Pitchfest! Jewish Stories Go Hollywood!

Join G-dcast’s Producer, Screenwriter, and a panel of celebrity judges in an interactive Hollywood style pitchfest. Each team gets a (very) colorful Jewish story that we promise you’ve never heard before and develops its own red carpet, scene-stealing pitch. (We’ll coach you on how the experts do it.) Then send your best rep up on stage to dazzle the executives and convince us why YOUR story should be turned into an animated film. Big sunglasses provided. (Session produced by Sarah Lefton, with supporting cast turns by Sean Mandell, Josh Walters, and Esther Kustanowitz)

Since I’m the “celebrity judge” who lives and works closest to Hollywood (geographically, Beverly Hills ain’t far), bringing the celebrity glamour will be my responsibility. You can check out my new TribeFest speaker’s bio here.

This is the intro for that session – what followed was a round robin of the people in the room, which I’m cutting out to preserve their privacy.

I hope to post more audio clips as I become more familiar with the audio editing software.

Nothing Helps intro

Huffington Post coverage of 1st Jewish Influencer Awards

I’m honored to have been named one of the Top Ten Jewish Influencers by the National Jewish Outreach Program.

Finalists were selected by an expert panel of judges and evaluated based on creative and strategic use of social media to positively impact the Jewish community. The achievement was also covered in the Huffington Post.

I’m honored to share company with the other members of the top ten, all of whom are prominent in the Jewish social media world, and to be recognized for the value I try to bring into the world through social media.

Thanks to everyone at NJOP and Jewish Tweets who had a hand in this decision – here’s to us all – top ten and beyond – using our online and offline influence to bring value, comfort, intellectual stimulation, laughter, joy and unity to people everywhere. May it always be our privilege.

We’ll start with the sad first in this post, and hopefully build towards joy from there. As the Psalm says, “they who sow in tears harvest with joy.”

In May, my mother, Shulamit E. Kustanowitz, lost her battle with two serious illnesses. Losing her has been the most earth-shattering experience of my life, and I’m dealing with it every day in some way. My writing has changed, both in frequency and in tone, and I haven’t been diligent about updating my blogs and websites, because it just didn’t seem important and because I felt, for a while, as if I’d lost command of the words. So it’s taking me a while to return to posting about my publications and achievements, and to the daily business of musing on things social media- and technology-related.

But there have been moments, even within a year of mourning, which are worth celebrating. I was thrilled to be named to the Big Jewcy , a list of 100 Jews to watch, which this year also featured my brother (we were the first siblings to make the list the same year, and the piece about me was published on my birthday, by coincidence). I presented at the 2011 General Assembly in Denver, JHub (social entrepreneurship hub in London), and the UK’s Limmud Conference, moderated at the Jewish Federation’s Day of Jewish Learning and Culture, and made 2012 plans to present or moderate sessions at LimmudLA (next weekend), Jewlicious (the weekend after), and the ROI Summit in Jerusalem (June). A friend also made me laugh with his Gefilte Fish Invaders game/Rosh Hashanah greeting card, which got me quoted in the Jewish Week’s Jewish Techs blog. So life does go on.

I’m working on getting my writing going again, and some of that is happening in a longer chunk of text that I’m referring to as a “book” and which might just be one some day, tentatively titled “Nothing Helps (But This Might Help): Loss, Grief and Unintentional Comedy in a Year of Mourning.” Some of it is likely to pop up on the web in various places – on my blogs or on websites – and hopefully to be finished before the end of 2012. (At least that’s my current estimate.) But I’m also balancing that with some lighter pieces, some focusing on culture or comedy, or other such smile-provoking subjects, and will likely produce several other pieces about Jewish life and contemporary culture, because – let’s face it – I do what I do.

Like I said, 2011 was quite a year. Here’s to a 2012 of gratitude, productivity, health, healing, laughter and eventually, joy. Thanks for your continued support.

More posts available at http://myurbankvetch.com

Greetings, readers. Apologies to you all for the delay in posting – my mother fell ill in April, and passed away in May. Since then, I’ve been making my way back, slowly, into a new reality, trying to get back to normal. So here I am, accepting offers for speaking engagements and setting my travel schedule for fall 2011. I’ll be in San Francisco and Berkeley (September); New York City, New Jersey and Oakland, CA (October); Denver, CO (November); and London, UK (December). Contact me for details, or stay tuned to this space or to MyUrbanKvetch.com for updates and details.

Also, I’ve published a number of pieces that might be of interest – most of the posts are from my own blog focus on my processing the loss of my mother, but one continues to explore the Jewish innovation scene.

“Innovation at Any Age” (eJewishPhilanthropy)

“Eulogy for My Mother” (My Urban Kvetch)

“E-Ma’ariv: Contemplating the Evening Prayers” (My Urban Kvetch)

“Marzipan and Meaning: Jerusalem Reflections” (My Urban Kvetch)

Truly, it was an honor to be the center of this piece, and to have my efforts to share with people outside the room acknowledged – and to be among those amazing people in entertainment whose names are simply a single name. Basically, this is something that some of  us are achieving by sticking to a brand on Twitter, and becoming known by a handle, which is often just a first name. In my case, it’s EstherK. But I guess in the Jewish world, most people know me as Esther.

The hashtag from this conference, which earned me this apparent Twitter equivalent to being named prom queen, is #tribefest. Check out the tweets from the past few days there and via the @tribefest account, handled by JFNA (@jfederations).

Engaging the Next Generation Meaningfully in a World of Options

January

Today, it begins with representing the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles at the Jewish Leadership Initiative Conference in Santa Monica, CA. I’ll be tabling at this conference of mostly graduate students, many of whom are looking for jobs – business or law, possibly a few interested in applying their MBAs or legal skills to serving the Jewish community.

February

February at least eases me into Conferenceness with a series of local conferences – it kicks off with the North American Jewish Day Schools Conference, March 6-8; I’ve been invited because many friends and colleagues from the world of Jewish education will be attending.

On February 16th, I’ve been invited by BBYO to present to their pre-Convention executive meeting for regional presidents and top leaders – they are planning to do a session inspired by this article.

After ending last year with a brief stint at Limmud in the UK (and missing LimmudNY), I’m thrilled to be preparing for LimmudLA – the local version of the international sensation that has never been snowed out takes place February 18-21. I’ll be presenting a number of sessions on things ranging from Jewish communal engagement and innovation to Jewish improv – stay tuned to this space for a full list of my sessions when they go up.

Then, a week later will be the Jewlicious Festival (my 7th), held in Long Beach, CA, and which will again, probably not be snowed out.

March

March brings two (confirmed) conferences that are pretty different from one another. March 6-8 is Tribefest, a gathering of Jews ages 22-45 in Las Vegas sponsored by the Jewish Federations of North America and designed to appeal to young Jews who connect to Jewish life in multiple and diverse ways. I’ll be wearing several hats while I’m there – from my role in NextGen Engagement at Federation to representing ROI Community.

Then, March 17-19 is the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), where I’m hoping to learn lots about how nonprofits inside and outside the Jewish world relate to the world of technology and social media.

There may yet be other additions to the conference schedule, but they’re all leading up to the 6th ROI Community Summit, this year moving back to Jerusalem in June. More information to come!

People from VS 004 sleeping at JFK T4 on December 26 (via http://Jason-Cochran.com)

When a blizzard prompted the cancellation of hundreds of flights on December 26 of last year, I was scheduled to be on VS004 from JFK to London. My Virgin Atlantic flight  - which had been cancelled on the 19th due to a blizzard at Heathrow and rescheduled for the 26th at 6:05pm  - was again cancelled after we sat on the plane for two hours because of a blizzard at JFK, was rescheduled for 6:05pm the 27th, then delayed to 7:30, then to a boarding time of 8:15 that didn’t happen, and eventually, after great protest from the passengers, finally took off after midnight on the 28th. During the entire experience, Virgin Atlantic continued to answer questions on its @virginatlantic Twitter account – except about our flight. There was no “stay tuned,” no “sorry we don’t have more information right now,” just silence. This is unacceptable in a social media world.

Nearly a month later now, Virgin Atlantic still denies that passengers were due any compensation for the experience, even as JetBlue once again proves its VIP status by giving their stranded passengers 10,000 points, scoring customer satisfaction points among its inconvenienced passengers. When it comes to all-star VIP customer treatment and stellar social media response, JetBlue turns around their bad situation, resulting in another social media win. In other words, JetBlue was able to take a blizzard and turn it into snowcones.

What’s the problem? Why won’t Virgin Atlantic make any compensation to the 250 of us who were on VS 004? According to USA Today, Virgin Atlantic (via spokesperson Greg Dawson) claims that “monetary compensation is not due” to the people on our flight – who “had to sleep in the airport terminal because all hotels nearby were booked” – because the snowstorm was an “extraordinary occurrence.” (The Virgin Atlantic staff also told us that the hotels they were offering us were two hours away in Long Island, and that buses would take too long to reach us, collect us and turn around and go back to Long Island.)

Travel writer and the main Twitter voice of our Virgin Atlantic experience Jason Cochran hasn’t given up on the idea of compensation, and continues to battle the customer relations and public relations departments via email.

But apparently, Virgin’s petulant behavior extends far beyond our particular flight – according to Bnet’s Brett Snyder, “Virgin Atlantic has decided it won’t pay Heathrow Airport’s owner BAA anything until an inquiry into last month’s days-long shutdown is completed. Virgin Atlantic is acting like an impatient child here, and runs the risk of making relations with its most important airport even worse.”

This preposterous experience just doesn’t seem to end. And least of all for writers. Because Jason is still on this situation – it’s his job to be. And as for me, while I’m not spending every day fighting about it, I definitely have more to say. Because all the elements of this experience combined into something resembling a psychological experiment in how far people’s patience can be stretched before someone cracks and goes postal. And while a Tweet here and there might not have alleviated our discomfort as we lay down for 40 minutes’ rest on the cold floor of JFK Airport, Virgin Atlantic should have been using its social media presence to reassure us, to apologize to us, and to make us feel accompanied on our difficult travel. That kind of attention could really have helped us feel like we hadn’t been quite so abandoned.

Here endeth the lesson. Except not quite, because Virgin Atlantic hasn’t learned anything.

While the students in the room at DTWT weren’t quite at that level of Twitter illiteracy, their lack of facility – and maybe even interest? – in the tool known as Twitter illustrates a point. Not every person who is young is active in all forms of social media. And while Facebook may be an exception, there is no one social media tool that is being used actively by all young people.

What organizations can take away from this is that although young people are involved in social media, social media is not the universal tool through which a project or organization can reach all young people. Today’s organizations must be educated about the tools that are out there, and know how to use them – but organizations need to adopt flexibility in creating their social media strategies, matching the available time and energy of their staffs to the likely payoff in each of the markets for tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Social media consultants can help, but so can members of your target demo. Use the tools that are out there – search Twitter and Facebook for conversations relevant to your product or program. And convene focus groups of people in the relevant demo – ask them how they prefer to get information and how they use these tools. Once you know where the people you want to reach dwell, you can know how to knock on the door.