In days of old, it took the Pony Express days or weeks to deliver a message, but today news travels fast. Sometimes so fast, the big news bypasses traditional media. Thanks to the immediacy of Internet-enabled camera phones, Solid Cactus client Janis Krums garnered national attention at exactly 3:36 p.m. ET on Thursday, January 15, 2009.
Krums, co-founder of ElementzNutrition.com was on a commuter ferry in the Hudson river when it was diverted to rescue passengers of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 after it made an emergency landing in the New York river.
Being the connected man he is, Krums took a picture and uploaded it to Twitter using TwitPic.com, where he also updated his status, letting his then 180 followers know that he was en route to pick up the survivors.
“Basically, it was an incredible sight. I definitely thought I should take a picture, and I happened to be on Twitter when I saw it, so that was quickest place to post,” said Krums.
When the ferry reached the plane Krums let a few of the passengers borrow his phone to call loved ones. When he was handed back his phone, he was amazed at the number of messages and Twitter followers he had gained. His photo became the first to circulate as part of an international news frenzy branded “Miracle on the Hudson.” His phone then started to ring.
Interviewed on many major news outlets for his citizen journalism experience, Janis Krums discovered the huge power of social media.
Regarding the calls from MSNBC, the BBC, and ABC News, he said, “I was very surprised and overwhelmed. When I got the phone back I had messages and calls… right away. [The media] had my number. My phone didn’t stop making noises for five hours.”
Krums had a Twitter account for 8 months, but really became active during the last 3.
“I was slowly building a following. It was mainly an experiment to see how you could use Twitter to promote a business or a brand,” he said. “I would post links to health-related articles since that’s our industry, or links to technology or social media articles. Basically anything that was cool to read.”
After his now historic Tweet, Krums jumped from 180 followers to 3500. He had planned to utilize social networking for his new website, however the plane incident reinforced that decision.
“I was going to use [social media marketing] tactics anyway. This reinforces the point, especially now that my network is so big – the reach now is incredible. No questions asked, I’ll definitely use it now,” he said.
“Nowadays you need to have any medium you can for business. You never know what is going to catch fire. Some people may look at Facebook and not Twitter…you need to have all angles covered. Everything is evolving so quickly. If you can be on the front of new technology, it’ll help business,” he said.
While this example is more on the citizen journalism side, it paints a huge example of how a fad, a product, or new site can spread fast. For that reason, social media has become a booming way to promote e-commerce. Krums says that he’s a member of several social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and a blog, but admits he doesn’t update them all the time.
“I’m getting better at updating and might use a service that does all the sites from one interface. I didn’t have as much of a use for it a week ago and hadn’t explored it, but it’s time now,” he said.
His site, ElementzNutrition.com features performance nutrition for elite athletes and is scheduled to launch this spring. You can bet he’ll post that throughout the Social Media universe!
[...] This is a blog post about a cool Twitter thingy that happened Friday evening. This would be a perfect example to use in a class or workshop on social media on how news can travel fast… of course this is not as cool as what happened with the Hudson Plane Crash and my client Janis Krums who took the first picture of the crash… (read about his cool story, here in the NY Daily News and also an article I wrote about Twitter and Janis, here.) [...]