When one of your mentors gives you the opportunity to really help them, that is the time you should move mountains to achieve results.
Rich Schefren really wanted to get in contact with Kathy Sierra – he mentioned this privately to me on a call last November – I didn’t get any immediate results to enquiries I made with a few online friends, and December was a time of turmoil for me – moving house, no internet connection, no telephone.
I dropped the ball
In January I noticed that Kathy Sierra was listed as a speaker at SXSW, but concluded it might be a mistake. Speaking proposals go through a fairly long acceptance process, and there was no hint of a resurrection of her blog, Creating Passionate Users. The last post was in April 2007 – I expected a mention if Kathy was really going to be speaking at SXSW.
SXSW & Twitter
On Friday Rich mentioned that he was heading to SXSW and that he would be twittering
My first thought was of Kathy – I had seen that she was still listed as presenting, though still no mention on her blog – maybe Rich had confirmation through other channels?
I did the obvious thing, like over 100 people had already done at the time in the space of just a few hours, I started following Rich Schefren on Twitter.
Fortunately Rich reciprocated a few hours later – that allowed me to send him a private message just in case
Hi Rich – I just bet you are going to “20 Ways to Woo Users” tomorrow – I hope you get to meet her, all my attempts to contact failed 05:59 PM March 08, 2008
It seems that was a fortuitous message – Rich had actually been encouraged to go to SXSW by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library.
Rich wasn’t aware that Kathy was presenting at SXSW
Fortunately Rich received my message… read what happened over on his blog.
2 Comments
It seems like you did okay in the end.
Well if you hadn’t sent the Twitter he probably wouldn’t have realised it was her by the sounds of it.
Everyone came out happy in the end.