I’ve hit another big milestone in my life this year turning 50. For the last month I’ve been reflecting on my life and what wisdom I would share on this special day. More than ever, I’m now being sought out to give advice and share my experiences.

Many of my values that define me where shaped by growing up in Nebraska. I lived in an idyllic setting much like fictional town of Lake Wobegon made famous in the radio show Prairie Home Companion. Living on the edge of the prairie gave me a set of unique experiences that have propelled me through my life.

My wife Gina and daughters have also impacted my life with their un-ending love and support. My daughters have always inspired me to step back and take a look at things through a different un-filtered view.

My mother influenced me with her artistic skills and sense of humor. And my father instilled into me skills to be a life long learner.

Some phrases that have stuck with me over the years:

“You never make it unless you deal with the person at the top” This was advice that my neighbor Mrs. McLaughlin would always tell us growing up with her very heavy Boston accent. McLaughlin was a very formal lady that always wore white gloves. She was very successful as a businesswoman and owned about half the real estate in our downtown area.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This was the Golden Rule that my grandfather Geddes would always quote to me. He was a mortician and always had to deal with people at the time of their deepest sorrows in life.

“No matter what happens…people will always eat” Was advice from my grandmother to hold unto ConAgra stock that has been in the family for 4 generations.

I’ve always set significant goals than define each decade of my professional life. At age 20 I got a lucky break and had already worked at the White House as a photographer. I was challenged by a mentor to put myself on the map at a major national newspaper, so I ended up at the Orange County (CA) Register as an editor when I was 31. When I hit 40, I was a Vice President of an Internet company.

Now I’m in the position to help provide people the tools and the strategy to move into the digital age that is rapidly changing our lives and economy.

I end with one of my favorite quotes from the martyred Lutheran Minster Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“By the time you have grown up, the old country parsonage and the old
town villa will belong to a vanished world. But the old spirit, after
a time of misunderstanding and weakness, withdrawal and recovery,
preservation and rehabilitation, will produce new forms. To be deeply
rooted in the soil of the past makes life harder, but it also makes it
richer and more vigorous. There are in human life certain fundamental
truths to which men will always return sooner or later; we have to be
able to wait.”

This was originally posted on John Temple's blog:

I had spent almost 20 years working at newspapers including the Rock Island Argus, Associated Press, The El Paso Times and The Orange County Register. In 1995 I considered myself at the top of my game in this profession. We had a good news year in Orange County and were recognized by the NPPA for Best Use of Photography at a large Metro.

But I knew something was going to fundamentally change in the media industry with the Internet starting up. I needed to stay in front of it to survive and maintain a quality of life for my family. My 5-year-old daughter had mastered using an Apple computer and I realized that in 15 years newspapers in printed form would not be relevant to her. Because of that I felt there would be no advertising base and I would be unemployed at age 50 if I stayed at a newspaper. My daughter turns 20 this year and my predictions have come true, except for being unemployed.

So I became very active in the local interactive development community, attending monthly computer user-group meetings, hearing stories about how developers were building new exciting things. At the end of these meetings the president of the group would always tell us that to get started all we needed to do is learn how to ask for our first $100,000.

What really changed my career is when I started volunteering at my daughter’s school in Orange County. I built a web site for the school (the original HTML files can be found at http://www.jaybryant.com/fhr) and that was picked up and used by the whole district as a template for the other schools. It was at this same time that I left the newsroom and went to work for Freedom Communications doing corporate communications and Internet projects.

I had set a goal that I wanted to be a Vice President of an Internet company by age 40. I left Freedom Communications in 1997 and started work with Frank Daniels III’s (former editor of the Raleigh News & Observer) new company KOZ.com to provide online community systems for media companies. At KOZ.com I continued my interest in education and started the education online community SchoolLife.net. I was able to partner with a non-profit organization and picked up the hosting of 5000 school web sites in 1998.

SchoolLife.net was then acquired by a new education company backed by Bell & Howell and Goldman Sachs. We raised $100 million and bigchalk.com was started with three other web sites. I was employee #3 and was a Vice President at age 40. I was relocated to New York City. When the dot.com crash took place in 2001, I was laid off and unemployed for 6 months.

Since that time I’ve worked in business development and product management positions at Educational Testing Service, TV Guide and now as Vice President of Sales at LiveWorld.com (a provider of white label social networks and services for large companies).

The things that have helped me in the business world that carried over from my days as a journalist:

* Ability to work on deadlines and turn around work quickly. This has been a very valuable skill that helps me stay ahead of my competition and impresses my clients.
* Strong communication skills. I use my writing and photography skills every day to communicate with a broad audience.
* The ability to spot trends and analyze vast amounts of information. All the hours of having to read the AP wire and budgets have given me great skills to analyze a lot of information and use that with my job. I now have over 200 blogs that I read through my RSS reader every day for about 2 hours each morning.
* Ability to gain trust quickly. As a newspaper photographer, I had to gain people’s trust really fast so I could photograph them for an assignment. This skill has translated well into my role in sales.

On the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy, I wanted to share one of my images that I shot of him back in 1978 when I was an intern photographer at the White House. Kennedy and Mrs. Carter had just returned from the funeral of Pope Paul VI in Rome and were met by President Carter at Andrews Air Force Base.

I’ve been thinking about this image this week with the news of his death. I went on a hunt through my house today trying to find the album with the 11×14 print that I have (the negatives are in the Carter Library) to scan it and post it. After tearing through my garage and basement this afternoon for 2 hours… I was not able to find the print. I did get lucky tonight and found a slide copy in my office and did a scan of it (sorry for the poor quality…it is a 3rd generation image).

I became a “citizen journalist” for the inauguration and took my photo and video gear out to document the events. I submitted photos and videos into CNN’s iReport and picked up over 16,000 views.

My first event was on Saturday of Obama’s train trip to Washington DC. I went down to Claymont DE where they slowed down the train and Obama stood on the back platform to wave to the crowd. I sent in photos to CNN iReport and my twitpic account. My wife shot video of it with a Kodak flip camera.

On Sunday we were in Washington DC and attended the We Are One concert at Lincoln Memorial. The ATT 3G network pretty much fell over and I wasn’t able to post to my twitpic account. I was able to email in photos to CNN’s iReport site and they featured them.

For the inauguration on Tuesday, I went to the Princeton NJ Public Library and shot photos with my Fuji S3 camera and uploaded them off my Mac using a Sprint 3G card from the library to CNN iReport and Facebook.

I was impressed with the producers from CNN’s iReport. On all three days that I submitted photos to them. I was contacted either on my phone or email by a producer to verify the facts and get additional information.

My work is at:

http://www.ireport.com/people/jaysbryant

http://twitpic.com/photos/jaysbryant

http://tinyurl.com/8jokls

My pictures have picked up a lot of comments on Facebook and iReport.

I spent 20 years as newspaper photographer and editor back in the “traditional” deadtree world. I started photographing political events in 1976 (http://tinyurl.com/8vknbr). I am excited that social media has now empowered me to publish and distribute my work on my own.

I will always remember the words “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” coming from my grandfather Glenn Geddes on every Veterans Day growing up in Nebraska. This was always a very solemn day for my grandfather and he would always go out to the local cemetery to take part of a remembrance service.

My grandfather was a quatermaster in the Army and did service in France during World War 1. The only thing still left in our family from the war besides the photo of him in his doughboy uniform is a French-made trench art shell that just has the words “World War” on it.

After the war was over he came back to the family business (a Furniture Store and Funeral Home) in Grand Island, NE for the rest of his life.

I am thankful on this day that my generation has not had to endure the large scale wars that have ripped through the lives of previous generations of my family. Because of my grandfather, I have a very deep respect for those that have served our country and defended our freedoms.

Brandweek last week had a good article about the soup battle between Campbells’ and Progresso Soup. In the article they pulled out quotes from the online community that we run for Campbells. Follow this link to read the actual discussions. The community members are full of great suggestions for Campbells.

One of the greatest things that the internet has done for marketing is provide a way to target the launch of new products to key influencers within specific niches. I’ve seen two really great examples of good viral marketing programs this last month.

Canon has just announced a great new camera (EOS 5D MKII) that not only does still photos but will capture video in full HD. They gave a pre-release version to photographer Vincent Laforet for 72 hours and Vincent produced a great sample movie that he posted on his blog. The net result was 539,380 visitors came to his blog within 4 days to see the movie sample.

Seagate introduced a new portable hard drive and recruited blogger Robert Scoble to promote it. So Scoble, on his blog and Twitter, announced that they would give away 20 of the new drives to anyone that met him in Times Square at 12 noon and then give another 20 away to the people they learned about the contest from. About 50 people showed up and it got a lot of buzz on Twitter that day.

We have a lot of similar stories with clients of LiveWorld (HBO, Campbell’s Soup, Mini-Cooper, TV Guide and others) that have been able to use their relationships in their online communities for specific marketing programs. Please give us a call and we can share more with you.



Scoble at the Times Square give-a-way

Back to reality..

My last week was very busy with time spent at two conferences in New York City and then a trip out to Altoona, PA for a view in the real world. The four hour drive out to Altoona gave me time to sort through all of the hype I had ingested from the Social Ad Summit and the Web 2.0 conference held in New York City.

I’ve been an online community practitioner now for over 12 years and have a bit of digital road tread down the middle of my back from all of my experiences in building & operating online communities. What I heard at the conferences last week really was not that much different from what was being pitched in the late 90’s. This time around my sense is the VC and investment community is not throwing around as much money as the good old days and are looking for actual business models that might work.

At the end of the day one of the participants at the Social Ad Summit remarked that the conference should have been re-named “How to advertise on Facebook.” Google even thinks the same in a relative way. I just did a Google search on “Social Ad Summit” to find the URL for the event to put into this posting and the top sponsored link in Google Ads was for FaceBook Ads, how ironic. My question…are the advertising strategies now for the Facebook platform any different than was being attempted with the old AOL platform?

The Web 2.0 conference in New York City gave us a lot of good exposure. I’m not a big fan of large conferences since it is almost impossible to get above the noise of all the other companies. But launching a great new product (LiveBar) provided us a lot of attention. The best moment for me from the conference was watching the staff of one of our competitors walking out early on the last day when we still had a booth full of good prospects talking with us.

With all of the people that I saw at our booth, I would ask about what was getting their attention at the show. The two most common themes of response were excitement over new web services from companies that could be mashed-up into new products and people wondering how many of the new companies were still going to be standing in 2 years.

So back to the theme of this posting of coming back to reality…

Having been raised in the Midwest, I always keep the worn out phrase of “will it play in Peoria” in the back of my mind when I deal with new technologies. Making the trip out to Altoona, PA to visit my daughter at school gave me the opportunity to see how much social networking and online communities have impacted mass society.

The truth is we still have a way to go. I was in a community lacking 3G connectivity (but a surprise was it did exist only in Beaver Stadium at PSU) and a lot of open WiFi networks that fuel my iPhone addiction for networking with the world. The local community newspaper will still a healthy size and had a full classified advertising section.

So time to continue digging at this and keep focus on enabling conversations.

##30##

My daughter Isabel stands out in my garden with the corn. It made to knee high by the 4th of July

It is a great summer day here in Jersey.