2009.13 KivaThon, possibly the 1st 24-hour Live Podcast
I discovered and joined Talkshoe in late 2006 along with Twitter and many other new web sites. While I was on a web site spree, I discovered http://Kiva.org, which is more important to me than most. Kiva is a subject I can go on and on about so I happened on the idea to do what I believe was the first 24-hour live podcast, called the 'Kivathon'. One of the great things about many companies on today's web is how easy it is to contact them. (The notable exception is Ebay, who has the absolute worst contact system ever devised.) I emailed Talkshoe's CEO, Dave Nelson on a Saturday morning and he answered saying I should call him right then on his cell. Dave was on board immediately with the idea of a 24-hour live Talkshoe for Kiva and we set the date as March 18th, 2007. I believe the name 'KivaThon' was his idea. We then recruited enough hosts so each would take about one hour around the clock. Chris Brogan gave us a push from his corner: http://tr.im/kivacb and I was able to get some high Google visibility in press releases, etc. Most of the hosts blogged about it.
One small incident marred things for a few minutes when some MLM jerk went into a long infomercial about his show. A quick mention would have been fine, but this went on to the extent that we had to cut him off and take control away from him. If you're doing a podcast for a cause, the cause is the main subject, not self-promo. The whole effort went very well and a lot of people, including myself, learned about how Kiva was started. We interviewed some people from Kiva, notably founder Matt Flannery (his Kiva blog: http://tr.im/30b3). Awareness was raised and a lot of us put more money in. Talkshoe also invested in the fund. At that time, Talkshoe was revenue sharing, and all funds from all of my Talkshoe activities went into my Kiva account. As of May 2008, that was suspended, but I've continued to add funds when I can, and spread the word. Awareness of Kiva.org got two big bumps later that year: a mention in Bill Clinton's book and the biggie, Oprah. Oprah's reach is like about 10 Twitter memberships so when that happened we started seeing the situation as it is today. There are currently times when loan requests are not available at all. Follow 'microactions' on Twitter to get alerts on available loans, mostly Kiva but apparently they do other things as well. I know that all of us who participated in the event are proud to have been a part of it. Nothing is more gratifying than paying forward some of the benefits of the new connectivity.
One small incident marred things for a few minutes when some MLM jerk went into a long infomercial about his show. A quick mention would have been fine, but this went on to the extent that we had to cut him off and take control away from him. If you're doing a podcast for a cause, the cause is the main subject, not self-promo. The whole effort went very well and a lot of people, including myself, learned about how Kiva was started. We interviewed some people from Kiva, notably founder Matt Flannery (his Kiva blog: http://tr.im/30b3). Awareness was raised and a lot of us put more money in. Talkshoe also invested in the fund. At that time, Talkshoe was revenue sharing, and all funds from all of my Talkshoe activities went into my Kiva account. As of May 2008, that was suspended, but I've continued to add funds when I can, and spread the word. Awareness of Kiva.org got two big bumps later that year: a mention in Bill Clinton's book and the biggie, Oprah. Oprah's reach is like about 10 Twitter memberships so when that happened we started seeing the situation as it is today. There are currently times when loan requests are not available at all. Follow 'microactions' on Twitter to get alerts on available loans, mostly Kiva but apparently they do other things as well. I know that all of us who participated in the event are proud to have been a part of it. Nothing is more gratifying than paying forward some of the benefits of the new connectivity.
