A few weeks ago, we were making the trip from the DC area to Chicago. For a variety of reasons, we decided to drive overnight.
With the wife and 3 kids sleeping in the back, there weren’t too many options of how to keep myself occupied for those long stretches of PA, OH, and IN.
But the phone was one of them.
Put out a few tweets and FB status updates looking for takers to “keep me company” and wouldn’t you know it, 10 people did.
I was on the phone pretty much non-stop from 10.30pm to 6am (save for the brief chat I had with the Ohio Highway Patrolman, but that is another story).
Some were personal friends, some were business contacts.
Some I had spoken to many times, others for the first time.
To give a full immersive experience of participating in the road trip, I used Google Latitude to share out my position with each caller, so they could watch me drive along the interstates in real time as we chatted.
In the heavily social networked world, the face to face meetings take on even more value (I call it the ‘last mile’)…as does the phone. Solidifying some relationships via good ol’ 1:1 voice means a lot…for me and for them.
And it was fun.
And…without Twitter and Facebook, it NEVER would have been possible to quickly identify willing participants.
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