This is a guest post by my dear friend and cohort, Fred Campos. He and I have been learning and evolving in the world of Social Media together for quite a few years now. If you ever have the chance to hear him speak and tell this story you will be blow away. These days you can find Fred’s writings over at his blog about parenting: Daddy Got Custody.
I am a virtually perfect human being but for some reason I am missing the cooking gene. I have brought tears to my children’s eyes by botching macaroni and cheese, burned instant coffee, caused fires and minor explosion in our built-in kitchen microwave. Thankfully I married up the food chain and do life with a wonderful cook. Karen is an extremely educated elementary school teacher and alpha parent to our three children: Caitlyn age 13, Zachary who is eight, and our youngest boy, Daniel age two.
As a domestic goddess of three young children, my wife NEVER gets to sleep in on holidays, weekends, or pretty much never. So my first social media ROI story begins the night before Thanksgiving when my wife Karen asked me…
“When you wake up early to go workout, will you put the Thanksgiving turkey in the oven so that I could sleep in?”
Without giving any thought the magnitude of this request, I said “Sure just leave me a stick note with the temperature on it.” I’ve see the oven in the kitchen before, perhaps even cleaned it once or twice in my 14 years of living in the house, but I am certainly not familiar with the proper cooking temperature of “Tom” the Turkey.
Morning came and I awoke at 6:00a to see my wife Karen happily sleeping. This was her ONE day of the year to sleep in. No early kid activity Saturdays, no Sunday morning church services, not even Christmas day affords her any extra time to sleep in. This was the DAY! I of course was up early to renew my holiday workout vows, which I accomplish 12 times a year from New Year’s Day to Christmas. Today was Thanksgiving and I need additional justification to adding to my laptop working belly before the “big meal.” Besides I hadn’t been to 24 Hour Fitness since Halloween, it was time.
As I was preparing to walk out the door, I grabbed a beautiful looking dressed tray and ready to go bird out of the refrigerator and placed it gentling on the lower rack inside the oven. I located on the kitchen counter my requested sticky note which read “375.” Sure enough I found a nob on the oven that said “375” but I also found another nob that said “Off, Bake, Broil.” I looked back at the sticky note, it didn’t say “Bake or Broil.”
I tipped toed quietly into the bedroom where I found the love of my life sleeping soundly. I walked back into the kitchen thinking this was clearly a binary problem, a true 50/50 solution. I took a deep breathe, flipped the oven to “Broil” grabbed my cell phone and headed for the door to go work out.
At the time I was experimenting with Twitter not totally getting the concept of tweeting and following people. I texted a rather pathetic tweet, “Do you ‘Bake’ or ‘Broil’ a turkey?” It was 6:00a on Thanksgiving morning 2009, but within seconds I got…
“Bake.” “Bake.” “Bake” “You’re a moron!” “Bake” “Bake” “Bake” “You’ll burn the house down.” “Bake” “Bake” “Bake” “Wake up Karen.” “Stay out of the kitchen.” “Bake” “Bake” “Bake”
18 people from all over the world, whom I had never met, cared enough to tell me to “Bake” not “Broil” within 30 seconds of sending out that tweet. (By the way, I didn’t get one “Broil,” but did manage a few “colorful metaphors” about my cooking.)
This is the power of social media!
What was your first social media experience? How has social media help you in your day to day life? Remember there is more to Social Media than just business but then again, that is the kind that leads to business.