My new business cards, designed by Snow Powers at Moo.com

Moo.com is hosting a contest, giving away $250,000 worth of design consultation. It’s called The Business Card Project. With six designers working on the project, they’ve already begun to make progress on redesigning business cards for all types of companies. They’re giving away 500 sets redesigned business cards! If you’ve got a card that needs help, apply now. And if you love my new card design, rate it here to put it in the running for the People’s Choice Award!

Some of you may already know that I’m a contest junkie — I’ve recently won a SxSW video contest, Real Housewives Foursquare swag,  and the John Caples Student Campaign of the Year Award. So when I saw that Moo.com, my favorite printing company, was giving away design consultations and free 100-pack minicards (or 50-pack business cards), I had to enter.

As you can see from the photo above, the cards turned out BEAUTIFUL. They capture everything about me that I want to exude: my love of orange, my geeky side and the fact that my last name is a BIRD, people!

Beforehand, my cards weren’t horrible, but they weren’t at their best, either. I ordered my first pack of minicards early last year and was so excited that I blogged about them (see here). The second order came late last year when I stocked up on a 400-pack. Here’s what they currently look like:

My old business cards, designed by me, featuring photos taken by me.

Not so bad, right? But when you compare the two designs, the new cards shine like gold!

I have to give mad props to the designer of my new cards, Snow White Powers.

Snow Powers, graphic designer working on The Business Card Project at the Moo.com office in Providence, Rhode Island. Nice work space, Snow!

Snow has been drawing since she was 10 years old and has always been interested in all types of art, but she’s been focusing on designing and illustrating for the past four years. She just graduated from Washington University in St. Louis this past summer with a degree in Communication Design. She just recently moved to Providence, Rhode Island to work as a graphic designer on The Business Card Project with Moo.com.

I asked Snow for the skivvy on life at Moo. I’m a big fan, what can I say? She gave me some insider information on the design team. She says they “request to get more string cheese in our fridge here every Friday as our daily snack at work. Once the giant pack of 50 string cheeses gets here, we eat all of it by the end of the day. We love string cheese.” Gotta love cheese, and you gotta love that team spirit.

As you can see from the cards at the top of this post, Snow has a great eye for design. But more importantly, I can vouch for her amazing knack for designing to specs. I told her my favorite color was orange, that I’d like to incorporate a QR code and some minimalist contact details along with a photo, and she ran with it, incorporating my social side the whole way through.

Here’s a sound bite from Snow on the design process:

“What I enjoyed most is being able to work with the fun style of your picture as well as incorporating orange, a color that I wouldn’t ever usually touch, believe it or not. I wanted a card that would be clever and reflective of your knowledge of social networking and technology, so the first thing that came to mind for me was chattering birds on a telephone wire. It worked perfect for me to include “swallows.”

A difficult part was consolidating a ton of information into a very small card and still making it look sleek and easy to read… this was the first mini-card redesign that I have done and it’s difficult to take the same amount of info that is already hard to fit on your standard sized-card and shrink it to half its size.”

Thank you to Snow Powers and Moo.com for doing such an amazing job with the redesign of my business cards. They look amazing.

To all the readers out there, if you’re business cards are needing a bit of help, I highly recommend Moo.com’s services. Apply now for their Business Card Project contest! If you don’t make the cut, definitely check out their site and consider designing your own cards on their platform. And don’t forget to rate my new card!

A while back, I wrote a post called Brands on Foursquare. It seems to have served the community well, so I decided to cover one of Foursquare’s top competitors, as well, Gowalla.

While at SxSWi 2010, there was an all-out battle between Foursquare and Gowalla. I’ll tell you straight out that I’m a huge Foursquare fan. I’m such a fan that despite all of the promotions that Gowalla ran at SxSW, I vowed to only check in via Foursquare the entire time. As of writing this post, I have 57 badges and over 1,200 checkins logged on Foursquare.

As a professional in the social media space, though, I have to draw the line. I finally downloaded the Gowalla iPhone app today and logged my first check in. There’s no return from here. Once I join a social platform, I’m in testing mode. So, folks, here it goes.

For my first research endeavor, I will curate a list of brands with brand pages on Gowalla. Enjoy and let me know if there are any missing in the list below. Thanks!

Austin 360

Austin American-Statesman

Chalkbot

CNN Money

Fort Worth, Texas

Livestrong

Longboards Ice Cream

National Geographic

Nets Basketball

NYC Media

Scottsdale, Arizona

Sierra Club

Snow.com (Vail Resorts)

University of Oklahoma

USA Today

Washington Post

Woosh! It has been a crazy two weeks! Two weeks ago, I said goodbye to The New York Times, where I served as a social media consultant. The weekend following that, my Mom got married (re-married). And this week, I joined Mashable as a features editorial assistant, just a month after they celebrated the opening of their New York office.

I’m working with Managing Editor Sharon Feder on writing and editing supported features posts, while also collaborating with the entire features team: Josh Catone (features editor), Matt Silverman (associate features editor), Zachary Sniderman (features editorial assistant), Stephanie Marcus (features editorial assistant), and Amy-May Elliott (features writer).

Because Mashable is a small company, I’m excited to also have the opportunity to collaborate with everyone else as time goes by. Within the first week, I already feel like a part of the team. And if I had to sum up my first week in three words…

• Awesome: Lame word, I know. But it’s always my fall-back word to describe things that are… well… awesome.
• Inspiring: The company culture is open and encouraging. I feel inspired to create. It’s a great vibe.
• Busy: It’s a positive sign when a company isn’t afraid to throw you right in there. After a quick orientation on my first day, I edited a few posts. And by the end of the week, I was averaging three to four posts edited per day. And I even wrote two posts! Needless to say, there wasn’t a moment to spare. It’s a fast-paced place.

Special thanks to the Mashable team for welcoming me with open arms. Here’s to a budding career at one of the top blogs in the world!

SurprisedSXSW Goodies from the "How to Create a Viral Video" Panelists

My favorite panel at the 2010 SXSW Interactive Conference was “How to Create a Viral Video“, which featured Damian Kulash, frontman of OK Go, Margaret Gould Stewart of YouTube and Jason Wishnow, director of film and video at TED. The panelists introduced the secret ingredients (boobies and kitties) and took it a step further by creating an homage to the popular “Surprised Kitty” video. The video starred Damian Kulash of OK Go tickling the 700 panel attendees and was filmed by Jason Wishnow of TED. After creating the video, they announced the SurprisedSXSW video contest, in which audience members were challenged to create more homages to “Surprised Kitty”.

Parker Higgins, my buddy and co-worker at the time, and I decided to up the ante by creating three videos, chronicling the big elephants in the room of SxSW: hangovers, the need for energy and celebrities. The original “Surprised Kitty” video, the homage filmed during the panel, and our three entries are below. It all paid off! We won!

The prize packs came in the mail this week. Thanks to the panelists for the awesome prizes:

- YouTube tube  socks (compliments of Margaret Gould Stewart of YouTube)
- OK Go flipbook (compliments of Damian Kulash of OK Go)
- The Decembrists Here Come the Waves DVD (produced by Flux.net and compliments of Jonathan Wells of Flux.net)
- TED2009Global DVD Box Set (The complete archive of all 4 days, compliments of Jason Wishnow of TED)

1. 
   ferris_bueller_ i’ve said it before & i’ll say it again: life move’s pretty fast. you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. 08 May 2010 from web

Ferris Bueller, Jeanie Bueller, Cameron Frye, Sloane Peterson, Tom Bueller, Ed Rooney, Abe Froman, and the Chez Quis Maitre D’ made their debuts on Twitter this week, in what might be my favorite digital ode to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (one of my favorite 1980′s movies).

The impersonator(s) behind this account  completely reenacted the entire movie on Twitter, including Foursquare check-ins to pivotal locations, Twitpics and Yfrog images of crucial moments, and tweets between characters.

Sadly, the fun ended, with an oh-so appropriate tweet from Ferris:

1. 
   ferris_bueller_ You’re still here? It’s over. Go home…. Go. 08 May 2010 from Bad Kitty

A screenshot of Faisal Shahzad's image on NYTimes.com, as sourced from Orkut.com

The recent creation of Facebook Open Graph opened a whole new can of worms regarding privacy on social networks. Now more than ever, the world is all a-buzz about privacy. But what about privacy for criminal suspects?

Faisal Shahzad, the suspect who admitted to attempting to explode a bomb in Times Square on May 1st, has been pictured across multiple news sites. Most of the pictures being used to depict the suspect are from Orkut and Facebook, social networking sites that Mr. Shahzad maintained profiles on. From a quick search on both sites, I couldn’t seem to find his profiles. But somehow, news agencies have managed to locate his photos and post them alongside the latest headlines.

How could an individual with a plan to unleash bombs in Times Square leave his online social presence completely unprotected from the media? Was he oblivious to the fact that his photos might some day be shared on national television and across the web without his authorization after his attempts at mass destruction? Or did he actually unknowingly give authorization to both sites to share his content with the world? Were the privacy settings too difficult to understand?

Maybe it was just that the default settings said, “Yes! Please obliterate my right to privacy,” and Mr. Shahzad didn’t realize it. Whatever the reason, I am amused to see “Orkut.com” as the source of these photos.

What are your thoughts on news sites sourcing Orkut and Facebook for photos? Do you think there are any privacy implications?

An Email Campaign for "Company Following" on LinkedIn

LinkedIn, the business networking site with over 60 million professionals, is taking cues from Facebook fan pages with its new Company Following capabilities. Users opting to follow a company can see updates on new hires, open positions and company profile status updates. All of this information is found on the Companies homepage, which is similar to the Facebook Newsfeed.

The Companies Homepage at linkedin.com/companies

The Companies homepage includes a search bar for finding companies to follow,  a feed of recent updates for companies you follow, a list of companies that you may want to follow, a few ads served by LinkedIn, and a link to your company’s profile.

After a user opts to follow a company for the first time, LinkedIn sends an email (as pictured above) with a list of some of the most popular companies to follow, urging users to follow a few more companies. Kudos to the email marketing team on that timely delivery!

Tweetie 2 Teaser: Coming Soon! Twitter for iPhone

A recent update for the Tweetie 2 iPhone app teased that “Twitter for iPhone” is coming soon. Just last month, Twitter bought Atebits, the company behind Tweetie. Twitter CEO Evan Williams promised that Tweetie would not disappear, but that it would become the official Twitter client and be renamed Twitter for iPhone.

Well, folks, it looks like we’re one update away from seeing the app as “Twitter for iPhone”. Above are two screenshots from the slot machine game that appeared in the recent app update (2.1.2). After the lever was pulled and the three wheels stopped, the first message was “Play again “. The second lever pull locked in the correct code (every time) and read: “Tweetie will be Twitter for iPhone (look for the next app update)”.

If you have Tweetie ($2.99), go try it for yourself. If not, wait until the free version comes out!

P.S. Foursquare also tweeted, “The latest Tweetie-to-foursquare integration on iPhone is tighter than ever before. Get the latest Tweetie update when you get a chance!” Good to know! Thanks!

The Foursquare homepage highlights 10 brand pages, but there are plenty more!

With all of the exciting Foursquare partnerships that have been popping up, I decided to start maintaining a list of all of the brands that are utilizing Foursquare to engage users and distribute content. Below is a full list of brands that currently have brand pages.

987FM

Adobe

ARTINFO

AskMen.com

Bing

Bon Appetit Magazine

Bonnaroo

Bravo

C-Span

CNN

Crain’s Chicago

The Dew Tour

DonQ Rum

Dora the Explorer

The Expendables

Explore Chicago

Flavorpill

GOOD Magazine

Gossip Girl

Harvard University

Havaianas

Heavy Table

Helmut Lang

History Channel

How to Make it in America (HBO)

Huffington Post

IFC (Independent Film Channel)

Intel

The Learning Channel (TLC)

Live Nation

Louis Vuitton

Lucky Magazine

Manchester City Football Club

Marc Jacobs

Mashable

Metromix

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metro News (English) / Journal Metro (French)

MTV

National Wildlife Foundation

New York Magazine

The New York Times

The Real L Word

San Fran BART

The Seattle Times

SFGate.com

SF Giants

Six Flags

SPIN Magazine

Stanford University

Super Model Me

Syracuse University

Texas A&M University

The Tenth Inning (PBS documentary)

Thrillist

Time Out Chicago

Time Out New York

TODAY Show

TransLink

Valentine’s Day Movie (Warner Brothers)

VH1

VisitPA

Visit Bucks County PA

Visit Milwaukee

The Wall Street Journal

Zagat

If you know of any partnerships left off the list, please add them in the comments below, as the goal of this post is to keep the world informed of the great stuff that’s going on over at Foursquare! Cheers!

Bravo sent out special gift bags to the first few Foursquare users that unlocked the "Real Housewife" badge

On behalf of Bravo, Congrats on living the life of a Real Housewife and unlocking our badge on foursquare. We appreciate your “following Bravo” on foursquare and in thanks, we’ll be sending you a special gift bag.

That’s an excerpt from the official email that a Bravo representative sent to me and a handful of other users who were the first to unlock the “Real Housewife” badge on Foursquare. A few days after receiving the email and responding with my mailing address, a hefty package arrived at my door.

What was I expecting? A t-shirt. Maybe a notebook. Definitely a few pens. Nope! This was a serious swag bag. Bravo wasn’t playing around when they called it a “special” gift bag. The overnighted package included four Bravo-branded items: a tote, umbrella, t-shirt and flip video camera.

Wo, wo, wo. Hold the phone. A flip cam? Yes, you read that correctly. Bravo sent me a few cutesy items (tote, umbrella and t-shirt) and topped it off with a flip cam! Now that’s a REAL reward for unlocking a Foursquare badge. Thank you, Bravo! And Kudos to Foursquare for scoring such a fun partnership!

Related Article: Why is it called a Tennis Bracelet? (“Real Housewives” reference)