Nan Palmero, MBA

SXSW 2010 – DONE!

Well, @alanweinkrantz and I survived SXSW 2010 and produced an astounding 55 posts between us over the course of a week. It was fun, exciting, exhausting and there are stories I won’t write down. 🙂 Interested in recapping some of the fun, such as interviews with internet famous folks like Sloane Berrent (@sloane), Ramon De Leon (@ramon_deleon), Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver) and some of the good folks from Foursquare.com (@foursquare)? Hop over to the MySA site with the posts. Alan and I look forward to serving up more tasty content together, that is, if MySA.com permits!

Oh, and if you’re interested in just seeing the photos, hit up the SXSW Flickr Group.

Photo by San Antonio Wedding Photographer | Ashley Palmero!

How to Compel a Response…from @BrentSpiner

Marcus and I have been friends since the 90’s. Since Bill Clinton was President. Since Motorola introduced the StarTac. Since he chewed on my loaned pen (I didn’t take it back). Recently, I’ve been enjoying his tweets as he’s become really active on Twitter. Marcus is known as @mlnorvell4 and recently he made it his mission to get a response from Brent Spiner – @brentspiner – of Star Trek and Independence Day fame. How would he do this? Tweet insane messages. It worked. Here are the high res JPG and PDF files for your humor. Keep it up, Marcus. Next target? @JimNorton Good luck, buddy.

UPDATE (2/26/2010): Marcus has been listed as The King of Celebrity Twitter Harassment by Asylum.com

I think this is what started it all…

Rules Are Ruining Your Life

WARNING: Don’t let your kids read this until they’re no longer living in your house.

Rules are helpful. They put order in our lives. They reduce risk and minimize variance. “I’m sorry, I can’t give you a free room, the rules don’t allow it.” In fact, I will enact rules to suit me and you likely do the same. At trade shows and conferences, I hate carrying the terrible and bulky marketing materials that the drones distribute. To ensure that I don’t have to bother, I carry an impossibly small bag that fits a few choice items and say “I’m sorry, I’m unable to carry anything larger than what can fit in this bag.” “Oh, of course, sir. Absolutely.” Rules can be established willy-nilly. Our society has built us to believe that if a rule exists, there must have been a far smarter person who developed the rule for a greater good. Although this may be true at times, I suggest that some many of these rules are ruining your life… well, at least your day, and that many of the people that developed many of the stupid rules ranged between myopic and mouth breathing fools.

Today is the day you can break free from these chains. Do you want three breakfast coupons during your stay, but your room doesn’t include them? Ask for them. And be specific about the exact number you want! Do you need to get an exception to a minimum seating rule because your group has no budget and can’t pay out of pocket? Ask specifically for an exception. I constantly hear, “but the rules RIGHT THERE say you CAN’T do that!” I don’t care. At the end of the day, I’m going to ask for what I want and need, then let the person receiving my request make a judgment call on whether my personalized request will be granted. But what happens if they say “no?” *GASP* You now have two choices. Option #1 – Say “thank you” and carry on. Option #2 – When a “no” is unacceptable, do what the kids do…ask dad. Or in this case, just ask someone else who has the authority to give you the answer you want and need.

It’s a new year, go ask for an exception this week and remember that it doesn’t always work. As I like to say: You win some, you win some later.

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik

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Swinging to the Next Vine

Whether you choose to listen to music, read books and blogs or just hang out with friends, the story remains the same: it’s the journey and the experience that you should enjoy the most. Interestingly, the older I get, the more I see this and the more I’m also reaching for the next goal. It’s an interesting split trying to appreciate the day to day as we’re driven by the upcoming accomplishment. Not surprisingly, though, once we get there, we feel a sense of relief followed, at least by me, with a sense of concern. I begin to ask “what’s next?” I’m already looking for the next opportunity to move the ball forward, which can become frustrating, scary and exciting all at the same time. Unfortunately, at these moments, when I’m trying to figure out which vine I want to swing to next, I end up missing out on the day to day.

So, I turn to you, my friendly reader. What do you do to ensure that you don’t miss the fun moments along the way when you’re too busy moving to the next adventure to pay attention to the here and now? Do you have a support system that disconnects you from time to time from your future endeavors to help you celebrate the day? Do you mentally make the leap? Share with us in the comments!

Photo: Tarzan by Disney

Send Ashley & Nan Away to Thailand

@ashleypalmero and I were selected as one of five couples entered for a chance to win a trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand via The Ultimate Thailand Explorers contest. You can help! All you need to do is register, login and vote for us. Are you an overachiever? Well, you can vote every 24 hours!

Head over to http://bit.ly/nanash to get started.
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I want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to vote for us. This will be a life changing event for Ashley and I and you’ll have helped make it happen, for that, we are truly grateful.

Cheers,
Nan

WES2009: All They Can Say is No! – The Story of Nan

Written by my friend Drip at Themes4bb.com

I am here to tell you that RIM did a bang up job on the BlackBerry WES party. With the drinks flying and the music of Will.I.am blaring, you can imagine the stories would be flying. Yeah, I’ll say. But I am not here to talk about this girl dancing. (See pic above) I am here to talk about a man and a video. Nan Palmero is one of the best guys you will meet. We share alot of the same business philosophies and zeal for life.. Now with all that being said, why is he meriting his own post? Him and I were chatting and raving about the good energy that was in the room tonight. Here is how I remember the conversation.

Nan ” Will I am is putting on quite the show”

Me: “Yeah man. Although I do miss Fergie.”

Nan:” You know, I got this press pass and I wanna see how far this will get me. I am gonna try and get on stage.””

Me: “Never gonna happen. (Although in my mind I’m thinking – this dude has balls the size of church bells)

Nan: “Why not? I’m going up. I will probably get shut down but why not!”

Me: (thinking to myself. Dude you’re done. I got $20 on the big Jesse “the Body” Ventura grabbing him by his throat.) Alright go!

Next thing I know, he is walking toward the stage. I grab our trusty camera and I see him talking to the stage bouncer (FAIL) The bouncer looks at him and says “go ahead.” And he did and he never looked back. (Smart move) Now, I am mentally navigating him on where he should go. He is first stopping at the drummer. He is taking pure video and good quality. Ok, it’s been fun right? Shows over. I mean he can’t be actually thinking about going to film Will.i.am right? Oh snap! He walks over to Will and starts filming him. Will looks at him and gets back to business on the turntables. Nan tells him to keep working. At this point, I see the po-po waiting for Nan to come off the stage because they got a special prize for him. They stop him and completely are ready to yank him and his video but somehow he wiggles his way out of their midst. He looks at me and I am rooting for him like he is a special olympic hurdler winning his first goal. He is noyt interested in my salutations. He is beelined for the door. All he says is, Chad I gotta go. Follow me to the door. Now, I realize what is going on. He can’t stop or they may strip him for his film. I am happy to say he is a free man and I have the video of his stage presence with Will i am.

Buy a Birthday BMW M5 for @nanpalmero #BMWFund

It all started this morning with a fun tweet by @alanweinkrantz who decided to raise funds to buy me a BMW M5 for my birthday. Since Alan is my friend and I want to honor his request and those that have been tweeting about it since, I’ve set up a Paypal button here to make contributions. So go crazy, donate a nickel and get one other person to do it and have them do the same. Let’s see how far we can take this. Maybe my 30th birthday will be the one where Twitter bought me a new car…or not. But nonetheless, it’ll be fun to see how far it goes. Let’s swing for the fences and see what’s possible.

UPDATE: The official BMW blogger, Thomas Gigold aka @gigold for the 2009 IAA Frankfurt Auto Show (@iaablog) has written about this fund raiser in German and English.

Imagine Fellowship – Land @mashable in 3 Steps

How we landed our church on @mashable

Last night, I was watching tv, scanning my tweetdeck and I see this:

@mashable talks about imagine fellowship — @mashable tweets about imagine fellowship

We got our church, Imagine Fellowship, tweeted about by @mashable! Yes, when @mashable says something about you, your site gets clobbered (ours crashed, temporarily – thank you Pete Cashmore + Friends!). Tonight, a few of the leaders from the Imagine Fellowship had a conversation about how we got Imagine there in the first place. In fact, the process was surprisingly simple.

We started with stimulus. There was another church that was testing twitter out in their church. I read about it on Church Marketing Sucks and thought it was a great idea.
I proposed the idea to Pastor Kevin Joyce (@kevj) who agreed the idea was brilliant. He wanted to do twitter on screen the next day. Not possible, we didn’t have any followers, it’d have to wait a week.
Imagine Fellowship does twitter weekly. At first it is there to only show people tweeting from the audience, then it grows into @kevj asking questions and having people answer on the screen. Next, we start live tweeting the sermons so people outside of the four walls of the church can attend. Some people even attend church through their phone.
Imagine Fellowship receives it’s first piece of coverage from @roybragg in the San Antonio Express News aka @mysa. A huge win for us. How’d we do this? We told @roybragg about the story and he liked it.
K-Love does a national piece on Imagine Fellowship talking about our use of twitter in church. How’d we do this? We sent a tip in through the news section of the page.
Outreach magazine, a large and influential Christian magazine recognizes Imagine Fellowship and our use of twitter as one of the trends reshaping the American Church. Outreach found us via the San Antonio Express News and K-Love.
@mashable tweets about Imagine Fellowship uses twitter at church. Amazing! How did that happen? One guess – submit a tip page.

Do you see a theme developing? If not, let me spell it out for you:

Find a cool idea and apply it
Contact the media
Repeat and think bigger

If you’re scared and don’t think you can do it, check out this video from Cameron Herold to get you fired up. Watch the video, do something cool and pick up the phone – GO! Remember, pitching the media is like asking a girl out, she might say no, but you’ve got to swing to hit.