I was ecstatic to see that my post had been selected and I will receive a copy of Mr. Miller’s book for free.

In a follow- up post announcing the winners, Chris linked to my original post and also  included the posts of all the others that took the challenge as well.

I highly recommend checking out the others who submitted stories as I have enjoyed reading many of them over the last few days. I will enjoy finishing the book once it arrives and will give you an update in the near future.

Next week, Bill Gates is launching the Gates College Tour, a three-day, five-school trip where he will open up a dialogue with students. He will focus on one question, “How do we get the world’s brightest people focused on its biggest problems?”

He will be streaming two of his talks on UStream and the first will be today at 1:15pm CST. He will be speaking from the University of California at Berkeley. The second one will be from Harvard on April 21st at 2:00pm CST. Both can be watched online by clicking on the Bill Gates USteam channel called The Gates Notes.

You can follow his reaction to the college tour by checking out his twitter stream @BillGates.

After asking the lady at the store to find me a copy I grabbed a seat out-of-the-way to check out this book that had impressed Chris so much. The first thing that jumped at me was the Max Lucado quote on the jacket. OK…heavy hitter Christian guy. Not what I was expecting, but OK I’ll dive in and see what this book is all about. After reading the first 107 pages I can say this book lives up to the hype Chris gives it in his blog post. Which also includes a video if you haven’t clicked the link I included above.

So back to the challenge. My topic is …. The importance of Story in my life.

Story has always been important in my life. I was born on St. Patrick’s Day. As those who know me, blarney is second nature. From being a genealogy buff  that always wanted to know the story of my families history to my political involvement that always focused on the person running and what their story was. Being an evangelist for a product, a person, or a company involves a great deal of story telling if done correctly. I have always “sold” things by getting people involved in the narrative of the story so they could see themselves as a part of the story. But in his book Million Miles in a Thousand Years Mr. Miller reveals a deeper meaning to the word Story and how it fits into what we do each day.

One example that comes to mind of showing people how they fit into “a story” was when I was in college and helped restart Zeta Psi Fraternity at the University of Illinois. One of the guys that wanted to get involved, but unsure if it was for him, came to talk to me in my dorm room one night. I explained to him that a fraternity is nothing more than what a bunch of guys do when they sit around and watch football and order pizza. The individuals usually organize ordering the pizza or any other activity based on their personality types and each play their own part in getting things accomplished.

After about 10 minutes of using this analogy my friend Evan saw a role for himself in the organization. In the end I was able to show his part in the story. The story of creating something on Campus that we 21 guys who said yes got the chance to put something back on Campus that other young men have been able to enjoy for the last 15 years.

What I got out of Million Miles was that while good at storytelling myself for a long time to accomplish helping get someone elected or sell a company’s service I have lost sight that there are some blank pages in my story that I need to start working on right now. I am glad this book was written and commend Mr. Miller on writing such a lighthearted book that at its core delivers a message that is anything but lighthearted if the reader takes Story seriously.

• I like Chris Brogan’s AnyWhen Manifesto. I’m not a big fan of the word Manifesto but he calls it that so I have to use his phrase. Maybe AnyWhen Interaction would be better Chris. Manifesto scares business people so you might want to consider your audience.

• Brain Tracy on setting goals or having one goal.  Good advice. Goes to what others I have listened to that say you don’t need to multi-task but focus on one thing at a time with your time management.

• Author and multimedia marketer Jason Jaffee sat down with speaker, podcaster, blogger and internet strategist Mitch Joel a couple of weeks ago to talk about the differences and evolution of traditional advertising agencies and those new fangled new media agencies. Listen to the conversation here. They are going to have a monthly podcast and I look forward to hearing more from them.

• In case you didn’t know, Chris Crum at WebProNews notes that Facebook status updates from Pages are now being indexed by Google. This is a great development for small business to make it easier to use Facebook to pull their customers into engaging with them.

• Want to search big websites easier?  Learn how in 2 minutes by watching this CNET video on creating  key-word based site specific searches.

More to come…….Part two tomorrow at 2pm.

So from here on out (and I have put a lot of thought into this) The Almanack will have the schedule below as a weekly posting schedule. Other items might go up along the way but I will look to have things for you each day that is new, different, educational, and related to social media, marketing, advertising, public relations, government relations and anything else that suits my fancy.

Monday — Top Online Videos

Tuesday — Twitter Tips

Wednesday — Facebook Fundamentals

Thursday — Tech Thursday (gadgets, apps, and more)

Friday — Social Media Strategy

Go ahead and help me spread the word and let me know if you see a story related to any of these topics.

Photo: My desk shot with the Droid 5MP Camera. Irony:  Sitting and blogging with my phone and not my laptop.

This should be interesting over the long haul. I got a Verizon Droid about a month ago and just tonight down loaded a free app that let’s me push blog posts from my phone to WordPress. I will be doing a post on my thoughts on the Droid soon enough. So stay tuned. I look forward to using this to get items I see by email on my phone through out the day straight into a blog post. I have also recently switched from the Flock browser back to Firefox and have added ScribeFire as an extension so I am going to be blogging more frequently. So that’s about it for my first blog post by phone.

I’m not sure if the folks at bubblemotion saw this SpongeBob video (start watching at the :31 second mark) before they came up with their cool concept to make a text message an audio sound bite but when I went to their website it was the SpongeBob video I first though of.

You can click the logo above to see their own little viral video on why this is a powerful product.  With the ability to have people recieve the audio text message and then forward them to friends and family I think this is a great tool for not-for-profits, political candidates or groups trying to lobbying on an issue.

Check out bubblemotion and I’m interested to hear what you think.

You can now use Facebook to stay in touch with those elected officials that you don’t think listen to you. They actually do keep very accurate records of how people are weighing in on a particular issue. So funnel your Facebook group members to have their voice heard through this tool.

Now you can use Facebook to make that real easy. H/T to TechCrunch for highlighting this new Facebook tool.

Click the Grassroots logo above to add this to your Facebook group.

From the Grasroots website that explains the purpose and benefits:

• Let Facebook page visitors immediately send letters to Federal or state officials without having to download anything or install any application.
• Automatically match them to federal and state legislative officials, based on the addresses they enter
• Add a prominent “Take Action” tab to your organization’s Facebook pages
• Allow visitors to instantly send messages to elected officials or other custom targets
• Use a unique URL for the “Take Action” tab, linkable in status updates and emails
• Enable Tell-A-Facebook Friend functionality after actions taken and on general spread-the-word pages

I think the strongest feature is this one……..

• Capture registrations in an external database for later emails, fundraising, etc.