Here’s what I am looking forward to this month in Greenville:

Trey Pennington (@TreyPennington) has created the “Social Story Conference” which is going to be in Greenville, SC on September 24th. Trey, along with some other awesome people will be speaking on the subject of social media and social stories.  In short, how businesses can, and do, connect with people and form relationships, rather than force-feeding marketing down a one-way pipeline.

If you want to learn more about how to connect with your customer base, how to share in their lives, and how your products or services are part of their lives then you should consider going. If you are just wanting to continue to “broadcast” your information in the hopes that someone is going to listen, then avoid this conference by all means. Let’s face it, if you are constantly blathering on twitter about the $29.99 special your company offers without ever taking the time to follow your followers or listen to what they have to say, you are going to be unfollowed or filtered, just like the annoying car dealership commercials are muted by TV viewers.

The line up of speakers for Greenville is exciting! In addition to Trey Pennington, we’ll get to hear from and connect with Amber Osborne (@MissDestructo), Tim TV, Sean Buvala (@StoryTeller), Olivier Blanchard (@TheBrandBuilder), and Rick Murray… The emcee will be Phil Yanov (@ThinkHammer).

This is not about the social media platform, it is independent of the transport mechanism. It’s not about Twitter, or Facebook, it’s about connections.

More information is on the Social Story Conference website at http://socialstoryconference.com/ and you can also follow the hash tag of #SocialStory on Twitter.

Homeland Secure IT is proud to help sponsor this event and we can’t wait to see you there!

Tanya Thompson / @thompsontanya commented about a device on Twitter this morning that caught my eye… It is the Withings / @Withings Wi-Fi connected scale, which uses network connectivity to log and track your weight loss (or gain) among other things.

You can view your trends with a web interface, and access the data with your iPhone. I believe something like this really could encourage you to lose some weight. Recently there have been news stories which cite studies about weight loss and the results indicate that those who use internet weight tracking actually do lose more weight and manage to maintain that loss better than those who do not.

The thing that bothers me is that it will Tweet out your weight once a week to Twitter. All I could think was exactly what it would be tweeting when I stepped on it… Something like, “HELP ME! This fat guy is smushing me!” is probably what it would have to say about me! Still, it is an interesting gadget and I would love to have it. Who knows, maybe I will order one. Follow me on Twitter to see what this thing has to say!

New Computer Wireless Network Technology to Drool Over

An article posted today on Wired got me all excited (Yes, I am that kind of geek)! They discuss the future of wireless networking and how the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) has announced that 60Ghz multi-gigabit wireless technology is now available to member companies to start turning out products that use the new high-speed standard.

Yes, you didn’t read that wrong and I didn’t make a typo…  multi-gigabit wireless! The article discusses this in more detail, so I will refer you to it to pull the details out, but imagine if you will, the ability to have a wireless LAN at more than 10 times the speed of current 802.11n Wi-Fi, or Wireless N rate. Heck, most offices do not even have gigabit switches in them, and my own home doesn’t.

That still means our bottleneck is the internet connection to our home, but a gigabit wireless, combined with say, Google Fiber Internet at gigabit speed is going to be amazing when it gets here! Of course, Google will bring that technology to Greenville SC first, so you better plan to move to the Upstate to fulfill your need for speed! =)