Follow up to earlier post, the winning bid to lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett was $1,500,100. The money goes to benefit the Glide Foundation. Read the full story at Reuters.

Beyond the Recession: Surviving on Main Street

Hosted by Wall Street Journal and WCBS Business Reporter Joe Connolly, the WCBS Small Business Breakfast has become the meeting place for business owners and operators. Come network, hear how others are Surviving on Main Street. Ask questions, take notes, and bring business cards.

WHEN:
Wednesday, June 16th – Doors open for networking at 7:30a.
Speaking program begins at 8:30a.

WHERE:
Stamford Hilton
One Stamford Place
Stamford, CT 06902

Ticket Price: $25

Wendy Caplan-Carroll of Constant Contact
Despite Facebook and Twitter, email is still the killer app and Wendy will speak on “the power of email marketing” and tell us what most people don’t realize about permission based marketing, ways to get feedback from recipients, segmenting lists, what to write – and what not to write and new ways to marry your emails with your social networking.

Joshua Crandall, founder of Clever Commute on Metro North
Josh left a corporate job and founded the popular and fast growing social network business that allows fellow riders to ease and speed each others’ commutes. Josh is a pioneer in peer to peer networks and mobile business. Small businesses are learning new ways to do very effective targeted advertising on clever commute alerts. He will also tell us what small businesses need to know to get ready for mobile sales.

David Lewis, President of OperationsInc Human Resources Outsourcing and Consulting of Stamford
David will speak about “small business success on a budget.” David started OperationsInc in his home in 2001. Now he offers his employees flex time, telecommuting and strong benefits. He has discovered news ways of networking and selling and even raised rates during the recession. He uses technology and smarts to generate PR like the big guys and generates 4 different newsletters a month.

Irv Cohen, President of American International Lifestyles
Irv has opened 4 new Apogee Pilates and wellness centers in White Plains, Bedford Hills and Manahttan. Irv is a graduate of Brooklyn College and Pace University, and he is a CPA. He was formerly on Wall Street and says “the fitness industry is not a niche – it’s a wave.” He’ll speak on how to find new business opportunities in the wellness industry and on how to grow business while the economy is coming out of a recession.

Mitchell Grossinger Etess, CEO of Mohegan Sun
Mitchell will speak on the future of discretionary spending. He will give us marketing ideas for small businesses based on what works for Mohegan Sun with a huge marketing budget. Mitchell understands smaller businesses. He grew up on the grounds of Grossinger’s Hotel, which was his family’s business, where he worked in virtually every capacity, before attending Columbia University and going on to work for Donald Trump and becoming CEO of Mohegan Sun.

For tickets call 914.495.3420 or click here to buy online.

When I saw this my inner geek lit up and I had to share here. An infograph of the 140 most influential people on twitter, sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity. Additionally, you can see the first tweet of each user on the map. To see exactly how stunningly beautiful this visualization map is, click here to download the entire version (PDF).

The smart folks at iA analyzed the data from their own Web Trend Engine, the Max Planck Institute (PDF), and Twitter directly.

It is just pretty damn cool.

Apparently, so have you.

According to a new Pew Research Center study Reputation Management and Social Media, 57% of adult internet users in the United States said they have entered their name into a search engine to assess their digital reputation. This is up from 47% in 2006 when the survey was last conducted.

Given the recent hoopla around Facebook privacy, it is no surprise people are concern over their online reputations, including young people contrary to popular belief (71% of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed their privacy settings to limit what they share with others).

The Pew Research Center study, which took place by phone between August 18 and September 14, sampled 2,253 adults 18 and older. You can download the full report here.

Without getting entrenched in the politics of what is undoubtedly one of the worst environmental disasters in US history, the fact that millions of gallons of crude oil is still spewing into the Gulf of Mexico more than a month after the oil rig explosion seems obscenely absurd. People tune in to their news source expecting to hear that the oil leak is at least contained but even now it appears the latest attempt by British Petroleum has failed to have an impact.

It is this absurdity that has given rise to a fake BP Public Relations Twitter account @BPGlobalPR that tweets satirical sentiments like: “Sadly we can no longer certify our oil as Dolphin Safe.”

The account’s owner remains anonymous (for now) though “he” recently had an interview with Brenna Ehrlich of Mashable. At the time of this writing @BPGlobalPR has collected over 84,000 followers since the first tweet on 5/19/10. That’s more than 10 times the followers of BP’s official Twitter account @BP_America which has about 8,100 followers and twice the tweets. It is really no surprise that more people would rather laugh than cry (so to speak). And as every good marketer knows, humor is a powerful memory hook.

Some people may feel that a parody of this kind is in bad taste but apparently BP doesn’t think so given they have not asked Twitter to take down the account (see this AdAge article); a smart move on BP’s part as they have enough to worry about without adding Twitter to the list.

The reason I write this post at all is that both BP and the fake BP make good use of the social network to address their respective audiences. For one it is about damage control and for the other it is about cause awareness (albeit in a droll sort of way not unlike John Stewart).

For the record, sales of the $25 BP Cares T-shirts being promoted on the fake BP Twitter feed actually goes toward the Gulf Restoration Network.