people who assume

• you have all day to look at Facebook
• you have to know when one of your friends makes a new friend
• you have to know someone pokes another person
• you know what a poke is

You can do Facebook much faster if you just see Status Updates, and they made it harder to do it.

Here’s the new Facebook trick

On the left hand side of your new page, if you click on Friends, you’ll see your friend lists, and just below it, it should say Status Updates.  Click on that.

The URL at the top should say

http://www.facebook.com/?sk=app_2915120374

but may have some other stuff in the middle.  The fact is that if you use the string above, and bookmark it, it should show you status updates (until the Facebook nerds do another one of their redesign/scavenger hunts).

Video demonstration

The problem

The big problem with this is that if you only see Status Updates, you won’t see when every one of your friends picks up a piece of cow shit in Farmville.

Sometimes, you search for someone in LinkedIn, but it says “out of network” because they aren’t a 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd level connection, and LinkedIn won’t give you the person’s name.   You assume you have to pay LinkedIn $25 in order to see their name.  Not true, because you know me.

Details:

Here’s my real life example

I was talking to a potential client (for social media consulting) at Connecticut Plastics, and she mentioned to me that the owner would be calling me.  I didn’t hear his name clearly, and it would be awkward if I didn’t know him by name when he called.

I did an advanced search on LinkedIn for

Connecticut Plastics owner

and it showed that he had a LinkedIn profile, but he was “out of network”, so LinkedIn wouldn’t give his name.

Cough up 25 bucks?  Not yet.

Look in Google using a fancy trick

Realize that Google has most LinkedIn profiles, so the trick is to somehow find them on Google for free.  If you pick some unique string from the info that LinkedIn does show you, and use a special feature of Google called the “site:” feature, (which allows you to just search one site on the Internet), you may find the name and full profile through Google.

I saw the string

Engineer at Alinabal

in his profile and figured that very few other people would have that string in their profile.  Therefore, I put it into Google, along with the word owner, using the following magic search string

Engineer at Alinabal owner site:www.linkedin.com

and found the profile in the Google results.  I clicked on the link, and LinkedIn showed me the LinkedIn profile page, with name and all.

See a 2 minute sample video

If you want to see a 2 minute video that shows exactly how to do it, go to my web site at

http://www.patrickomalley.com/linkedin-find-out-of-network-profiles-free.html

This technique doesn’t work in every case, but it works in a lot of cases.  If it works for you, please send me $25 each time.

Pretty cool, huh?   Pass it on…

Shameless self-promotion

My email subscribers got this months ago – If you want these before I make them public, sign up for my email newsletter at http://www.patrickomalley.com

Speeches and seminars – I’ve been giving this tip in speeches and seminars for years.  Hire me and get WAY ahead of the curve.  And your friends will think you’re cool.

A subtle beta feature was added to LinkedIn that will save sales people time.  If you “Search Companies”, it will now tell you who you know someone “through”.

Details:

If you’re a sales person, you will want to research target companies through LinkedIn.  One way to do this is to use the “Search Companies” option, which is actually a drop down option from the “Search People” function in the upper right hand corner of your home page.

If you look in the results, LinkedIn’s new beta feature will now tell you the names of the people who connect you to employees in that company.  This can save you a tremendous amount of time, because instead of clicking through to each profile, then scrolling down to see who you know someone “through”, LinkedIn puts it all on that page.

See the picture below for an example:

I did the following:

• Went to my LinkedIn home page
• Used the drop down menu to change Search People to Search Companies
• Searched for the company BG Medicine
• Clicked through to the company

Under “Current Employees”, I now see that I have a 2^nd level connection to the Chairman and founder, Noubar Afeyan, through my friend Dave Gowel and through J Mark (a LinkedIn connection who I do not know well), and can see connections to other employees without having to click through to each one.

If I wanted an introduction to the Chairman, Dave Gowel has just become my new best friend

Cool, huh?

Put the name of your city (in text form) somewhere in your LinkedIn profile.  Otherwise, you may not be found in searches.

Details:

LinkedIn training tip – put the name of your city in text somewhere in your profile

That’s right.  As unnecessary as it sounds, make sure you put the name of your city in the Summary field or in some other part of your profile.

Why is the tip important?

If someone goes to LinkedIn and uses the Search People function (in the upper right hand corner) to look for

accountant boston

because they are looking for an accountant, it won’t find most accountants in boston.  Why?  Because LinkedIn remembers your location based on your zip code (sort of).  It does not put it in text format.  Regardless, the search won’t find your profile unless you have the word boston somewhere in your profile.

Therefore, if you want potential customers or potential hiring managers to be able to find you, this tip should give you an edge over your competition if they are looking for someone in your city to help them in their business.

The proof, if you care

To test and prove this, do a search for

patrick o’malley boston

You will probably see 4 profiles in the results, and all have the word Boston in their profile.  Oddly, the other 3 aren’t from Boston (but went to Boston schools).  However, each has the word Boston in text somewhere in their profile

If you repeat the search and remove the word boston, just searching for patrick o’malley, you will see over a hundred matches.

Now click “Greater Boston Area” on the right hand side, it will filter those who actually live in Boston (based on zip code), and there are 11 of them.   However, none of them have the word Boston in their profile, so they wouldn’t be found in the search above when the word boston is added to the search.  LinkedIn only knows that they are from the “Greater Boston area” because it internally remembers their zip code, but won’t match that when you do a search for the actual word boston.

The important thing for you to know is that you should put the name of your city in the Summary field of your profile (or somewhere else) so that you appear in search results for your name and city, or more importantly, for your occupation and city.  Try it for your name and city.

Cool, huh?

If you want to see me talking about this as one of my “hot undocumented tips” in a keynote speech, see the video below.  Its not a funny clip, but it is a 60 second version that I gave one of my audiences:

Notes:

• I used to be the #1 match for Patrick O’Malley, and now I’m not in the first 10 pages.  If you want to see a funny blog entry on it, click http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/08/27/linkedin-search-people-function-changed-sort-order/
• One of the matches in the above search is a woman, but she worked for an organization with “Pat” in the name

Bit.ly results are actually public, and I’ll show you how to see how many clicks your competition is getting.  I’ll also explain why you may not want them seeing your clicks.

Details:

Introduction and background on bit.ly

Bit.ly is a URL shortener, which is commonly used in Twitter when people want to post a long URL but can’t fit it in 140 characters.  However, a big advantage to it is that it can actually tell you how many people clicked on the link.  This is great for marketers that are interested in quickly tracking how many people came to their site from Twitter.  If you want more, I also have two advanced videos on bit.ly at

• using bit.ly, then creating the bit.ly bookmarklet (97 second video)
  
• bit.ly “custom name” tip (70 second video)

For current users of bit.ly

The surprising thing is that the results of bit.ly click thru’s are public. They are not just available to the account holder.  If you want to see the number of clicks for any bit.ly link, you just put /info/ in the URL between bit.ly and the unique identifier, and you’ll see the same counts that the account holder would see.

Here’s an example:

On Oct 30^th, @DellOutlet sent out a tweet that said

Last day of Sale – 15% off Dell Outlet Home laptops and desktops with coupons: http://bit.ly/22ZFyi

The tweet can be seen at http://twitter.com/delloutlet/statuses/5288866064 if you want to see it.

Most importantly, anyone can put /info/ into the bit.ly link, and can look at http://bit.ly/info/22ZFyi to see that they got 13,220+ clicks on that link.

The disadvantage of using bit.ly

You would think HP and other competitors would care, and let’s see what HP could learn.  If you believe the common adage that 1% of these people will convert and buy a machine, and assume that they paid $1,000 for it, Dell would have made $132,000 from that tweet.  Tweak the numbers any way you want, but I personally think that they would have made much more than that, and think $200,000-$400,000 is a better estimate.

If I were Dell, I wouldn’t want HP knowing any of this, because HP might smarten up and start using Twitter.  Dell certainly has the technical savvy to use another URL shortener like tinyurl.com and just measure the incoming Twitter traffic through their web logs.  Fortunately for Dell, HP has a pitiful Twitter presence, which is embarrassing to stockholders like myself, but that’s a blog entry for another time.  If someone at HP was smart, and realized that Dell could make hundreds of thousands on a single tweet, they might invest some time and money in a Twitter strategy.

Should you be using bit.ly for your company?  Are you giving competitors useful information?

• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091111-011039
• http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/10/BU911AI6K0.DTL&type=tech
• http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/11/09/allen-blue-twitter-and-linkedin-go-together-like-peanut-butter-and-chocolate/

Essentially, LinkedIn allows you to cross-post status updates to Twitter.  This capability has been available for a long time through some free online utilities like ping.fm, so it isn’t really earth shattering.

There are a few problems in the way LinkedIn does status updates that many people don’t realize:

• It will only remember the LAST update by each person
• It will only show 3 updates from your connections, and then if you click to “Show more…”, it will only show the last 10 updates
• There is no way to see other previous updates

LinkedIn could really give you a powerful feature if you could rate other people’s updates.  That way, each day you could just see the highest rated updates from your connections, and just see the most useful comments of the day, week, or month, as voted by your connections, who really are your peers.

They could expand the feature to allow you to also see

• highly rated status updates from 2^nd and 3^rd level connections
• highest rated status updates from anyone on LinkedIn, regardless of whether they are in your network

This isn’t that complicated to implement, and I promise you that someday LinkedIn and Twitter (or someone else) will have this feature.  Then they’ll really have a time saving, powerful feature to brag about.

What other features would you like to see?

God Bless the country that allows me to freely speak my mind about this.  Freedom wasn’t free.  Thank you, Veterans.

To see only status updates on Facebook:

• In the upper left menu, under the Facebook logo, at the bottom, click More (in blue)
• Drag “Status Updates” to the top of the list.
• Click on it.

Aaaaaaaahhhhh.

Quick video actually shows you….

NOTE – I just discovered that this feature only allow you to see someone’s LAST status update (discovered 10/29/09).  Wow, Facebook makes this difficult.

If you go to someone’s Twitter page, you can now mark them as a spammer (under block xxxxxxxxxx)

Details, blog sized:

Here are the most annoying scenarios:

1) you follow someone, and they send you multiple DMs (Direct Messages) about

• a product they’re selling
• the fact that you have to read their blog
• something else you don’t want that wastes your time and could make them money

2) someone sends an @reply with your name in it, so you see it, but it is clearly directed to a bunch of people for no reason other than to get your attention and sell you something.  But

• you don’t know them
• you wouldn’t want to know them
• and if you go to their page, and that’s ALL they ever tweet about.

In the past, you could block them (on the right of their Twitter page under Actions), but there was no way to really feel like you were solving the problem.  You could solve it for yourself, but you couldn’t prevent these annoying gnats from bothering other people, and others couldn’t help to keep them away from you.

Boom – finally, Twitter has added a

“report RickieAuten for spam”

button.  It is located on someone’s Twitter page, on the right hand side, under Actions, and under the “block RickieAuten” button.  For instance, if you go to http://twitter.com/RickieAuten you can see that this is just a spammer trying to sell a product.  Dirtbag has ZERO followers and is following NO ONE, but sends @replies about his product.  On the right, under Actions, you can now report him for spam.  Bye, Rickie, you little pain in the ass gnat.

I just saw it for the first time today, (and I was blocking spammers last night, so it’s the first time it showed up for me), so I’m not sure what Twitter is going to do with it.  Hopefully, it means that Twitter will now use a counter to determine that a bunch of us considered someone a spammer, and Twitter will remove them.  It does give you a message that says “Reporting for spam will block and flag RickieAuten for review”.  OK.

Rickie should be flagged AND flogged.

If Twitter was really smart, they’d allow us to set a counter, so that we could say that we don’t want to follow someone or receive @replies from someone with more than 5 of these “report xxxxx for spam” clicks, for instance.  We could each decide if 5 is the right number, since some scumbags will certainly gang up and do this to their competitor’s accounts just to make their competitors look like spammers.  That’s a problem Twitter will have to solve down the road.

Now I have to decide whether to mark people as spammers if they send me a DM about

• joining their mafia family
• the TrueTwit validation service, which is spam of another kind

Hope this helps, and for those of you in the mafia, I’m not scared.