Chad Hutchins

We will be hosting another open coffee event on Tuesday June 23 starting at 9am and ending at 4pm. A big thanks, to Abilene Christian University who will be sponsoring the event with free lunches and coffee. The open coffee events are a great way to meet local entrepreneurs, freelancers and many others. Being a “co-working” event, we will be meeting up to get to know each other, but most of all, meeting up to work together at a common location for the day. Be sure to bring your laptop to hookup to the free internet.

Please pass around the Facebook event to invite your friends.

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If you haven’t been to a ReInvent Abilene, tonight would be a great night to start. ReInvent Abilene is monthly gathering of Research & Development inventors, researchers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalist. Guest speakers are brought in to speak about entrepreneurship, technology and other topics. Tonight’s session is called “ReInvent in 60 Seconds”. All of the attendees will have the opportunity to introduce themselves and tell about the cool things they are working on. There will also be food and beverages there to snack on. To keep up with what’s going on with ReInvent be sure to checkout their website.

Over a year ago, I had the opportunity to hang out with some young startups when visiting TechStars. One of the guys was Arron Kallenberg of DandyID.org, and he let me have a test run last week of their new pro accounts. DandyID is a simple web application that allows you to organize, track and analyze your social network.

DandyID has integrated nearly 300 social networks into their system. By building out your profile and adding the social networks you are a part of, they provide a nice profile page.

This week they have released pro accounts for users that really want to understand and increase the impact of their online identity. With DandyID’s extensive API, there are several ways to share your DandyID profile with the world. When sharing your DandyID profile on other sites, DandyID provides analytics allowing you to track and analyze who is visiting your on your various social network profiles. For instance, I included my DandyID on my personal blog with their handy wordpress plugin.

Whenever someone is visiting my blog and clicks on my Twitter account I can see the results in the analytics section of my DandyID account broken down by which links are clicked (Twitter in this case), which site it was visited from (my blog) and who the visitor was (if they are a DandyID member).

The DandyID pro accounts also give you a breakdown of what social networks your DandyID contacts are using.

Lastly, of your contacts on DandyID, you can see a simple list of all the changes your contacts are making on their public profiles that they have listed on DandyID, all wrapped up in a nice RSS feed.

DandyID is a great way to keep track of all of your social networks, especially while managing a brand. I highly recommend the service, so if you want to give it whirl, go sign up for a free account today. Arron and the DandyID team are very open to users’ thoughts and suggestions. Be sure to connect with them if you have feedback.

Have you used DandyID? Let me know your thoughts by commenting below.

Do you find yourself wondering how social media got to the point it is today? I know I do. It has been a fun phenomenon to be a part of.

The following article from the Social Media Rockstar blog gives a great breakdown of the history of social media, leading up to where we are today.

Thanks to @SteveCollier for finding and sharing the link.

Which stages leading up to social media as we know it today were you a part of?

Things in Abilene have definitely seemed to quiet down as the local universities and colleges have let out for summer, but at the same time there are all kinds of opportunities. The economy may be slow, but the entrepreneurship opportunities are abundant.

I really enjoy working on software development projects, but unfortunately I can’t pick up every one of them that comes along. Off the top of my head, I can think of several startups who need solid software developers now. More often than not, I get emails from friends and other connections asking for some development help, but I just don’t have the cycles to help out. Not only are these startups looking for quality developers, but like-minded and passionate business developers to help them out.

If you have software or business development skills who are looking to get into a new venture (probably little to no pay, but potentially big opportunities) be sure to connect with me on Twitter or at hutchins.chad@gmail.com and I’ll see if I have a match for you.

And here’s a video to check out…

Everything is amazing, nobody is happy. Do you agree?

The Springboard Challenge was once again a success; with many student and community participants, over 50 business plans were submitted, $40,000 in prize money was handed out, an excellent array of judges, a fantastic speaker, and a large crowd for the awards dinner.

Jody Walker won first place in the student category, with Tape Trade. Jody’s idea will be a time-saver for high school coaches everywhere, allowing coaches to easily trade game footage of all sports. Today, coaches typically meet up with other coaches to trade tapes, or they use snail mail.

Melissa Richardson took home first place in the pre-revenue community category with Dating by Design. Melissa is passionate about helping those with Asperger syndrome. There are not many resources and places of community for those with Aspergers as they become adults. Melissa wants to change that.

The Big Tech Onion team took home first place in the post-revenue community category with Sheepdog. As social networks become more and more of a household name, businesses need to find way to effectively hear what their customers are saying about them and their competitors. Sheepdog allows organizations get an in-depth look at what social networks their customers are using.

Many others were awarded cash prizes. Over the next few weeks I hope to feature several of these business ideas.

Abilene Reporter also wrote-up about the event.

I’ve had a few people ask me, “How can I be informed when you post new posts on the Abilene Startups Blog?”. We all already have enough noise during the day to deal with and we don’t have time during the day to go to each individual site we want to keep up with. The tools below will help save you time, especially if you are already using Twitter, Facebook or an RSS Reader.

Below are few ways that I would recommend keeping up with this blog:

1. Follow me on Twitter (@chadhutchins) - This may seem like a shameless plug, but if you want to be the first to know when I post something new on the Abilene Startup Blog, Twitter is the first place I go.
2. Be a Fan of the Facebook Page - Most of you are already on Facebook, so if you become a fan of the Abilene Startups Facebook Page you will receive updates on your Facebook homepage as soon as I post the link to the latest article.
3. Use an RSS Reader. - RSS is yet another nerdy computer term, but is simply a feed of posts from a blog. Most every blog has an RSS feed. An RSS Reader, such as Google Reader, let you easily manage multiple blog feeds. Whenever someone writes a new post from a blog you are following in your RSS Reader, you will see it on your list of things to read.

Are there any other ways you would like to be notified of new posts?

I just received an email from the Springboard team saying the finalists have been notified. Best of luck to all of you who have made it to the final round. Finalists will be giving their verbal business pitches to the judges Saturday morning, in hopes of winning some of the $40,000 in prize money.

Whether or not you participated in the Springboard Challenge or not, you should be sure to sign-up for the awards dinner this Saturday night. Dr. Christopher Kersey is speaking on “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School About Entrepreneurship.” Tickets are $15 dollars and well worth it. You can sign-up for the dinner on Springboard’s website.

Come out for the poster session, featuring the Springboard participants and their ideas. The poster session will begin at 6:00pm and the dinner will begin at 7:00pm. The event will be held this Saturday night in the new ACU Hunter Welcome Center.

Hope to see you there.

I ran across two posts yesterday that I believe will speak to you entrepreneurs out there:

10 Entrepreneurial Concepts to Live By (thanks to Steve Collier)

It’s what’s in between that counts. (found via Twitter)

Can you relate to these? What are your thoughts?

Facebook Can Make Your Local Shop Rock!

I recently reconnected with an old friend on Facebook, like many of you have, I’m sure. As we went through the process of catching one another up on things, I learned that she had a shop in her city and was just trying to get a website up, start blogging, etc., to publicize events at her shop. Since she knew that I had just released “Digital Engagement,” she started asking me for advice.

I encouraged her to consider setting up a Facebook page using the Pages utility, and invite friends to ‘fan’ the page. My reasoning was that since what she needed was to get the word out to lots of people, and Facebook already had lots of people, she should start there. This progressed with her starting to ask about advertising on Facebook, and us jointly developing a targeting strategy using Facebook Ads. Since there is so much discussion around how small local retailers can use the web, with varying reports of its effectiveness, I thought I’d share her response with you: “Just wanted to follow up and give you an update on the success of the Third Friday event and the Facebook marketing I did. It was awesome! …had about 50 people in and sales were through the roof. Facebook got me over 78,000 impressions and 25 click throughs for $21. Wow!! I have a feeling this won’t last for long so I have placed another ad for my craft classes. I noticed an ad for American Airlines today, the secret is getting out! Thanks again for your help, I truly appreciate it. I never would have put a page together if you hadn’t suggested it. I have my networking business group meeting at the store in a couple of weeks and I am going to have a few copies of your book there for purchase. I think every one in business right now needs to use this wonderful asset!”

It’s nice to see a plan come together, to help a friend, and to see how effective social network marketing can be for a small local retailer.

Engage!

Thanks to Leland Harden, author of Digital Engagement, for writing this up for the Abilene Startups Blog. Be sure to pick up his book on Amazon, or grab a book from him personally if you can catch him at his Hardin-Simmons University office.