After trekking back from Keuka Lake to Buffalo, NY – We finished our preparations and packed up for our ‘All-You-Can-Jet’ adventure.  We caught a 5:30am ride to BUF and arrived at JFK by 8:00am.

I caught up with Morgan Johnston, Greg Krause, and Matt McCall; friends from last years http://www.twelvehoursinacity.com project.

JetBlue threw a nice party in T-5, with plenty of sweet #AYCJ shwag for all the jetters in attendance. Dunkin Donuts provided free coffee and donuts for people to socialize over. The New York Jets ‘Flight Crew’ also stopped by to entertain the masses and provide some excellent photo ops.

Marty St. George stirred up the party when he announced a new plane in the jetBlue fleet named “All-Blue-Can-Jet” which features a new livery design.

After catching up on some e-mail and developing some quick bug fixes for http://www.netsetjet.com. Amber and I parted with our #AYCJ friends and headed for Meg’s house in Brooklyn/Queens.

At the t-5 taxi terminal, our driver ended up in a screaming match with the Port Authority officer.  The confrontation was resolved quickly as our driver sped off screaming obscenities with us in the back preparing for the worse.  However, our travelers luck held strong and we made it to Queens without further incident.

We hung out on a stoop in  Ridgewood/Bushwick waiting for Meg to show up.  Then we took a nap and prepared for this evenings festivities.  Catching up with old friends and trying to sneak in a photo shoot if I can find a model and the time.

Please take a moment to write a comment about this post if you enjoyed it, let me know what type of photos you’d like to see more of on the rest of the trip.

Safe Travels,

Clark

This morning I was invited to talk with Bridget and Mike on their show Good Morning Western New York about my All-You-Can-Jet plans for 2010.  It was exciting because I’ve spent the last few days planning and hacking on a new community site for my fellow All You Can Jet travelers.

Sharing Stories:

Last year, I was lucky and was able to tell my story in a BIG way.  Sharing my content and images through a blog and making over 30 media appearances in major publications around the globe.  It was fun, it was exciting, it was selfish.

One of the things that bothered me through out the trip last year was the fact that our “party to-go” marathon around the US received a ton of media coverage and that altruistic projects like Greg Krause’s 30dayonjetblue.com ended up as a foot note in the concluding paragraphs.  It was an interesting problem, how could I solve it?

By Creating a community!

I spoke at the JetBlue Executive Leadership Conference at West Point last year and told them; next year build the scaffold, the community will develop around it organically.

I believe they did a good job using the tools that they were able to use (as a corporation with a legal department and communications guidelines, I’m sure they were somewhat limited by the liability openness exposes the brand to [remember the skittles fiasco]).  I believe that Morgan Johnston and the JetBlue Communications team have done incredible things with their twitter community, facebook pages, blog, and flickr pool.  They really use those channels to their fullest and have created the playbook that other businesses try and replicate.  But, a community of loosely coupled travellers, criss-crossing the western hemisphere, in real time; need more connectivity, more openness, and they need it aggregated in one place.

What AllYouCanJetwork.com NetSetJet.com brings to the table:

So this year, lets build a thriving and interactive community of jet-setters based around a portal.

Enter All You Can Jetwork NetSetJet.com — a community site for everyone to enjoy this culture phenomenon.

Implemented Features:

• Live Twitter feed of #AYCJ
• Community Forum
• Flickr Integration – Grabs photos tagged AYCJ
• AYCJ Community Blog Aggregator (Contact me to have your blog added to our feeds)

Features coming soon

• User Profiles
  • Website URL
  • Foursquare URL (Used to populate our map)
  • Facebook URL
  • Twitter Handle
  • CouchSurfer URL
• Foursquare/Google Maps Mash-up – Showing our users locations around the US! (Find out which other AYCJ’ers are in the same city as you)
• Community Wiki – Share tips on travelling and list cool places to visit in all the AYCJ cities!
• Live Twitter Feed of @jetblue/aycj
• OAuth Integration: Log-in using twitter or facebook to authenticate.

What can you do?

Share stories, images, video, and make new friends.  The spirit of AYCJ is laced with adventure, so take the plunge! Visit http://www.allyoucanjetwork.com and register.  The team and I hope to have the rest of our feature set developed in this next week.  We want to keep refining the experience and adding fun ideas to the project throughout the month of September.

Leave a comment and give us your ideas!

Last year around this time, I was building a website and a facebook page for a little project you may have heard about called Twelve Hours in a City.  It was a great trip, I flew around the country for 31 Days on the All-You-Can-Jet Pass from jetBlue.  It was hard work, 20 hour days – shooting, editing, handling media requests, publishing content to our fans and followers; I was proud of what we accomplished and excited to experience so much in such a short time.  However, I believe the trip strayed from my original intentions, my goals were to photograph different people and cities, learn about their cultures, and document a moment in American History.  So after a year of soul searching, I decided that I wasn’t going to repeat last years marathon endeavor.

So what’s on the agenda for AYCJ 2010?

This year has been about personal growth,  I’ve spent the last 12 months building a photography business.  I focus mostly on portraits and events in my business, but I also had a wonderfully informative 3-month internship with Rhea Anna a national level commercial shooter.   My experience this year has really enforced two things, 1) Photography is in the middle of a huge paradigm shift and it scares photographers to death and 2) I still have a ton to learn about the art form of photography and the science of running a successful  business.

I believe that I can use my 2010 AYCJ pass to help show my peers the light at the end of the tunnel while developing my skill sets.  I have recently been listed as a “Recommend Speaker” by the American Society of Media Photographers for my talk on Using Social Media to build your Business.  ASMP has chapters in almost every major city in the United States and those chapters all have incredibly talented photographers.

The plan is pretty simple:

1. I find chapters that want to learn more about Social Media (I can fly there for free!)
2. They agree to host me while I’m in their city (Food and Accommodations… I’ll sleep on floors and eat Ramen though – no worries!)
3. They peer me with a photographer for a shoot during my stay (so I can work on my skills and create interesting content for my readers — that’s you!)
4. I promote my talk using my network (Hopefully, bringing some new faces in to the chapter.)
5. I give a talk to their chapter (They learn how to build relationships with clients using Social Media Tools.)
6. Chapter passes the hat (This dude has fixed costs to cover, I usually charge $500-$1,000 for an hour long talk to a chapter)
7. I take the images and lessons learned from the day and post them on this blog and share them with my readers (My mentor for the day gets to show his work to my 3,000 fans!)

What will you talk about?

1. How we achieved brand recognition during Twelve Hours in a City (We also maxed out at around 3,500 fans)
2. Best Practices for Twitter and Facebook
3. The Grammar of Twitter
4. Social Networking Mores
5. Strategies for engaging fans and building your base
6. How to build from your existing mailing lists
7. Along with a few funny anecdotes from the First Project

It will be a revised version of my Social Media for Photographer’s talk, it has received great reviews from attendees.

How can I book you to speak for free in my city?

1. Live in an AYCJ city or be prepared to pick me/drop me off in one (I’m talking to you Boulder, CO!)
2. Book a space for an hour and a half, some evening between Sept 7 – Oct 6 (Projector and Project-able Surface is a must!)
3. Actively promote my talk (I’d much rather speak to 100 people than 10; You can charge people to raise money for your group — I’ll promote it using my networks too)
4. Agree to Pick me up from the Airport, Feed Me, Give me a Couch to crash on, and most importantly drop me off at the Airport on-time for my flight.
5. (Optionally) Find me a photographer and/or models to work with.
6. E-mail Me (clark@clarkdever.com) or call me (716.222.0237) to provide me with the details of what you’ve got to offer and confirm my availability.

How can I follow along on your adventures this year?

1. Compiled content will be released in blog posts – so subscribe to my RSS feed.
2. There’s always @clarkdever on twitter (this is the most unfiltered feed).
3. I’ll be announcing my talks, travel dates, and photos through my fan page on facebook.
4. I’ll be releasing images through my flickr account.
5. I’ll be releasing video through my youtube account.

We don’t have an ASMP Chapter, but we’re photographers interested in Social Media

Cool with me, you should start an ASMP Chapter; but if you have a Meetup Group, PPA Chapter, NPA Chapter, etc – I’d still be happy to talk to you if you can meet the requirements above.

I’m not a photographer, but my professional group would love to have you talk.

That’s fine, I’m more than happy to talk to other business/regional groups – the practices I teach work for any small business.  You just have to follow my conditions above, but you can substitute #5 for splitting the profits on the talk with me.  Call me to iron out the details – (716) 222-0237

I don’t care about learning social media, I just want to hear about your first trip!

Fine, I can talk to you and your friends for an hour retelling the real antics of  my first debaucherous mission around the US.  Get me a projector, buy me some beer, and plan a party.  I’ll bring a laptop full of images and enough drunken hilarity to make it worth your time.  Just name the city and the date, bonus points if you find a good photographer to come shoot with me during the day, super bonus points if you are a good photographer and we party at your studio… with models.   E-mail Me (clark@clarkdever.com) or call me (716.222.0237) to provide me with the details of what you’ve got to offer and confirm my availability.

Twelve Hours in a City Season 1 Recap from nathan m peracciny on Vimeo.

That’s it for right now… stay tuned for more details soon!

Check out my buddy Greg’s project 30 Days on jetBlue – I will be donating some of my proceeds to his parents school in Zambia. Check out his family’s not-for-profit Zambia Tomorrow and donate now.

What is Twitter, Who started it, and Why?:

Twitter was started by a guy named Evan Williams (@ev) as a way for people to update their status. Some of you non-nerds may think that facebook came up with the status idea, however, ever since time in memorial; Nerds have been broadcasting their status. From .plan files on unix shells, to /away messages on IRC, and then “Away” messages on AIM, every time a new communication medium is created nerds figure out a way to update their friends on what they’re doing. With the growing prevalence of cell phones it was just a natural evolution for nerds to update their status via Short Message Service(SMS) and want it to propagate to all of their Points-of-presence. After all, according to Wikipedia “SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones”. So Twitter is the convergence of the nerds need for statusing, saturation of cell phones, and the open protocols of the internet. Basically, @ev and his team of hackers wrote a little app that took SMS data and published it in a “micro-blog” on the web. The reason that tweets (The nomenclature used for twitter posts) are limited to 140 characters is due to the SMS standard being restricted to that length.

What can I do with it?

You can use the tool in several different ways; Twitter is part Hive-mind, part global consciousness, part blog, part marketing tool, part instantaneous telepresence, part flashmob generator, and last but not least a nifty way to synchronize your status on your social networks.

Hive-mind is the concept that none of us are as smart as all of us. If you post a question on twitter and tag it properly, there is a good chance that you will get a response. Even if you don’t post a question, if you use some of the twitter search tools you will find tons of leads that will point you in the right direction.

Global consciousness is similar to the idea of a hive-mind, but it has more to do with awareness. Twitter has users all over the world and there are tools that will automatically translate their posts for you and translate your responses back to them. The staccato nature of twitter posts leads people to speak concisely and directly, a side effect of this is that messages tend to be easier to translate. The asymmetrical nature of twitter allows for interesting dynamics, you can follow anyone you wish who has an account. They get notification when you do and get to decide if they wish to follow you back. Twitter gives you access to some of the biggest influencers in the world. I follow a plethora of technologists/futurists, the dalai lama, lance armstrong, tony hawk, levar burton, and kevin smith. Interestingly enough some of them follow me too, on a theoretical level this means that my reflection on a subject could influence the dalai lama’s view of our existence… neat, huh?

I originally joined Twitter in mid-2008, right before I left for Arizona to travel back to New York. I used it to micro-blog my progress across the United States. I didn’t know if I would have reliable internet access, but I wanted to be able to update my family and friends and allow them to know where I was at fairly regular intervals. With twitter I could type a message up via SMS and even if I didn’t have cell phone reception at the time I could rest easy, knowing that it would be beamed to my account as soon as I had the slightest hint of cell phone reception. Since then, I have used it mainly as a way to document and journal interesting events as they happened, so that I could reflect on them later or share them with friends in real-time.

You can also use twitter as a marketing tool. As I continue to develop my Photography, I seek both models and feedback from my fellows. I can tag a tweet with the word #photo or #photography and it instantly becomes accessible to the thousands of photographers around the world.

Twitter is a stream of data, you choose how much of the flow you want to consume by carefully selecting who you follow. Every second of every day, hundreds of thousand users are adding tweets to the unimaginable choir that is the twitterstream. Many of them tag their tweets so they can be more easily filtered out of the noise and heard by those who are interested in the associated topic. When Continental Flight 3407 crashed in Clarence, NY (15 minutes from my house) the twitterstream provided an immense amount of data, within a few hours I had links to youtube videos from the scene, tons of photos on flickr, analysis of the crash from other pilots, even the ATC radio traffic in mp3 form from a local Hammer. All I had to do was search for #3407, #Continental, #BuffaloCrash and a few other tags. Twitter provides you a rich source of data from anywhere in the world at any given time.

Another powerful feature is it’s ability to generate “FlashMobs”, unrelated or loosely tied affinity groups that suddenly appear at a location. An example of this is two days ago when Levar Burton invited his followers to meet him for a beer in Toronto. If I had a car at that moment, I would have raced across the border to share a drink with Mr. Reading-Rainbow-LaForge himself.

Lastly, if you’re not interested in the consciousness, the celebrity, or the networking aspects of the application; you can use it for it’s original purpose… To update all your status notifications! There are plugins for just about every social networking site, blogs, and instant messaging clients that will allow you to automatically synchronize your status messages from your twitterstream.

How do I get started ?

1. The first thing you need to do is go to: http://www.twitter.com and sign up for an account.
2. Then I recommend setting up your mobile device and adding the twitter SMS number to your contacts (40404)
3. Grab a twitter client, I highly recommend Tweetdeck: http://www.tweetdeck.com
4. Tweet your first message to the twitterstream
5. Next start following me by going to http://twitter.com/clarkdever
6. Then use Twitter’s tools to find other contacts you might know: http://twitter.com/invitations
7. Now might also be a good time to google for plugins for twitter and social networks
8. Lastly, if you’re looking to find other random local people (say for marketing purposes) I recommend the following googlehack: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com+”Location+Buffalo,NY”+OR+”Location+Buffalo” (Obviously, replacing the city with your own).

Twitter’s Grammar

It’s up to you to decide how you’re going to use twitter. I’ll leave you with a few twitterisms.

@username This is the way to publicly reply to a user
d username This is how to send a private message to a user (you can only DM people who are following you)
RT @username This is how you tell people that you are “Retweeting” what another said. Important Note:If you want to comment on their post, your comment goes before the RT (ie. Congratulations Dude! RT @clarkdever Check out this magazine article that I’m featured in: http://bit.ly/12hours)
#keyword This is how you identify the topic of your post, even if you didn’t say it directly (ie. “#Buffalo The 198 has an accident by the albright knox heading East Bound” Users who have searches for the word #buffalo would instantly get the traffic update.)

I also recommend using tools like http://bit.ly (which has the ability to tweet built in) to shorten long urls, so you can provide some information about the link you’re posting if it’s not apparent from the URL itself.

Please share this Primer and feel free to Copypasta it as your own note, all I ask is that you ask people to follow me if they join twitter!

Hope this was insightful and I’ll tweet you later,
Clark Dever
https://twitter.com/clarkdever