The answer, of course, is “it takes about ten years of suffering hard work to become an overnight sensation.” In the case of new media and Web2.0, you can so that in a lot less time. Being an early — the earliest — adopter doesn’t hurt, but it isn’t necessary, really. However, any way you slice it, with a few exceptions, becoming an overnight sensation on Twitter, YouTube, Plurk, QIK, Utterli, LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace is going to require a lot of your resources (time and/or money) and more time than you probably planned out for your boss or your client — or yourself!

I am pretty interested in seeing how my Twitter profile has gone from nothing to 2,511+ followers. Twitterholic has allowed me to figure that out in an easy-to-read format, which I appreciate. I joined Twitter on January 6th, 2007. By October 30th, I had 441 followers. It took until May 5th, 2008, to break 1,000 followers. It only took until September 11th for me to break 2,000 followers, and now, as of December 7th (a day that lives in infamy), I have 2,511 followers. I find that interesting to study but I don’t know what it means.

I think I will venture to explain its meaning: social media requires investment and time. Growing a social media profile is like growing a coral reef: after seeding the reef, there are so many things that need to happen before a reef blooms “in its own.” There are many things that can aid the reef: safety, cleanliness, warmth, nutrients, oxygenation, etc… however, one of the most important thing is time and commitment.

Social media cultivation makes most PR and marketing professionals cringe at the thought of trying to sell these solutions to their clients. A client generally wants metrics now and right away. Clients oftentimes spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a social network platform, a blog, or a spate of social media profiles that are world class and amazingly turned; however, when the six-month mark comes around and the community is not yet bustling, most clients get severe cold feet and oftentimes abandon all of the work-in (and money out) as a failed campaign — right before the reef blooms!

It kills me to see the number of corporate blogs, home-grown social networks, message boards, and social network profiles that are like those bare and barren rocks and wrecks that never in fact ever blossomed into an emergent community manifest in a coral reef. An ecosystem as delicate and hardy as any social media space, from Twitter to Facebook, from MySpace to your corporate blog.

I forgot to also add to the resources plus time equation: commitment, consistency, calmness, dedication, generosity, and compassion. When you invest in online community as much as I do (2,511 on Twitter with 11,200 tweets, 2,734 on Facebook, 1,496 on LinkedIn, and 5,321 posts on my blog, an online presence I have had since 1999, for example) then you need to be generous — give more than you take — and you need to be committed to the long term. You will need to learn what each community will allow, suffer, enjoy, or penalize. You will learn where the borders are and you will learn what works (and draws people in) and what doesn’t (making them flee).

Well, with no further ado, here’s a lot of work, time, creativity, hours, minutes, wit, mistake, missteps, business, play, Washington, Berlin, Slovakia, San Diego, and a hundred other places. If you want to have 2,500 followers and you’re not already famous, you’ll have to put in the work. If you can achieve tens of thousands of followers, you’re probably already somebody; in that case, it wasn’t just overnight: you just put in your licks elsewhere. Otherwise, put on those work-gloves and start working!

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Bio: Web strategist and new media guru and president of Abraham Harrison LLC, http://ahllc.eu
Joined Twitter on 2007-01-06 14:51:39

“According to Harry B. Soria, the celebration of May 1 as Lei Day was invented in 1927 by island artist, writer Donald Benson Blanding and Grace Tower Warren. Don Blanding is also credited with the invention of the custom of tossing your lei overboard when you sailed from Honolulu. If the lei came back to shore (and most did) it supposedly meant you would return.” Via Square 1

This is true, this is what is was like as a little kid in Hawaii, living in Salt Lake and attending Aliamanu Elementary School. We did our thing out in the field. The following is a nostalgic remembrance from the Hula Pages.

“For those blessed with a childhood in Hawai`i, there was no finer or more festive day of Hawaiian celebration. For this Aunty’s home village in Puna on the Big Island, The May Day Pageant, held at the school, was a far bigger event than the Christmas Program, which came in second, a distant second. May Day was not, and still is not, an official Hawaiian holiday, but villagers took off work anyway, whether they had kids in school or not. It was a day that drew us together like a powerful magnet. We came together as a community in celebration and remembrance of our cultural heritage and diversity.

This page was created for all who find their way here, but especially written for those who must be away from the `âina (literally, the land; figuratively, Hawai`i). As your own unique memories flow through your consciousness , may the vivid remembrance of the sights, sounds, fragrances and The Aloha Spirit of this special day permeate your every sense:

Remember the excitement and giddy anticipation leading up to May Day? The hours of dance practice, coaxing awkward hands and clumsy feet into graceful movements… preparing the costumes… gently picking flowers and stringing them into lei to express Aloha to loved ones, physically here and departed, kumu (teachers) and for the all-important May Day performance by each class…

Remember going to school decked out in lei, wearing brightly-colored mu`umu`u and Aloha shirts? Kids “oohing-and-ahhing” over each other’s delectable lei of candy, packs of chewing gum and cracked seed, individually wrapped in colored cellophane tied together with curly ribbon… lei being pulled apart and treats being exchanged and consumed, spinning each kid out to lofty sugar highs… presenting lei to kumu with sticky hands and even stickier kisses, and soon the top of kumu’s head was barely seen above the crush of lei…

Remember wriggling into dance costumes and the last-minute rehearsals and jitters? A bit of nail-biting, some hand-holding, and a whole lot of fidgeting… the entire community coming together for the May Day school pageant, lei contest, games and food… waving to all the smiling Aunties and Uncles, as you filed in with your class…

Remember that standing-room-only crowd, but there was no rudeness, no unruliness, no jostling, just smiles and kû ka paila (heaps of) Aloha Spirit… squeezing closer and tighter to fit one more Aunty’s `elemu (buttocks), or gladly giving up a coveted seat for a tûtû (grandparent) or mama with bêbê (baby)… EVERY person donning their best Hawaiian finery: mu`umu`u or Aloha shirt, lauhala hats (plaited hats of the hala leaves) encircled with lei hulu (feather lei), Hawaiian bracelets, flowers, be it a single pua melia over the ear or a hugely elaborate floral arrangement in the hair, and lei, lei, lei… “garlands of flowers everywhere…”

Remember the intermingled a`ala (fragrances) of pua melia (plumeria), ginger blossoms, gardenia, maile? Ambrosia for the ihu (nose).

Remember the strumming of `ukulele and guitars and the falsetto singing revving up the bustling crowd… then, the pû (conch shell) blower came running down the aisle, pausing to trumpet the festivities to come… an instant hush would come over the crowd… and necks would crane to get the first peek of the May Day mô`î wahine (queen) and mô`î kâne (king) and their court… first, the princesses, resplendent in holokû (formal Hawaiian dresses) and knee-length lei of the islands they represent and the princes in their malo (loincloths) and `ahu (capes), carrying kâhili (standards) marched in…

Remember feeling the lump-in-the-throat pride — and for our tûtû, the wistful nostalgia of times past– when the beautiful May Day mô`î wahine and the handsome mô`î kâne, who, representing the dignity, beauty and goodness of our people and culture, stepped forward? A thousand admiring glances, the population of this Aunty’s village in the 1950′s, kept pace with every regal step taken down the aisle and up to their flower-bedecked thrones…

And remember the hula? Ahh, the HULA…”

A reflection on a two-month sailing trip from Acapulco to Los Angeles on a 42-foot Jeanneau catamaran. Almost two-years-ago now.

My spiritual experience of sailing during Lent during my Jesus year birthday of 33 and all the important lessons and experience I have been lucky to have as a result. Although I am a member of the Vestry of Saint James’ and its currently both the most exciting time and my favorite time on the Church calendar, Lent, I responded to the call of my best friend Mark when he asked me to come to Mexico to help him complete his sail from Charleston, SC, to Los Angeles, CA.

I joined the sail on March 1, spent my birthday on the boat, and find myself stuck in Cabo San Lucas over a month later.

What I have realized is that sailing allows one to better understand the nature of God’s grace in my life. Little did I know that it would be as much help to me as it has been to him.

I had never sailed with Mark, even though he lives and works from the deck and cabin of a gorgeous yacht catamaran named Kinship II. I have never been much of a sailor and so much of my sailing enjoyment has been vicarious. It just never interested me and Mark never really pressed the issue.

A little over a month ago, Mark called me and told me that the crew of six he started with in South Carolina had started abandoning the vessel beginning at the first stop after a grueling trek from the Keys all the way to Central America, through the Panama Canal, and back up the Pacific coast of Mexico. The faithful remnant left in Acapulco because their money had run out and the time schedule had slipped and slipped and slipped, as sailing schedules are wont to do.

So, when Mark suggested that he would pay for me to fly to Acapulco to join the crew — him — I took this as one of those veiled manly calls for help which never really show either fear or desperation.

When you spend time with men’s men, you have to read between the lines. I was in Acapulco within five days. I might have hurt a relation with a client and leaned on my lovely friend Sarah a little too much, to say nothing of the strain on my new and wondrous relationship with Wendy, but it was Mark! The brother I never had.

We burnt two weeks moored off of the Club de Yates de Acapulco as most of the beatings that Kinship II had suffered on the long passage through the Gulf, along Central America, through the Panama Canal, and up along the Pacific coast were being healed by our angel, Gabriel, who took the time and the pride to get us up to ship shape.

I have been officially sailing the Pacific sea since the first day of Lent, 5 March. An equal time has been spent stuck in port and harbor as it has been sailing miles offshore; some of it has been gentle and awe-inspiring while other parts have been punishing and trying.

Although I have not officially given up anything for Lent save my job, I have been able to use the time to become more essential.

Things have been very difficult for me over the last year or so, at least since 9-11, but including the technology crash. Technology and the Internet is the basket I had been placing all of my eggs and I had been compensated very well for it.

During the last six months, thought, I have be grasping at straws, asking myself what I want to do with the rest of my life. Become a lawyer? Go to business school? Pursue a PhD?

I was stuck in a myopic infinite loop. My priorities, my goals, my desires, and my true wants and needs were befuddled and unclear. Sadly, I have unintentionally hurt people as they were caught in my personal panic as I desperately searched for my equilibrium while not giving myself either the time or the slack with which to find it.

On 8 March, in addition to everything else, I became 33, which to everyone I have spoken to at Saint James’ and elsewhere is my “Jesus year.” Allegedly, the age Jesus the Christ died for our sins. Lord knows this was renting space in my mind as the date approached. Lord knows that there was no way I could even remotely find the time or the money to be able to take this time to both help my friend and save myself. But there it was, and I am still sailing with a lot of help from my friends.

Sailing takes time, and it takes its own time which has nothing to do with either my desire or the requirements of society. The moment one becomes willful enough to disrespect the nature of the sea is the day something breaks. Its as simple as that and is kind of spooky at first. Easy as she goes. Cliche sentiment seem to reverberate on the sea. The 96-hour passages blur one into the other into one long day, and when the limits of my tolerance were reached I was rewarded with a pod of a hundred dolphins dancing in and out of my wake. Or a field of basking green sea turtles in the middle of the sea. Or a dense morning fog clearing to a double rainbow.

God can be very remedial in his lessons when you are sailing. He also protects fools and drunks and I am most certainly a fool at the very least. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and Karma is direct, reciprocity is king on the sea. When I am tempted to be willful and push myself past either my abilities or my energy, I always either hurt myself or break something onboard. This is not a joke. It seems gentle — the sea always does — but it is life or death.

The lesson I have learned thus far is that there is a definite rhythm I have been blind to, within which everything works beautifully.

As a striking example, last week we were on route from Manzanillo to Cabo San Lucas and it was to be a milk run. Easily enough diesel to motor from where we were anchored at the Las Hadas Resort to where we were to moor in Cabo San Lucas. First impossibility: we ran out of diesel prematurely because the engine was detuned and was drinking the fuel quickly. So we ran out with just enough to bring us in to port when we finally made it to port, which was still 150 miles away.

That’s okay, we have a sailing catamaran. We sail easily in 5 knot winds. During the second day, the main sail halyard snaps at the block, at the top of the mast. That’s okay, we have a redundant halyard — which snaps four hours later! We string up the Genoa line and limp the rest of the way. Impossible, but normal I guess.

Things like this happen a lot. When we arrived at Cabo San Lucas, we could not find anyone who would climb the mast, until we ran into Sebastian and his family, from Vancouver, BC. He shimmied up the mast for free and we were back on schedule. We ran into many people like Seb along the way and the Cruiser community around the world is amazing generous.

Sartre was wrong, hell is not other people: grace is other people.

Every day of this trip has humbled me; every day has given me confidence. Not once have I felt humiliation and every day has been a celebration. The confidence not to fear what will happen next, to remain present and observant, to remain vigilant but not aggressive.

And I have been thriving and I am strong and worthy of supporting Captain Mark as his only crew and of protecting the delicate fiberglass exoskeleton Kinship II so that she is seaworthy and makes her voyage to Los Angeles on one pristine piece.

On the sea, nothing needs to be forced, nothing needs to be rushed; in fact, there are very few things that can be rushed. I have had to turn on the hourly chime on my wristwatch because I have experienced a couple of these 96-hour days. Time shrinks and expands. Being on watch exacerbates this experience. Time is relative in a practical sense as it can stretch or compress, and some nights I have been on a watch for what feels like an hour starting at 0100 and then the sky lightens and turns pink and the morning comes. Other times, I fight for wakefulness and after making a go of trying, I wake Mark and ask him to take the watch instead so that I can catch some sleep for a little while. This is too much to risk, too much to lose, if I were to try any harder and fall deep into an exhausted sleep leaving no one at all to keep an eye out for cruise ships or super liners.

What’s on the line is the safety of the boat — a quarter-million-dollar investment — and the safety of the crew. There is only one person, usually sleepy and bored, who takes watch and single-handedly keeps the fragile and absurdly delicate vessel going 8 knots out of the way of container ships moving at 25 knots. There is a feeling of trust, the kind of confidence-building experience that can easily undo damage done in the workaday world of corporate America, can rebuild the confidence and self-love that might have blossomed in simpler times. I know they did for me. On the sea, either alone or with a crew, one can renew one’s faith in oneself and others.

Post Enron, dot-com, 9-11, and Clinton, my world changed in significant ways. I am a pretty technologically-savvy fellow and when I graduated from GW in 1993, during a low point in employment and jobs, I became an Internet and web developer in addition to photography and writing. Although a student of literature at University, I didn’t choose graduate school right away but instead became part of the great excitement of the dot-com explosion. I have been using the Internet since a bet version of Mosaic; since I played with MacWeb, when I noodled with lynx. I am pre-Internet and as a teen I was part of the BBS culture. It was natural for me to join the excitement and during the 90s I didn’t explore graduate school or law school, but rather put all my eggs into the Internet economy. And I was rewarded for a time.

Recently, times have become tough and I have lost much of my confidence in my choices, what I have to offer, and in myself. Luckily, I have never lost my Faith.

While on Kinship II, Mark and I went over my life because I needed distance and clarity. I was able to note the five things that are most important to be in my life, and I am proud to say that I have four out of five of them in spades: A partner, my family, my friends, my spiritual life, and money.

I am told that there are so many rich Americans who suffer from a true lack in their lives. So many Americans who might have money and a partner, but lack friends, family, and spirit. Or have money and nothing else. I am reminded every day that in a conscious, present, spiritual life, money is the easiest to secure for many of us as it is the most valued. Surely, it can feel that way. There are days when I lose sight of all the things in my life for which I am amazingly grateful and focus on only the things I lack, in this case money. And then it is often a downward spiral, where lack begets lack and before I knew it, I find myself feeling not only like a loser but like the worse kind: the fellow who failed to live up to his potential. In these times, I lose sight that I have had money before and that I will have money again. Its easy when one lives in a small world — or a world, shrunk — to find oneself skewed: both in perspective and proportion.

But on the sea, its different. As a geek, I liken it to rebooting my desktop computer. Rebooting the PC is the secret we techies have for fixing most of the problems wrong with most desktop PCs. Most of the time, these slowdowns occur because there are too many things going on on the PC that the user is no longer aware of: memory leaks, infinite loops, crashed software. These things cannot fix themselves and most users cannot truly sense this chaos in any way short of system slowdown. Not all problems result in the blue screen of death, some just send the computer into a morass. A skilled technician can fix some of the problems from the keyboard or by using a piece of software as an elixir, but the simplest thing one can do to set everything right is to turn the machine off, wait a minute and then turn it back on. Reboot.

So as I sit in an Internet cafe in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, Mexico, wondering if I am spending Lent the way I should. Mexico is a traditionally catholic country, truly religious. I have not given up coffee, chocolate, or even beer; I am not attending church and I am three thousand miles away from my pew in my parish, Saint James’ Episcopal Church, Capitol Hill.

Yes, I am spending Lent better than I could have ever imagined, in my opinion. For all the fears, stresses, and anxieties I have been suffering under, I have had my head truly buzzing so that I couldn’t hear myself think clearly, to say nothing of the soft voice of my Faith.

On the boat, I have had time to think. At first, way too much time! I felt guilt and boredom; I felt like I needed to do something, needed to get back to the office to make sure everything was all right. After two weeks — yes, I buzzed for a fortnight — I started to relax. I felt my heart, my face, by body, and then my mind become more tranquil. On the boat, I have been getting a good lesson in Faith, in trust, and in moving with the flow as opposed to opposing it, striking against it. To force it makes it break; to avoid it doesn’t make it go away; to fear it doesn’t help. Whatever it is. To be completely honest, I have not felt so good about myself and what I have to offer in ten years. I feel like a tiger!

So I have done the most irresponsible thing imaginable in dropping everything and flying three thousand miles to help a friend by replacing his crew and becoming a sailor for what will be over six weeks. It would never have happened had the request come in any other form than what I perceived as a mayday, an SOS. But it did and I am here and I am changed. Does this mean that I will be doing this irresponsible thing again and again? Will I need to do this again in the same way, taking an unscheduled, selfish, and fool hardy escape again? Probably not I have learned so many things and the next time I become overwhelmed or lose faith in myself or my life experience and am myopic and suffused with fear, all I need to do is remember; or, be reminded. Quite possibly this very writing will be enough; if not, then Mark, my friends, my parish family, or you.

Instead of being changed into a bum, a drop out, or a vagabond, am becoming more clear that I want the life I have, that I can handle the life choices I make, that I make fine life choices. I have had an amazing growing up, brilliant parents, a world-class education, and have many friends, and a fine girlfriend. When I make a life choice there is a good chance that my decision is a result of a very fine coming up and I should not worry too much. My choices will probably — based on a thirty-three year track record — be moral and kind.

I have been spending the last three years attending Saint James’ Holy Week religiously. Saint James’ offers one of the most spiritually rich Holy Week and Easter I could ever have imagined. From Maundy Thursday through Easter Eve, the Spirit is palpable and the presence of God is undeniable; similarly, I have a profound personal and spiritual experience while sailing. As arcane and transcendent and as undeniable as what I experienced in Church. To be sure, I am grateful to have had spent a truly blessed experience.

The next time I wish someone Godspeed, in my mind and heart that will forever be between 2.9 and 8 knots.